School violence is our shame

Robin McAlpine

There has been a discussion kicked off on the back of more reporting of school violence in Scotland. Pupil violence, like drug deaths or food banks, is not a reflection on our schools or on our children but on our society. It is society we need to fix – but that doesn't mean we can't do anything in schools.

It is time finally to recognise that violence is learned and can be unlearned. It is time to teach non-violence. But any adult daring to claim this is a solution to the issue should be ashamed of themselves. What the hell have we don't to our children to leave us in this position?

That's what I want to start with. I want, with a little well of internal fury, to point to every one of you who moralised at people who said 'we must lock down to protect the vulnerable, but do not pretend this isn't going to ruin the lives of our children'. I was one of those people and I remember being treated like I was a serial killer for raising any caveat at all to the 'lock everything down to save lives'.

Let's be clear; I was a hawk about lockdown one. It was needed. But let us also be honest – lockdown was for old people on the whole. Of course some young people were in a vulnerable category but this was about protecting older people. Quite right too – but to exclude what this meant to children was utterly wrong. And we did. Collectively we dismissed what children needed.

Because children are every bit as vulnerable to isolation as older people are to a virus. Cutting young people off from each other might look like 'a small sacrifice' to you, but it was no such thing. For adults loneliness can be as bad for you as smoking. For children whose brains are developing, loneliness is disastrous. 

We disrupted education. We disrupted socialisation. We utterly disrupted their lives. We took away something they will never, ever get back. And in return what have we done for them? Absolutely nothing at all. Zero. In public policy children are always a nuisance – no ball games...

Lockdown devastated the mental wellbeing of children and without that socialisation, the kinds of helpful inhibitions that we are supposed to learn (like violence not being a legitimate response to frustration) didn't get learned. This is our 'violence' to them reflected back at us.

Not that it was just lockdown. There are two things that shape behaviour – biology and environment. Left to its own devices, biology is pretty static. If children's biologies are changing then it is what we are feeding them. And if its not their biologies, its their environment. If we increase rates of anxiety in children, their behaviour changes. These are laws of nature.

And all we've done for decades now is increase anxiety on children and fuck with their biologies. We have fed them ultra processed food which is devastating their bodies. It really is. I find it hard to overemphasise how significant is the emerging research on ultra processed diets. They literally create addiction frameworks in the mind, reduce concentration spans, harm neurotransmitters which regulate mood, destroy stomach ecosystems which we are discovering is closely linked to mood - and loads more.

We have, in the most literal sense, sought to turn them into addicts. Every computer game your children or grandchildren play has been carefully engineered to make money at their expense through a scientifically-designed programme of addiction training. Advertising at children is a giant insecurity-generating industry there to constantly provoke their dissatisfaction with their lives.

Work is no longer a good way to make a living for many people. Get in the wrong strata of work (for example, most of the service sector, much of the care sector and so on) and you're screwed for life. The only escape hatch is school exams – so we've turned education into the Hunger Games. Pass exams or die. It is piling more and more environmental stressors on children.

Our society doesn't so much raise children any more as farm them. They are valuable consumers we must herd, until they are a pests that must be controlled. Politicians talk about ending child poverty being their number one priority. This is a total lie. They've done nothing meaningful other than the Scottish Child Payment, the cost of which they've clawed by by cutting other poverty programmes.

Because children can't vote so literally who cares? Earlier in this piece I suggested that what we inflict on children is a kind of 'violence'. It is, but it is both violence and neglect. Their hunger is a tool politicians use rhetorically to make themselves look moral. The extent to which they ignore and do nothing for hungry poor kids in reality is appalling.

I can get angrier and angrier about this. We are the worst generation of adults to our children since we stopped forcing them down mines and up chimneys. If you doubt that go and look at the mental health statistics. I've not even mentioned social media in the above. Children's biology is down to us. Their environment is down to us. To say we failed is an overwhelming understatement.

All of that said, the primary victim of school violence isn't the teachers, awful though it is that they have to endure it. The real victims are the children. Violent people either need to be rich or their violence will exclude them from a good life. The violent person is their own prisoner. It is for the children I want non-violence, not the adults.

Yet we do nothing. Seriously, violence is learned, and so is non-violence. I spoke to the parent of a friend of my daughter a few years ago, a working class man with almost no education and almost certainly learning difficulties. He couldn't understand how to raise a child without smacking. No-one ever told him about 'naughty steps' and all of that. He knew only what he'd experienced.

I have a more direct relationship with learned behaviour. As my mother points out, I came out angry and I have a natural tendency towards violence because it takes little to stimulate my anger and I'm a big guy with much capability to inflict harm and hurt. Thankfully my mum, throughout my life, trained me to redirect my rage into something more constructive. I decided to call my anger 'Common Weal' and try and do something about.

So if we want children to break their relationship with violence, we must help them. Negotiation, non-violence, de-escalation and conflict resolution are all disciplines with knowledge and skills and science every bit as much as maths or physics or history. So why don't we teach it? Why don't we give pupils the tools that help them redirect their frustration and humiliation into something that isn't lashing out?

It could be transformative. I often wonder why we don't do it. All those entrepreneurs we asked to redefine school for us – why was financial literacy always top of things that should be taught but not cooking, never art, and certainly not non-violence? Are we still really trying to produce worker-shopper drones in our schools?

And if as adults we've done so much damage that mental health and violence are rocketing, don't we need to sacrifice to sort it? Is putting social workers and mental health professionals into schools not our fist duty, with our mortgage perks and our obsession with potholes and the entire Scottish Enterprise budget third-order issues by comparison? If only those children had the vote, eh...

Teachers are not the police, they're not psychologists and they're not social workers. The idea that teachers are in a position to sort this problem is ludicrous. The idea that we're talking as if they might be is ludicrous. We'll have them extracting tonsils and doing dental exams soon.

We've created a world in which police, social workers and psychologists are essential features many schools' needs. Once again, this is to our very great shame. What we cannot do is take 'zero tolerance' stances because excluding kids isn't going to work. It is our job to repair what we broke. The violent children are the victims.

As you can tell, more and more I am finding that our age divisions are becoming as important as our class divisions. The people who took all the housing wealth and cashed in on it for their own great merriment are all over 50. The people who can't get a decent home at a decent price are all under 50. This doesn't mean that most old people didn't also got screwed, just that we, collectively, allowed it to happen and the young are blameless.

Our society is sick and it is making our children violent. We built that society. It is our responsibility to fix it. Blaming children is a whole new level of shameful disgrace we bring on ourselves. Implement non-violence education to help children. Put mental health and social work and nutritional support in schools to help children.

But not before those of us who aren't children hold ourselves to account for what we have done. Fire in with all the comments you want, but it doesn't change anything. Our children's behaviour, health, mental wellbeing, life chances and even life expectancy are plummeting. The species isn't evolving that fast. It is not and cannot be because of them. It's us.