Parent Rage pushing teachers to the edge - The Age 10/6
Published 1 year, 6 months ago in Making News.We are all superheroes ! We just need “training”
The modern employers panacea for any dysfunction in the workplace is to propose some “training”. The unchallenged and unstated assumption is that there is no limit to any one persons performance. Job expectations can be expanded without limit as long as “training” is provided. The mantra is most commonly espoused by governments that cannot seem to give up on trying to be “all things to all people”. Yesterday the idiocy was repeated by a very frequent offender, the Victorian Education Department. “A Government spokeswoman rejected the need for new laws to protect teachers. She said the Government was taking action to reduce parent-rage incidents by providing training for teachers on how to defuse possibly violent situations.” (Parent Rage pushing teachers to the edge 10/6). Teachers are being “trained” not to cope better before the police arrive, but to avoid the need to ring the police. The inference for teachers is that intimidating and violent behaviour is part of life and we must learn to handle it - not stop it. Similarly, despite the recent blustering about mandatory reporting of drug use in schools. The government’s policy of “harm minimisation” is designed to “train” teachers to cope with and support drug using students in their classrooms. After all, drug use is part of life and we must learn to handle it - not stop it. But there’s more… The government continues to push students with severe disabilities into “normal” classrooms maintaining that the teachers can be “trained up” to meet any parent’s expectation about their child’s special needs. There are many more examples of this dangerous fallacy in the way employers respond to when their policies create impossible situations in nursing, the police force, social welfare etc.
Training is seen as the cheap alternative to workable policy.
2 Responses to “Parent Rage pushing teachers to the edge - The Age 10/6”
Leave a Reply
Your reply will not appear on the site until it has been approved
I hadn’t noticed this before but you are absolutely right. Presumably the answer is that extra training leads to extra skills and therefore warrants an increase in salary, otherwise training should be turned down.
In my day re-organisation was the curse:
We trained hard, but it seemed every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.
Attributed to Gaius Petronus AD 66
Whole heartedly agree with you. It’s the lazy governments way of dealing with these situations. It passes the buck of responsibility onto the employee because they’ve been “trained” and uses this as an excuse not to implement decent policy.
In creating a culture of passing the buck, it supports lazy, incompetent parenting, the lack of responsibility for ones own actions and the demoralisation of all involved.