Introduction

Growing problems of discipline in schools, and school violence in particular, seem to many educators nowadays some sort of transnational epidemic which moves and extend from country to country completely changing the landscape of our school system and the self-perception of our profession. Moreover, this post-modern disease, unfortunately like so many others, lacks any generally agreed-upon diagnostic, which makes it even more puzzling for teachers and parents alike. 

For some years now, educators and researchers have been referring to these phenomena in quite different ways: school violence, discipline problems and conflicts, school violence, and anti-social behaviour in schools are the most widely and commonly used. Each of them reflects a distinct approach to the whole issue, one that in turn stems from the different academic and professional disciplines dealing with the phenomena involved. Thus, while the sociologist will tend to talk about school violence, the psychologist would rather deal with antisocial behaviour in schools. The former will emphasize the wider social context and maybe the overall condition of structural violence – to use the much debated concept coined by Galtung – as the root of school violence, while the latter will portrait the issue from the sole perspective of individual conduct and concrete behavioural patterns of students at school. The outcome of all this, in any case, is that there is some sort of “semantic inflation” having to do with our issue: violence seems to be a pervasive phenomenon in our society, including schools; violence is versatile and multi-faceted, it takes many different forms and grasps public attention in very many different ways, to the point that some media have it as one of its editorial priorities.

This inflation of meaning is partly responsible for the perception of violence and antisocial behaviour in schools increasing and sometimes getting out of hand. However, for those familiar with Criminology as a subject, the paradox is that factual evidence and crime statistics – in this case, statistical data about school violence  – reflect the extent to which society an public services are mobilized to prevent and tackle the phenomena. And, of course, the degree to which public opinion is increasing its overall sensitivity and, as a consequence, its rejection. So, looking at it closely, the apparently bad news of increasing evidence of school violence should be taken as good news of our school system, public opinion and society at large taking more and more seriously an issue which some decades ago was simply invisible, buried under the nice-looking daily events of school life.

But we know now that there is some type of violence – or antisocial behaviour if you speak from a more behaviourist perspective – which is endemic to school life, which emerges as part of school culture and has to do with the configuration of interpersonal relations therein.  This violence affects every student, even those who are apparently just spectators because it is part of the context and part of the content of the socialization process in schools. In other words, it is part of what is learned by students at school.

Categories of antisocial behaviour in schools

After some years devoted to research on these issues (Moreno, 1998a & 1998b; Moreno y Torrego 1999a & 1999b), we have come up with a categorization of violent and antisocial phenomena which has proved to be quite useful, at least for schools and teachers when they decide to review their current situation in that regard:

• Disruptive behaviour in classrooms

• Discipline problems (interpersonal conflicts, specially teacher-student)

• Bullying

• Vandalism

• Physical violence

• Sexual harassment and abuse

• Absenteeism and drop-out

• Fraud (cheating, plagiarism and influence peddling) 

Research about these eight categories of phenomena is quite uneven. Bullying has concentrated much of the work carried out in Europe ever since the 70s, to the point that it has been the one which has triggered interest of researchers about the other seven categories. On the other hand, for instance, we do not know much about sexual harassment in schools or the nature and implications of fraud in education (Revista de Educación, 1997; Moreno, 1999). We know, however, that four of these categories – discipline problems, vandalism, physical violence and absenteeism – share a very high public visibility, inside and outside of the school. Thus, it is no surprise that they are taken as “everything which is there” in terms of school violence; parents, administrators, policy-makers and public opinion in general are worried primarily about these issues. Then, the other four categories share being invisible, especially from outside of the school; but teachers and students consistently respond that these are the ones that they really worry about (teachers about classroom disruption; students about bullying and sexual harassment; see Mooij and Funk in Revista de Educación, 1997).

Research in Europe is still quite weak from the methodological point of view and this is probably the main reason to account for the fact that research outcomes are not fully used by administrators and educators within schools. We know a lot now about risk factors of school violence and antisocial behaviour; but we do not know much about protective factors, i.e., which factors can explain that some very violent children do not develop delinquent adult careers. Only in recent times, we have started to consider classroom and school variables as related to the appearance and the frequency of antisocial behaviour in schools; to the surprise of many, it is becoming increasingly clear that they can be as important as personal, family and social background variables (Vettenburg, 1999).

The turning point: when teachers become victims of school violence

The interesting paradox we are facing now is that, at the same time that we have achieved empirical evidence about the potential role of the school itself to prevent and deal with, or to cause and exacerbate school violence, research shows that our teachers, especially those working in secondary schools, perceive themselves as the main victims of school violence (Debarbieux & Blaya, 2001). And this has probably been the turning point in the way the whole issue is approached and dealt with in our society. Even more than recent episodes of student killings by classmates in American schools (perceived as isolated tragedies by public opinion worldwide), the fact that many teachers are suffering the effects of violence within their own schools, not long ago their kingdoms, nowadays their prisons, is having tremendous consequences in terms of social image, public confidence, and political legitimacy of schooling as one of the central elements of our society. 

