Schools - How much diversity can they take ?

Cultural Diversity and multiculturalism are a stated goals of the Victorian Government. These are broad "feel good" policies with seemingly benign aims mainly limited to support for immigrant sub-cultures. Their effect has been a minor amplification of the general cultural fragmentation arising from a variety of other social and economic policies. Nevertheless, these policies provide a lens through which to view the growing stresses on government schools. The government exhortations to accommodate increasing social diversity of all kinds into school classrooms can be seen to be a key factor undermining public confidence in government schools.
Both cultural diversity and multiculturalism policies are generally considered to apply only to the support for immigrant sub-cultures. They seek to prevent integration or assimilation by funding and support for sub-cultures. The classroom strategies that are promoted to all government schools to help accommodate the diverse behaviours of many immigrant sub-cultures are increasingly exploited more generally and with more adverse effect by Australian born sub-cultures. Schools having difficulty with "student management" are advised by consultants to be more "understanding". In action, this means to seek appeasement both within the classroom and after the event. Schools are asked to accept that in a growing number of families violence is a common method for minor dispute resolution. It is just a cultural difference. Such "cultural differences" are completely independent of race or immigrant background. They more commonly relate to what used to be called "class" differences. Schools are exhorted to accept that verbal obscenity is now common in the home and in the media and "middle class" gentility in speech is just a form of "cultural insensitivity".
Policies flow from policies. "Restorative justice" and the further limiting of government school discipline powers are direct policy mechanisms designed to prevent school communities from attempting to resist the new requirements for diversity. The huge cost burdens that their implementation places on schools is only part of the problem.
Funds are depleted through the progressive yearly increase in staff release from teaching for duties titled "student management", "student well-being", "student welfare". Every new name masks a common technique - more investment in the "talking cure".
More important than the huge waste of money is the loss of time and energy from teaching. Many teachers who have fully accommodated to the new focus will talk of themselves as teachers of "the whole person" rather than of any subject or skill. Those with specific responsibility to manage the crises - especially principals and assistant principals develop a growing cynicism in parallel with their emotional exhaustion. The public rarely hears the reality due to the siege mentality of government schools where any admission of systemic problems is considered high treason.
Each classroom teacher's success is measured, NOT by the quality of their teaching program, but by the degree to which they can "engage" the students. When the fruits of diversity sit in a classroom, they show highly varied behaviours - some trivial (loud sniffing of nasal mucus, use of expletives, volume of voice, demand for variations to uniform requirements) and others more "challenging" (refusal to obey any simple request, contempt for female authority, use of physical size as implied threat).
Some readers will reveal their own prejudices by assuming that I refer to one or more immigrant groups. In my long experience teaching in a culturally diverse school, these behaviours are just as common among non-immigrant students.
The domino effect of policy development is now flowing strongly towards "engagement" as the key objective for all schools and teachers because it is the first and last resort.
To an effective teacher in an effective school, engagement refers to a range of tactics especially important at the start of each lesson and sequence of lessons. These tactics focus attention, stimulate curiosity, link the content to a variety of other areas of possible interest to students. They are part of a strategy that bears fruit in hard work and the satisfaction of high achievement.
Teachers in many schools are being told covertly and overtly that: engagement is not just a tactic but THE goal; that hard work is a relic of the past and any good teacher should be able to make every lesson "fun" (with all its connotations of transience and lack of enduring worth). This strategy bears fruit in a highly engaged class having fun - and learning something in the process. Learning is reduced (gradually but inexorably) to an accidental side effect of having a good time. As students come more and more to compare school fun with their other entertainments, the activities that "engage" them must emulate those amusements more and more. This approach results in computers being mainly used as a fun contemporary context for quite trivial educational objectives.
The caustic effect of these priorities on the teacher in the next classroom is immediate and powerful. The ability of a teacher to be effective depends in part on the school environment. In the last decade, I have seen many highly effective teachers become ineffective in this new environment. This is explained in terms of the age of the teacher and his or her inability to recognise that evolution has suddenly produced a generation of students irrevocably different to those of the past.
Appeasing any level of behavioural diversity by investing time in the talking cure; changing curriculum process and content so that engagement is the key goal. These are the practical outcomes of policies that continue to flow from the Victorian government - whether intended or not.
Under these stresses, it is no wonder that so many parents seek to choose schools whose diversity is filtered so that engagement is a tactic - but the goal is still education.

Stephen Digby