Tea at Trianon: Restorative Discipline: Crippling Children's Mental Maturity And Validating Violence

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Restorative Discipline: Crippling Children's Mental Maturity And Validating Violence

From Jan Greenhawk at The Easton Gazette:

I remember the first time I heard about "restorative discipline." I was in one of my last years of teaching and we were being told that kids no longer needed consequences to correct their behavior but a strategy called restorative discipline. Having been a teacher for almost thirty years, I was suspect of the phrase. You see, education administrations have a way of naming new trends so that they sound really good even when they are really bad. Or worse, ineffective.
When I first heard the term I was mentoring some new teachers at the local high school. The school had just implemented a new strategy that included creating a "ninth grade academy" in our school, a wing dedicated just to 9th grade classes and students. The idea was that 9th graders would adjust better if they were kept out of the 10th, 11th and 12th grade populations and therefore cause fewer incidents and problems. Like most ideas, it didn't work out the way they thought it would. Discipline referrals went up so much that the administrator in charge of the 9th grade academy would hide them in his desk drawer and not log them into our local, state and federal discipline stats. By halfway through the year, his drawer was overflowing. That was a violation of COMAR (State policy).
It was then the onslaught of counselors, psychiatrists, and mental health personnel started showing up to take kids out of class. It was usually the students who were behavior problems. They were glad to leave class because they got free pizza. It didn't matter to administration if these students were missing class time or content because the most important thing was for them to discuss their lives with someone who would then help them learn how to control their emotions. They called it "restorative discipline." (Read more.)