Years ago, I used to volunteer at a Saturday school
teaching music to deprived children. This was run completely by volunteers, professional musicians and postgrad students who were helping children who otherwise wouldn't have a chance to learn music theory, or an instrument, or even how to read music. In other words, it was A Good Thing.

About 80% of the children were black, the rest a mixture of white, oriental and hispanic. On my very first day, I was taken aside by the director (a young, earnest, well-meaning but ultimately neurotic man, who was paranoid about being accused of racism). "If one of the...darker...children doesn't act the way you want them to" he whispered, "don't tell them off."
Me: "eh? But...this is a school, right? Children come here to (a) learn music, and (b) learn the difference between right and wrong, surely?"
Him: "Yes, but some of the parents might take it the... wrong way... if you tell their children off. Instead, just ignore the wrong-doers until they change their behaviour."

Great. So if a black kid was acting up, instead of saying "oi, stop that and concentrate on learning your music theory", I had to ignore them. Children do not like being ignored - FACT. So they'd start acting up even more. And stil be ignored. It was a vicious circle. The director was naive in the extreme to think that children would behave themselves if ignored, but I didn't say that to him because I really wanted to teach there.

Such was the director's paranoia that parents would accuse his school teachers of being racist, that every single teacher had been told to ignore misbehaving black kids. So, for the 6 months I was there, behaviour got worse and worse, as these poor kids struggled to get a reaction. Some of the older ones were getting particularly bolshy, acting up in front of the younger ones, who saw that they weren't being told off for it, and in turn started to act up themselves. It was a mess, with screaming kids running around, with teachers surrepticiously trying to tell them to sit down and shut up, without the director seeing. Eventually, almost all of our time was spent stopping the smaller kids from running riot, and we didn't even have time to talk to the older kids. I'd had enough and left. The following week, two other teachers did the same. A month after I left, only the director and three other teachers were left (there were originally 8 or so of us). There was no teaching going on at all, the children were missing out, loads of kids thought that the teachers were ignoring them on purpose, the younger ones were following by example and getting ruder and ruder, quite a few children stopped coming to the school because they weren't learning anything...all because one man was paranoid of telling black kids to stop pissing around in class.

There is a happy end. The director eventually left (because of stress), and was replaced by an older man, who had no compunction in telling kids to shut up and listen to him. It took a while for everyone to get used to him, and quite a few older kids stopped coming, now that they didn't have somewhere warm to dick around for a few hours every Saturday. But they were replaced by children who genuinely wanted to learn music. The school is going strong, they have enough teachers, and the children are happy.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Thu 22 Nov 2007, 15:57, 1 reply)

Wisdom.
Any chance you can e-mail this to all the clowns that run our education system? Because they just don't seem to understand that sometimes kids need somebody to say "No!"
(Big D, Thu 22 Nov 2007, 18:06, closed)