by Boris Johnson » Fri Aug 31, 2012 9:24 am
Most of the issues are homeside. A teacher trying to undo years of non-existent parents in 30-50 kids, is quite frankly impossible.
Also as has been mentioned, being a wannabe james dean, does not necessarily make a failure. Anecdotally there are dozens of cases from most people's lives I hope. I spent a sizeable portion of school time in the pub/hungover, I now have a bunch of letters after my name. In fact, and I'll think you'll see this is 'good' schools anywhere in the western world too, considering education is now entirely driven by stats (which is, in itself a serious problem, quantifying education pretty much ruined it), they don't expel the kids who test well, regardless of their behaviour.
So really.. that's not the issue.
The issue i'd suggest, is that in a lot of frankly impoverished backgrounds various cultures glorify being illiterate or semi-illiterate.
The real secret, and this is something that's simply not taught to kids. There's literally nothing except perhaps at the current edge of research that cannot be learnt from a book, for free. I also don't think that making them ready poorly written novels about kids having magical adventures does anything to address this.
In short, discipline is not really the problem here. We as a culture (part of the problem here is not that 'western' culture has been unified, its that its been unified largely in a completely uncontrolled manner by music, tv and film) don't value education so school is something to be gotten through, moreover, barely anyone even tries to be an autodidact anymore. That's the problem.