Time to reassert authority in schools

It is a fact that brain development and human behaviour can be changed forever by the things we do, or don’t do, as most of a year without schooling is demonstrating vividly for our children.

For sure, that so many have now failed their school tests when probably a majority had no Internet access and almost no schooling in 2020, can come as no surprise. The catching up is there to do.

But it’s also a reality that the younger minds are stimulated, the more they wire-up for more complex challenges. Leave them to fall intellectually idle and the development simply slows down, leaving kids with a permanent deficit on where they would have been.

That’s not quite so bad if action is taken straight away, with many studies available on ways of stimulating brain development in youngsters, from top class nutrition and micronutrients, to repeated exposure to classical and other music.

Reading books speeds up brain growth, as do many board games and other activities that mean concentrating and thinking, or the working out of patterns or spatial awareness through jigsaws, or the construction of models or toys.

However, even beyond the gap in knowledge that has been generated and the dropped cognitive growth through intellectual under-stimulation, there sits the matter of behaviour and attitude.

For authority and social norms are matters of habit. Take away an authority figure for a prolonged period and the result when the authority figure is reinstated is that they have less authority: they literally need to begin again in setting boundaries and asserting power.

Indeed, it’s a reality I have played out myself twice during the disruption caused by Covid-19. Once was through my business, where too long with no office and nearly no supervision inevitably saw productivity fall.

However, it was the loss of authority that surprised me more. Getting staff back to the office became a matter of negotiation, where, sometimes, they would just decide not to go in after all. That would have been previously unthinkable. The process of booking time off also fell apart.

At home, people felt quite able to nip out to the market or even the dentist, or to see a friend, in a way that never happened without discussion from the workplace. And those with a tendency to coast, coasted more.

But moving boundaries and authority breakdown happen everywhere in these times of suspension, as I found out even in my own home. In early November, I got stuck in France in a lockdown for a month longer than I intended, leaving my teenage son and his teenage friend, who lives with us, ‘home alone’. My son, who, despite having turned 18 last summer, had never lived without parental norms and authority in some form, was suddenly running his ‘own’ home or at least he felt he was, which meant a lot changed.

He didn’t go crazy. No wild parties that trashed the home. But he did progressively turn the house into a student house. He asked if a friend could come to stay who was in trouble, so then there were three. Then many others were just coming and going for sleepovers. I thought it would be fine, until I got back. The mess, the shift in power, no longer was I the head of the household, but a nuisance effecting how they were running ‘their’ home.

Eventually the ground rules were re-established, but it took a small war to get back my home, that I pay all the bills for, and which is not a student hostel.

For our schools now, that is set to be worse, because they are dealing with younger minds with often lesser habits in place beforehand, and all norms now frayed or absent. School is no longer automatic, the rules are no longer automatic.

Boundaries will cause resentments that would never have taken hold before, and so, even, see schools set alight. Which means we all need to work to restore that status quo, support our teachers, our head teachers, and our schools, and put the system back into the school students. Or the learning problem will only grow, instead of the students.