"Safe Schools"

Paul Crawford, superintendent of education for the Toronto Catholic School Board said in today's Toronto Star (February 1, 2008) that "school safety comes first, but generally you want to nip things in the bud before they get too far and help kids who need treatment for things like anger management". Ontario has earmarked $43 million for school boards to hire new social workers, psychologists and youth workers for this new program to keep our schools safe. Eleven thousand principals and teachers are now trained in the new "progressive discipline" which requires that consideration must be given to how a suspension might disrupt the child's schooling and if need be offer counselling to help the child to be more endearing to his friends and teachers.

Developmentalists realize that children are not naturally sensitive to one another. Children are not yet responsible for each other. Having children positively disciplined for not wanting to play/ be with each other is not what is going to keep them safe. To bring or impose a program on children to be nice to one another is going against the whole grain of development.

To protect our children and keep our schools safe we must focus on not what the other children think but what it is that the parents and teachers think about them. Trying to control children's reactions to one another is futile. It is we adults who must shield our children from one another's frustration and immaturity. The relationship children have with responsible adults is far more important than the relationships children have with one another. Children who are protected by responsible adults from the harshness of other children develop deep roots that allow them to mature into caring and respectful human- beings. However, adults who shame and blame children for their nastiness toward one another have created a burden to great for the child to bear.

We need to rethink the horizontal reference points to which we have oriented our children and reestablish the vertical adult-child hierarchy in which they can mature and reach their full potential.

February 3, 2008

Copyright, 2010 by Susan Dafoe-Abbey. Permission to use this material, either in English or in translation, for educational purposes is hereby granted.