Available data about teachers’ perceptions in that regard suggest that the experience of violence at schools causes an identity crisis in teachers, both personal and professional (Moreno & Torrego, 1999b). Teachers, as a result, tend to retreat to their private world seeking refuge, and stop taking any sort of risk when teaching. Moreover, teachers perceive violence as a phenomenon coming exclusively from outside of the school, assuming correspondingly that solutions should also come from outside the school (be it from experts, social workers or, simply, the police).  In short, one could argue that teachers, especially in secondary school, have lost faith in the role of schooling and in their own role as educators. And teachers’ opinions and perceptions, as it is widely recognized, have an enormous potential to shape public opinion about education and schools. Thus, the generalized view projected by the media of the school as an institution that is under siege, and, another example, the rise of the number of families choosing home schooling in the USA and in many other western countries may have a lot to do with that opinion, primarily shaped by teachers themselves.

What are our schools doing?

There are many school systems in Europe which are taking measures at every level to tackle school violence. From awareness-raising campaigns in the national media to classroom activities, it should be recognized that European countries are strongly mobilized against violence and antisocial behaviour in schools. Despite that, it could also be argued that individual schools and school systems at large are not reacting in a very imaginative or sensible way to the phenomena at stake. In other words, the school response to violence so far is, broadly speaking, a conventional one; and the problems we are facing here are anything but conventional.   

The rationale implicit in the standard measures taken so far at the school level implies that it is assumed that every cause for violent phenomena lies outside the school. Problems are therefore pushed away from the school; there is a basic rejection - quite understandable on the other hand - to take responsibility on the part of teachers. Ironically, this is exactly what teachers are blaming parents for: not taking their quota of responsibility in the education of their children. However, we know that student cultures nowadays share an intense and growing component of anti-school attitudes, or, to put it more precisely, the lack of compromise with school and school activities as a positive dimension of the student culture (Cothran & Ennis, 2000). To be sure, it is interesting to note, that many times this anti-school attitudes and students’ lack of compromise are perceived as violent behaviour by teachers. This is not something that teachers can pretend to place away from them, their actions and their classrooms. On the contrary, it needs to be rigorously analysed from within the schools and, as a consequence, very firm measures and actions should be adopted and implemented.    

A general measure that many European school systems have been taking is the segregation of problematic pupils, namely, their isolation in classroom groups or in special schools altogether. This is happening in Europe in cities with high numbers of migrants. Segregation of the problematic implies, firstly, the assumption that responsibility for antisocial behaviour is only of the student involved; and secondly, that there is only one pattern of socially acceptable behaviour in schools, so that any other pattern is to be considered as deviant. Thus, solutions to school violence lie in setting up special remedial programs in social skills, peaceful conflict resolution skills, activities to increase students’ self-esteem, and the like. I do not mean to undermine the importance of such skills and activities. I just want to point to the fact that this is a mixed clinical-sportive approach: violence can be cured; pro-social behaviour and good social skills can be learned and people can be trained to acquire them. To be fair, it should also be recognized that the approach is quite optimistic, since it is implied that everybody can be cured and that everybody can be trained. Everybody can be cured of being a foreigner, for example. And everybody can be trained to be emotionally intelligent. But does this curing and training business require segregation of students? Needless to say, segregation does not solve school violence. On the contrary, it forces many students – and their families – to look for other institutions, reference groups and socialization patterns in order to build their identity, which may be very far way from the ideal patterns of public schooling and the values of social cohesion and integration.

Also in the conventional logic of school life and school culture at large is the spontaneous trend to create a school subject whenever educators feel that there is a new need that is not being properly taken care of. This has been particularly the case in countries with a pragmatic tradition in curriculum development, such as the United States or the United Kingdom. Their influence on the school curriculum of other European countries – and beyond – has been especially remarkable at least in the last five decades. This pragmatism is leading now to think about emotional development, conflict resolution, peace education and the like in terms of new school subject(s). It goes without saying how this is resisted by many teachers, and how parents and wide sectors of public opinion regard this trend as a devaluation of the school curriculum and the watering down of the quality of education, whatever this may be. In countries responding to a more classic and rationalist curriculum tradition – France, Italy or Germany –, the substitute for the creation of a new subject is usually the creation of a new school committee. Many committees have been created in the last few years in our schools to deal with violence, sometimes with positive results, some others just having the effect of increasing the internal bureaucracy of schools.

The creation of school discipline committees has served too often to channel the more repressive-oriented response to school violence, which unfortunately entails or leads straight to the judicialization of school life: Teachers devoting most of their classroom time to the control and monitoring of discipline, the opening of files and investigations to students, the increase of outside inspections, the principal’s continuous involvement in discipline related conflicts and, the most dangerous one, the multiplication of cases of student exclusion, both official and unofficial (Hayden & Blaya, 2001). There is no need to insist on the devastating long-term consequences for public schooling should this approach to deal with school violence prevail.

