Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Collective punishment

It's a favourite of those in authority. Can't be arsed to deal with a minor problem, opt for a blanket ban.
Telegraph.
A primary school has banned children from playing football at break-time during Euro 2012 to stop fights - and has asked them to play chess instead.
Pupils have been told kickabouts and all other ball games are off limits at playtime during the tournament.
Instead, staff at Hall Road Primary, in Orchard Park, Hull, hope pupils will skip and play with outdoor chess sets.
Deputy head teacher Kristina Frary said the ban was needed to prevent injuries and allow staff to get on with teaching.
She said: "Passions are running high, especially with the Euro 2012 football tournament. Potentially, that's why children are wound-up.
"We have had a sequence of fall-outs and they were all centred around football.
"It was only a small number of incidents - maybe half a dozen - but we have decided to have a break."
So instead of being prepared to deal with a half a dozen incidents, all the kids who want to play football have to suffer? Wouldn't it have just been easier to 'sin bin' the ones who can't control themselves and to let the rest enjoy the pleasure of kicking a ball about to let off steam?
I do wish the powers that be would just leave us alone, to see that in life as in sport there are winners and losers. To allow small disputes like these to be treated as a breach of the rules, rather than as an excuse for collective punishment.
Kids are competitive, kids fight, you punish the guilty, not the innocent.
What''s so bloody hard about that?

3 annotations:

Captain Ranty said...

Yep. The solution to a non-problem generated by the weak.

This treatment follows us all of our lives. All are punished.

Guns, smoking, drinking, eating,...the list is quite long.

Bans R Us. New name for the UK govt.

CR.

DerekP said...

Also, boys need to burn up energy through activity, otherwise they will be restless and fidgety during lessons, and will not be able to concentrate.

(They also need to maintain hydation levels in order to think clearly, and being thirsty from activity means they are more likely to drink some water rather than dehyrate without realising it.)

It's hardly surprising then, that as the teaching 'profession' has become dominated by women who think all children should behave like passive girls, boys' academic performance has nosedived.

Of course there appear to be other aspects to the academic decline*, such as changing to a 'non-competitive ethos' (i.e a 'conformist ethos'), and instead of simply a final exam we have a significant input from 'assessment by teachers' (any guesses as to how they'll assess non-conformist thinking?).

But these are all part of the 'conformist ethos' favoured by Socialists - that is, telling people what to think rather than giving them the tools to think for themselves.


* Look up the PISA results

andy said...

They obviously dont remember that epic chess match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky,things got so bad tempered they starting kicking each other under the table to the point that a wooden screen had to be installed to stop them.