Who wouldn't be 'school phobic'?

Who wouldn't be 'school phobic'?
by Sarah Fitz-Claridge

http://www.school-survival.net/articles/school/Who_wouldnt_be_school_phobic.php

'School phobia' is a dreadful label for some children's perfectly
understandable response to being compelled to go to school against
their will. They are not phobic, any more than a conscientious
objector is a coward; they are refusing - and in most cases very
nobly. Over the years, I have spoken to many worried parents of school-
refusing children. The outrages these children have been subjected to
in the name of 'education' disgust me. They have been saddled with a
pseudo-medical label that has deliberate connotations of 'mental
illness' - with all the stigma and the implied (and not-so-implied)
menace that goes with that. Their perfectly reasonable dissent, and
their desperately courageous resistance to being hurt and harmed has
been cynically redefined as 'overdependence,' 'psychological
instability,' and 'immaturity.' They have been psychologically
tortured under the guise of psychiatric or psychological 'treatment'
for a non-existent ailment. Their parents - also demeaned by labels
such as 'overprotective' - have been threatened with court action
unless they physically force their terrified, traumatised children
into school every day. Many such parents who have sought my advice
have themselves been in a terrible state of stress and trauma. Why
don't they just comply? Because they know that forcing their child to
go so school is immoral, psychologically harmful, and inimical to
their child's education.

Or do they know that? Parents often do not seem to know it
consciously. Or if they do, they also 'know' the contradictory idea
that it is right and important for children to be schooled, because
the law, the psychiatric, psychological, and educational professions
all say so. They may be nice people in many respects, but as a result
of their own parents' coercion, they are simply unable to see how
damaging and wrong it is to force a child to go to school.

Ask parents what they would think of a system which not only imprisons
innocent people (some of whom are terrified and suffer lifelong trauma
as a result) for many years but then forces them to obey every whim of
the warders, takes up their time with mind-numbing makework, leaving
them almost no time for their own pursuits, and in some cases even
force-feeds inmates, and so on. Thinking of vicious tyrants like
Saddam Hussein, most will be incensed. They will rail against the
brutality and immorality of such a system. Until you tell them that
you were referring to our own dear school system. Then they will think
that you are guilty of hyperbole, and that anyway, schoolchildren get
nights and weekends out, unlike 'real' prisoners. Oh, well that's all
right then! They are only imprisoned for five days out of seven.
Super. And I suppose that the knowledge that they are to be locked up
for five days a week for eleven years does not remotely affect them on
the days when they are 'free'? False. The psychological effects of
school hang like a pall over children's lives, twisting their thinking
and stunting their intellectual and psychological growth, whether it
is a school day or not.

How would you feel if you were told today that you must go to school
for the next eleven years, that you must attend all the classes I have
deemed necessary for you, that you must submit to humiliating
procedures and that you will probably be in fear for your physical
safety much of the time. But worse, that you will have to put your own
life on hold for eleven years in order to jump through the hoops that
will be set up for you?

Even this comparison fails to capture some of the more destructive
effects of compulsory schooling on children. Childhood is both the
most important and the most vulnerable period of life. Children are at
the beginning of their lives and do not have the inner resources that
you might use to palliate an eleven-year imprisonment. Furthermore you
are not in the position of having an overwhelming need to please your
parents. As adults, most of us have to a significant extent escaped
the need not to disappoint our parents or invoke their wrath. But
children cannot throw off the need for their parents' love and
approval without terrible emotional cost.

Even given that I am free from parental coercion, being forced to go
to school would ruin my life. I should have to give up doing and
thinking about what I want to do and think about, when and where I
want to. Life is all too short and precious to waste doing things we
don't want to do. In spending seven hours a day, five days a week,
doing lessons that are at best only accidentally related to things I
am interested in, I should be enacting someone else's notion of what I
should do and of who I am. I should have no mental energy left to
spend another seven hours at home thinking about the things I really
want to think about. This would be very debilitating, and would
adversely affect me at weekends too, because all the time, I should
have in mind that on Monday morning, I must be back at school. The
knowledge that there is a time limit - that on Monday morning I must
be back at school - would make it very difficult to start any major
project or train of thought during weekends and short holidays. (And
that is assuming that there is no homework. I once spent virtually an
entire six-week summer holiday solving 590 sets of simultaneous
equations, only to return to school to find that the teacher, having
had second thoughts about the drudgery of marking the work he had
ordered, exercised his right to choose and claimed to have been
joking. I wasn't laughing.) I used to feel an increasing sense of
dread as the weekend or school holiday wore on. I used to feel
physically sick every Sunday night.

Was I labelled 'school phobic'? No. My mother thought I loved school,
because I did quite well and didn't make a fuss about going. She was
very surprised when, some years ago, I told her that I had loathed
school. As William Blake wrote,

And because I am happy, & dance & sing.
They think they have done me no injury...

Children whose parents would neither dream of forcing them to go to
school nor of preventing them from going, and who support their
children in anything they want to do, and who do not allow themselves
to be drawn by the school system into a conspiracy against their
children, have a very different experience of school if they do choose
to go. Not having to worry about their parents' approval (for they
will have it anyway), they are free to take their teachers just as
seriously as they deserve. They are free to do what they think right
instead of deferring to authority. They are free to leave.

Sadly, there are very few such children, for most parents cannot bring
themselves to cede this elementary aspect of self-determination: they
wouldn't dream of allowing their children to leave school just because
they want to, or indeed to attend just because they want to. Some of
the children become deeply miserable as a result; some rebel; some
really do go mad in the end. Is this surprising? I have, if anything,
more hope for children who kick and scream when their parents drag
them into school than for children who respond only inwardly, as I
did, for the kickers and screamers are still fighting; they still have
a sense of self; they have not been successfully crushed and moulded
by the system. They are like the character played by Jack Nicholson in
the very important film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And teachers
and parents who calmly conspire in this despicable treatment of fellow
human beings (yes, children are human beings too) are like the
serenely evil psychiatric nurse in that film.

So I, as an adult and a psychologist, want to say to any children out
there who hate school: you are not alone. Most people hate it too, but
usually they don't feel entitled to say so, and many can't bear to
think about it so they hardly even know how they feel. You are not mad
- you don't have a Deep Psychological Problem (though you might
develop one if you stay in school against your will!); and you are not
bad for wanting to live your life the way you choose, doing what you
think right - that is what everyone should be doing. You are not the
problem: coercion is the problem. Being forced to go to school is the
problem.

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How to survive school: http://www.school-survival.net/
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mac (24.07.2007 15:11)