Whose body is it anyway?
The Politics of Controlling Children in Schools
A response to Pedagogy of the Oppressor? “Denialism in the Education Debate”
Phil hasn’t written for a while, so I was excited to see his most recent piece on denialism in education. I am at that (procrastination) stage where I am re-reading my PhD thesis “an exploration of belonging, agency, and governance in UK Alternative Provision” and his article resonated.
Phil writes about the student testimonies from schools that have adopted hyper-controlled behavioural regimes. These include enforcement of silence in coridoors, detention for a wrong shade of scarves, the wrong number of stripes on a tie - that sort of thing. They are often the schools that echo the words ‘you promote what you permit’* and other cliched phrases. Phil reports reading the student reviews describing themselves as “robots devoid of personality.” Reading those accounts, I don’t just recognise the pattern academically, it reminds me of specific children that have suffered in similar environments. I think suffer is the right word, autocratic environments that can be described as regimes. Children I have sat with, listened to, and watched try to put themselves back together.
What often gets lost in education debate when we talk about “behaviour policies” and “consistency,” we are really talking about bodies. Whose body gets to move freely, whose body gets to go to the toilet, whose body gets to express itself through clothing, hair, posture. But also whose body gets punished when it fails to comply?
In my research with young people in Alternative Provision, the body emerged as the primary terrain of conflict between students and the institutions that were supposed to be educating them. This wasn’t something I went looking for, my research is intentional exploratory, open and unapologetically qualitative.
One of my participants, who chose the name Catherine to refer to her as, has a duplex kidney condition. She needed to use the toilet during a lesson. Her teacher assumed she just wanted to get out of class. Initially, she was refused permission, but eventually was allowed to go, but by that time it was too late, and she wet herself. She was humiliated and never returned to the school. When I asked her about her mainstream experience, she didn’t talk about bullies in the playground. She said: “I was bullied and traumatised by staff, by school, not the other kids.”
That sentence has stayed with me because it reframes the entire conversation. When we think about anti-bullying systems, we don’t think about staff, but by students but we have to also be clear that the system must be in a position where it doesn’t denigrate students, and protects them from harm. In this instance the harm didn’t come from peers but from the institution itself. A system so fixated on order and compliance that a child’s basic biological need was treated as such, but the very request to use the loo, as an act of defiance.
This is what Chris Shilling means when he warns that ignoring body politics within education leads to a “partial and misleading view” of how schools function. It’s what Phil is pointing to when he highlights the testimonies of students who felt dehumanised by regimes that prized consistency above everything else.
