The film Backboard Jungle, released in 1955, is about a group of students led by a youth rebel who engages in anti-social behaviour at school with the expressed aim of frustrating and unsettling teachers. Although now the blackboard has been replaced by the white board it looks as if the film is still relevant to the present school system.
To the teachers in a particular secondary school defined by the Malta Union of Teachers in pejorative terms as the ‘Blackboard Jungle’ with its soundtrack music of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, is not a fiction on the cinema screen but a reality which they have to face and cope with every day.
This reference to the film makes us however realise that pupils’ deviant behaviour at school is not a new phenomenon. It may of course have become more acute with the onset of what the philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas defines as the Legitimation Crisis. This is a crisis based on the premise that today’s society is characterised by a decline in the confidence of administrative functions of the political and social institutions.
The school as an institution has not been immune from this crisis as teachers are finding it more difficult to assert their authority in class. Pedagogy, however modernised, is still based on the tacit approval of the teacher’s authority. When this authority is challenged in highly defiant terms the ethos of the school suffers.
Since school is made up of highly homogeneous pupils grouped in a restricted area one’s deviant behaviour becomes highly contagious. This is what might be happening in certain schools where the MUT is claiming that things have run out of control. The low morale among the teachers induced by this escalation of antisocial behaviour gives rise to a sense of inertia and a high level of stress that being so prolonged and overpowering makes them unable to function in their position.
Their continuous striving efforts to control the class saps all their energy, making them feel unarmed and impotent to deal with the situation. Part of their survival kit is to be oblivious of what is going on around them.
What makes the situation so distressing is that the root of problem lies beyond them. The general feeling among teachers and also the MUT is that the main factor for this deviant school behaviour is the family background. Families which do not value learning fail to instill in their children the ideal cultural artifact, or what Bourdieu defines as habitus, that foster a conformist attitude to the generally accepted social and cultural norms of the school system.
Rather than conforming to the ethos of the school these pupils may either initiate deviant behaviour or else join the deviant gang at school. If the family is the root of the problem what can the education system do to remedy the situation? Perhaps establishing healthy relationships with the families and building bridges between home and school may be part of the equation for the problem to be solved.
Fine-tuning its programme of learning to pupils’ culture can prove to be an effective strategy towards higher level of conformity by the pupils
On the other hand however extraneous to the school the root of the problem may be the teachers have to realise that deviant behaviour may be also induced by the school system. All staff should recognise that quality of teaching and learning has a significant effect on pupils’ behaviour. The school on its part should also show more respect to the culture that pupils bring with them to school rather than treating it as alien to the school mainstream culture. Fine-tuning its programme of learning to pupils’ culture can prove to be an effective strategy towards higher level of conformity by the pupils.
On its part the Ministry of Education, in its aims to harness this flow of anti-social behavior, should place qualified personnel at school. In order to equip these personnel with the right tools of analysis an audit of pupils’ behaviour at school should be conducted.
Deviant behaviour at school can take a variety of forms which can be collocated within a continuous range from the mildest to the most severe. The mildest form may include mucking about, which consists of making a deliberate effort to be late for the lesson and work avoidance through which the pupil makes a deliberate attempt to be without copy book, textbook and writing material.
This mild form can become less tolerable when the pupil tries to cause disruption of the lesson by talking, chatting, whispering and even shouting and banging desks. The severe form starts when the pupil adopts open defiance in confrontation with the teacher.
In adopting this defiant attitude the pupil answers back in a very rude manner to shock the teacher and at the same time alert fellow pupils that the authority of the teacher can not only be questioned but resisted. This type of deviant behaviour embraces a malicious pleasure in causing discomfort to and unsettling the teacher in class. Of course the severest form of deviant behaviour translates into acts of vandalism, assault and bullying. All these acts ranging from the mildest to the severest tend to be highly contagious.
This three-pronged approach consisting of incorporating the family withinthe school system, fine-tuning the learning process and the administrative set-up of the school to the teenage culture of the pupils and an audit exercise of deviant behaviour may not offer a patented solution.
But it can go a long way in making the lion friendlier in approach and thus making the jungle a safer and maybe an amenable place to live in.
Saviour Rizzo is a former director of the Centre for Labour Studies, University of Malta.