Structural shaming in the school system – part 1

Many interesting and important studies on shaming in schools have already been published.

However, the structural aspect has mostly been overlooked or at least underestimated, because for people who have been through school and university themselves it is so self-evident that they usually do not even notice it.

Underlying the open forms of shaming in our school system, such as mockery, bullying and exclusion, is a hidden form of shaming that I call structural shaming and – this is very important to me! – for which I blame no one personally. Since it is a structural feature, all members of the system – pupils, parents and teachers – are rather all victims of this shaming.

Anyone who experienced it as a child usually never gets rid of it for the rest of their life, because they have unconsciously internalised it ever since. An inner voice whispers to him or her: “As you are, you are not good enough! To earn love and recognition, you have to make an effort and try hard to live up to other people’s expectations.” Especially when it concerns unchangeable characteristics (such as origin, sex, physique, disposition), the feeling of shame this triggers is almost unbearable for those affected.

So at first they can only repress it, but sooner or later the repressed feelings of shame will turn out to be the real cause of many forms of aggression (from bullying to, in extreme cases, murder) or self-aggression (from addiction to, in extreme cases, suicide). The problem of structural shaming is therefore far-reaching.

Four unconscious beliefs

Try to remember your own childhood or to put yourself in the position of a sensitive child starting school (I am not talking about particularly dramatic fates here, but about perfectly ordinary, average cases that everyone knows). First day at school: in more or less explicit words, the child learns that from now on it must regularly go to an institution called “school” so that it will “become something”. In this way the first unconscious belief is planted in it: as I am, I am not good enough.

Instead of continuing to explore the world in its own way and playfully developing its abilities in the process, the child is now put on a particular “educational track” along which it has to move forward in a prescribed way. An officially laid-down curriculum determines what is very important (core subjects), what is less important (minor subjects) and what is unimportant and therefore not on the curriculum at all. This lays the foundation for the second shaming belief: others know better than I do what is good and important for me.

In the classroom the child sits among peers of the same age, with whom it is constantly compared or compares itself. The competitive pressure that is unavoidable in such a school class quite naturally produces the third belief: life is a fight (or a race); either I am one of the winners, or I am a loser.

This comparison with others is the basis of assessment: through marks, written reports or even unintentional remarks by teachers and classmates, the child learns that it is better or worse than others. Overall, the school reports produce a normal distribution from “very good” to “fail” in the shape of the famous Gaussian bell curve. Officially, however, the aim is equal opportunity, so the child is told that how far “up” this curve it gets depends on its personal effort. This gives rise to the fourth belief: it is my own fault if I stay at the bottom. Or, seen the other way round: because I am better than others, I deserve special recognition.

The top of the class and the school failure

The actual factors of success – origin, family situation, innate talents, state of health, emotional condition, willingness to conform, status among classmates and so on – are largely disregarded, or at any rate not mentioned. From an early age, the schoolchild thus learns to feel responsible for its success or failure to an extent that does not correspond to reality:

• The good pupil from a stable family background, healthy, talented, willing to conform and given plenty of support at home, is proud of being top of the class. Since she is praised and rewarded for her achievements, she mistakenly regards them as her personal merit.
• The poor pupil from a difficult family background, perhaps even a refugee, poorly fed, often short of sleep, teased by his classmates because he is not dressed and equipped in the latest fashion, aggressive if only because nobody takes his urge to move adequately into account, and so on, is scolded at school and punished at home. His parents do not mean any harm; they are driven by fear of disgrace, of social decline, of a botched future for their child. And so the son feels doubly guilty when he gets bad marks or fails.

This injustice will very probably continue one-to-one in later life. The top of the class will study successfully, get a spacious flat and a good job with the help of her family, and regard her high income as self-evidently justified.

The school failure can count himself lucky if he does not go off the rails but at least lands a badly paid job now and then and is kept afloat by social assistance in between. He feels like a failure and has to put up with being called a welfare scrounger. Sooner or later his dull resentment at the constant shaming will be discharged in aggression and/or self-destruction (compulsive eating, gambling, alcohol, drugs and so on).

A system with mechanical precision

In most cases, however, the hidden curriculum of school, as the philosopher Ivan Illich calls it, ensures that neither the swot nor the failure questions the system that has assigned them their place on the social ladder with merciless mechanical precision. The winner has little reason to do so and no time either. She is fully occupied with securing her status.

The loser would not even be able to see through such complex connections. He therefore readily turns to populist seducers who do his thinking for him and promise him simple, if need be violent, solutions. The natural urge to ask one’s own questions, to get to the bottom of things on one’s own initiative and to think about alternative solutions was trained out of winners and losers alike at a young age: they have learned that questions are asked by authority figures and that their task is to give the “right answers” in order to get on in life.

Many teachers, head teachers and inspectors of course often suffer themselves from not being able to do what their intuition or their educational instinct would advise them. Time and again they have to subordinate their human needs to bureaucratic regulations and feel under pressure “from above” – pressure that they pass on downwards, or that breaks them.

Part 2 deals with the historical development of our school system and with the human “hierarchy of needs”.