{"id":68102,"date":"2023-05-08T01:10:44","date_gmt":"2023-05-08T05:10:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=68102"},"modified":"2023-05-08T01:10:44","modified_gmt":"2023-05-08T05:10:44","slug":"educate-without-sanctioning-misunderstandings-of-positive-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/educate-without-sanctioning-misunderstandings-of-positive-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Educate without sanctioning? Misunderstandings of positive education"},"content":{"rendered":"

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How to react to the whims and acts of disobedience of a young child?\u00a0Sending him to his room to punish him, is that being too strict or does it amount to setting necessary limits for him?\u00a0In this spring of 2023, psychologists and families are again divided on these questions, reviving the\u00a0debate around an education without constraint and without sanction, or “positive”<\/a>\u00a0– \u200b\u200ban ideal that could cover sweet and dangerous illusions.<\/p>\n

No one will dispute that the educational process had to be rid of all physical and psychological violence.\u00a0The educational brutality<\/a>\u00a0of past centuries is chilling.\u00a0From the ferrule to the dunce’s cap, from the\u00a0pensum<\/a>\u00a0to the dungeon, the list of punitive practices deployed is terrible and almost infinite, as shown by the\u00a0Dictionary of whipping and spanking<\/em><\/a>\u00a0recently published by the Presses Universitaires de France.\u00a0The world of literature has not failed to echo these excesses.\u00a0Let us think of Balzac in\u00a0Louis Lambert<\/em><\/a>\u00a0, Jules Vall\u00e8s in\u00a0L’Enfant<\/em><\/a>\u00a0or even Paul Verlaine in\u00a0Mes prisons<\/em><\/a>\u00a0.<\/p>\n

However, banning all forms of violence does not amount to condemning authority.\u00a0Constraint has its virtues, sanction too.\u00a0It is amazing in this debate to see how educational history is often falsified, or even simply forgotten.<\/p>\n

School without constraint: the failure of a utopia<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Let us recall that a school without constraint and without sanction already existed, through the experience of the\u00a0master-comrades of Hamburg<\/a>\u00a0, in the 1920s. of punishment or sanction, that there would no longer be any question of prohibition or of any regulation whatsoever which could hamper them in their use of their full freedom”, writes\u00a0Jakob Robert Schmid<\/a>\u00a0who relates this astonishing experience in\u00a0Le ma\u00eetre-comarade and libertarian pedagogy<\/em>\u00a0.<\/p>\n

The masters of Hamburg thought that only freedom, understood as the absence of constraint, could bring out the treasures of childhood. The teachers no longer wanted to be teachers: \u201cWe finally want to begin to live fraternally with the children of the school: we want to live with them as true comrades.<\/p>\n

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“Wait\u2026 I’ll give you some\u2026 from the schoolmaster”, Honor\u00e9 Daumier, lithograph, 1846. National Gallery of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia<\/p><\/div>\n

This experiment embodied in its most radical form the utopia of an educational space purged of all forms of constraint.\u00a0It ended in resounding failure, all the more bitter in that, for more than ten years, these innovating masters showed uncommon enthusiasm.\u00a0Zeidler, one of the inspirations, had to admit, not without sadness, that
\n\u201cwherever one allowed oneself to be guided by a boundless confidence in the tact of children, in their strength of will, in their perseverance, in the sureness of their instincts and in the tolerance of individuals to form a community [\u2026], we saw the formation of bands of undisciplined people\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

Make no mistake, the child needs to be guided and sometimes constrained.\u00a0Freud says it, could not be more clearly, in his\u00a0New Lectures<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0: \u201cTo give him the freedom to follow all his impulses is impossible.\u00a0It would be a very instructive experiment for the psychologists, but the parents would not be able to stand it and the children themselves would suffer serious damage\u201d.\u00a0Educational work calls above all to encourage, support, value, but it cannot do without prohibition.<\/p>\n

The educational scope of the sanction<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Followers of the neither-nor ideology (neither constraint nor sanction) often refer to support their thesis to educational experiences which, contrary to what they may say, have never banished sanction.\u00a0The school of Yasnaya Polyana<\/a>\u00a0, opened by Tolstoy in 1859 for a few short years, and which is often cited as a model, in fact resorted to exclusion and deprivation.<\/p>\n

Maria Montessori<\/a>\u00a0is also summoned.\u00a0However, the\u00a0Casa dei Bambini<\/a>\u00a0, which brought together very young children, mentions in its rules of procedure of 1913, that the “unruly” and the “neglected and dirty” children will be expelled from school.\u00a0There were also sanctions at Summerhill, the school founded in 1921 by\u00a0Scottish pedagogue Alexander Neill<\/a>\u00a0, and which was intended to be a free place.\u00a0However, what do we discover there? Sanctions such as fines, warnings, corv\u00e9e were distributed there\u2026 by other children set up in court.\u00a0Progressivism is not always where you think it is.<\/p>\n

Generally speaking, the schools which have claimed to avoid any sanctions are often schools which have taken in restricted or even selected students, thus contravening the principle of hospitality.\u00a0They are also schools that have hidden their punitive practices under so-called \u201cnatural\u201d sanctions.\u00a0Finally \u2013 something that is hardly admissible \u2013 schools where adults have got rid of the right to punish to bequeath it to children, as was the case in the famous school of Summerhill.<\/p>\n

The most innovative perspectives are not those which have attempted to oust the reality of the sanction but those which have endeavored to give it an educational scope.\u00a0In particular, they have shown that an\u00a0educational sanction<\/a>\u00a0always pursues a triple end: to reaffirm a shared rule, to empower a young person growing up and to set a limit for him.\u00a0They also showed that an educational sanction could take a private form.<\/p>\n

The educational sanction<\/a>\u00a0is suspensive, it temporarily suspends a right, a power.\u00a0It narrows, for a moment, the field of possibilities and opportunities.\u00a0With a sentence, she momentarily reduces the power of the subject.\u00a0\u201cI won’t speak to you again because you haven’t stopped saying unpleasant things this afternoon\u201d.\u00a0\u201cI stop helping you because, on your side, you don’t do what you have to do, you don’t respect the contract\u201d.\u00a0\u201cGo back to your place, you can join us when you really want to work and get involved\u201d.<\/p>\n

Let’s stop thinking of the sanction as a penalty, it is no longer on the agenda, the page has been turned.\u00a0The sanction is not there to hurt but to make sense.\u00a0It can also, in certain circumstances, take a restorative form.\u00a0\u201cYou have soiled this wall, now you are going to wash it\u201d;\u00a0“You keep annoying little Paul, you’re going to show him what it’s like to be big, and you’re going to help him with his homework until the end of the week.”\u00a0To repair is certainly to repair something, it is also and above all to repair someone.<\/p>\n

The rule, constraint and guarantee of rights<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The neither-nor ideology is now returning at a gallop with positive education.\u00a0As Denis Jeffrey, professor of education at the University of Laval<\/a>\u00a0, has clearly seen\u00a0, we start by keeping quiet and renaming.\u00a0We play on words instead of thinking: \u201cThe teacher becomes a guide or a facilitator, the rule an expectation, the punishment a consequence\u201d.<\/p>\n

Let’s assume the words: a teacher teaches, a rule is a rule.\u00a0Perhaps it is good to remember that there are three lines of meaning in the idea of \u200b\u200ba rule:<\/p>\n