The Parent Trap

Last week, Baroness Estelle Morris decided to tell us that she is “not at ease” with the current policy of locking up the parents of truanting children. Too fucking right she shouldn’t feel at ease, in fact maybe she should feel some contrition too, as the secretary for education who instituted this policy. One wonders if her ill-ease was more about the fact that the policy has been shown in recent surveys not to work, rather than because she’s discovered an ethical problem with it. Nonetheless, the policy persists, and there is no sign that it will change any time soon. I really do think we need to consider what the policy of imprisoning parents means, not only to them, but to their children and to the education system as a whole. Furthermore, how much can we blame truancy solely on the family, and how much are we willing to punish one person on the basis of the behaviour of another person who’s over the age of criminal responsibility?

To me it seems clear that this punishment is aimed not at the parents of truanting children, but rather at the children themselves. Emma Garza, daughter of the first woman to be jailed with this legislation said “I felt really guilty and wanted to go back to school… I went straight back and knuckled down.” Prison is bad, but having your parents, your sole means of support, taken away from you is clearly worse. Imagine if young people convicted of crimes were told “you can either go to juvenile detention for a while or you can have your parents taken away for 60 days, live with the guilt of that, watch the effect that has on your family life, have the parent losing his/her job on your conscience, and maybe even be put into care as you have no other means of support.” I think it’s pretty clear which they would choose. This is a cruel and unusual punishment that needs to be eliminated from our legal system. Morris tells us “If it worked, it was worth it. If it didn’t work, it wasn’t worth it,” but how far are we willing to allow our government to go with its by-any-means-necessary tactics. I for one can think of plenty of inhumane ways to force kids to attend schools, but that doesn’t mean we should use them.

And where does this leave schools? Places that should be sanctuaries of learning, places that should be designed to foster the desires of children, to help them develop, become in themselves a punishment. How can a place that is attended out of fear and obligation for one’s family ever hope to encourage children to express themselves? I’ve spent a good chunk of today rereading John Holt’s How Children Fail (dated as it may be, he offers an eloquent exposition of this subject), he writes:

What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it?[…]Most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they can control their fears, living with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligences and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner

Maybe the question we should be asking is “what is it about the society as a whole, or about our education system, that makes children truant?” or even, “how can we make children want to attend school?” Of course our current government are more concerned with making children attend school regardless of whether they like it or not, regardless of whether it educates them or not, and regardless of whether they do it for themselves or are doing it for others. A messy situation, and one that has consequences as dire for those students who do want to attend as for those who don’t. The structural meanings of this exertion of power permeate the institutions.

And can we be so confident that all blame lies with the family? It seems like the easy solution to what is in reality an extremely nuanced problem. Children truant for a whole variety of reasons, and to demand that a parent personally deals with each and every one of these is far beyond the call of duty. New Labour have held the family at the centre of our social system, but in this case it is just being used as a smokescreen, to mask the problems of society. I find it difficult to believe that there are swathes of children who really enjoy endless hours on street corners, who enjoy a life of boredom. Holt has more to say on this:

Yesterday three young boys were riding the subway to Park Street. The were exceedingly noisy, excited, and rude[…]What did these boys have to nourish their self-respect and self-esteem besides the short-lived and uneasy approval they gave each other? Only the palpable disapproval of everyone else around them, a disapproval close to fear. If you can’t make people like you, it is something to be able to make them afraid of you.[…]Even in the most tightly knit street gangs there is little of what we call friendship. Gang members are no more than uneasy allies, welded together partly by fear of the world outside and partly by the certain knowledge that nobody else in the world gives a damn about them

The state sure as hell doesn’t give a damn about them, if it’s willing to compromise, through the imprisonment of parents, one of the few structures these kids have left. And what of the parents? When has it ever been right to prosecute one person on the acts of another? No-one takes the parents of young offenders to court, even though they bear a responsibility to teach those young people the difference between right and wrong. Why are we happy to maintain the inconsistency that parents are not to blame for the illegal acts of their children, but are to blame for their truancy? And what of the siblings? Why should they have their parents taken away, unless they are their brothers’ keepers. Maybe we should be asking our children to take a little more responsibility for themselves, but at the same time we should be demanding that our government takes a load more responsibility for our children.