Is there anything else that can be done?

In my view, the deepest and most pervasive effect of violence is the loss of meaning: and it is the widening of this loss that works as a generator of more violence. It is crucial to make sense of school violence, to analyse and understand, to review our current practice accordingly and, finally, to make decisions and adopt concrete measures. This is why policies and measures against violence are basically two-fold: those which question present school practice and those which do not question present practice assuming that there are programs and solutions out there which can work as a quick-fix.

Facing and tackling school violence and antisocial behaviour is not about transforming our classrooms into group therapy sessions (curing and training everybody), as many teachers complain nowadays. It is about how to be more inclusive and caring for the disenfranchised and  the disadvantaged. (It should never be forgotten that for them, paradoxically, education is the only way forward in terms of social mobility). Schools need to be ethically and culturally reconstructed if they really are to work as a mobilizing tool against violence. Educators need to recuperate a positive self-image, the firm belief in the meaning of what they are supposed to do. Our society cannot continue to socialize youngsters via the questioning of the socialization process itself.  

In this regard, there are at least four proposals that can be made in order to build a different approach to schools and teachers dealing with school violence, antisocial behaviour and lack of discipline:

·        New professionals are needed in the system, especially in secondary schools. And by new professionals we do not mean the intervention of the army, as it happened in France in 1998 and 1999. We have accepted that teachers have to play new roles and we have consequently widened the quantity and the quality of their competencies. This we have done in that context of loss of meaning and loss of identity caused by violence. We should not let this process get out of hand: teachers need to be able to do what they were trained for, namely, govern and manage the teaching-learning process. And the growing complexity of our schools from the social, cultural, linguistic and ethnic point of views is obviously calling for the presence of new professionals carefully trained to face and respond to the new needs stemming from those new circumstances.

·        New teacher-training systems. Although I favour in some way the back-to-basics approach in terms of what the teacher is expected to do in schools, I do not forget that teacher training systems also need a very intense aggiornamento, just to be able to make sense of the new situation of schools, and to offset – and fight – the loss of meaning and identity caused by the perceived increase of school violence. In Europe, this is especially urgent for secondary school teachers for whom the existing gap between the training received and the performance expected is so great that I have it as the biggest threat on contemporary public schooling. New ways and means in the teacher training system should be accompanied by radical changes in the way teachers are recruited, selected and sent to different schools in the publicly funded school system. This should be more flexible, i.e. allowing for the formation of teacher teams voluntarily wanting to work together.

·        “New deal” with student families. Relationships between teachers and parents are not undergoing their best time in European countries. There is a mutual lack of confidence and the trend to blame the other for not assuming enough responsibility. Actually, we are having the strong impression that becoming an adult and taking the resulting responsibility – especially if it entails responsibility for the education of the young – is not very fashionable in today’s world (Savater, 1998). Parents and teachers should go back to the historical consensus achieved in the times of the democratic reforms of schooling throughout the XXth century. Teachers and parents need to have more space and time available to meet, discuss and agree. And the mobilization against violence provides the most appropriate scenario for that new deal to be built again.

·        Greater involvement of local administrations in school life. Many European educational systems have undergone a deep decentralization process in the past decades, so that regional and provincial educational authorities have increased their say over what goes on in schools. This process should continue on to the local authorities of our cities and towns. Their growing involvement in the decision making process about education and schools could be crucial in terms of dealing with school violence and probably with violence in general. It is now obvious that teachers and schools cannot go on playing the school under siege anymore. They have to open up, searching for allies of all kinds that could support, complement and reinforce their action: local associations, NGO’s and voluntary organizations, sport clubs, small and medium size companies, public services…, are the best potential allies for schools. Among them, the role of local authorities, both from the political and financial points of view, is seen to be critical.

These four sets of measures - and the joint approach they amount to - share at least one trait: All of them involve some sort of devolution and power-sharing from the perspective of teachers. In other words, they require that teachers – and teachers’ Unions, which are quite strong in Europe – relinquish some of their power. And this is indeed an obstacle not that very easy to overcome. Teachers in European schools, most of them civil servants with a contract for life, are socialized into the idea that schools and classrooms are their property. This is why they tend not to tolerate very well the physical presence of parents or the professional intervention of so-called experts. They demand help to solve violence and discipline problems but without offering to limit or to share their almost limitless power over the daily business of schools. But more and more teachers are aware that sharing and devolving power is, with no exaggeration, a matter of survival: first of all to students themselves and to their parents; secondly, to the new professionals that our schools need. 

Schools should be rearranged to be in different ways what they have always attempted to being: teaching and learning centres. This should be so even if we are compelled to consider them also as centres to prevent, process and transform social conflict as it is reflected in the younger generations living together in schools. We have created democratic schools; now they also have to become schools of democracy. Because democracy is the one and only condition which allows us to speak about a culture of peace in our civilization.

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