Sure,
Its media coverage is indeed necessary. However, it remains misleading: school violence is not easily comprehended. Each new case of aggression, sometimes turning into human tragedy, gives the public the impression of a resurgence, if not an increase in the phenomenon. In urgency, the political power, solicited from all sides, announces a plan: more than ten over the past twenty years. As usual, the reassuring implementation of new quantitative criteria that emphasize the reported and recorded numbers of acts struggles to conceal the profound confusion surrounding this enigmatic fact.
The issue of school violence often confuses two approaches: on one hand, the inherent physical and psychological aspects of the puberty process and, on the other hand, the consequences of gaps in education and culture, two domains responsible, in any human society, for curbing tendencies towards fundamental violence deriving from an original survival impulse. A formative crisis, the pubertal period carries a part of violence that can lead the young person to aggressive behaviors, either towards others or themselves. The encounter of word and act characterizes this passage, where the boy attempts to reappropriate a body that escapes him and where the girl seeks to eliminate physical transformations felt as an active masculine principle, obstructing the emergence of her femininity. In schools, as curiously noted by the latest academy records, “physical violence predominates in boys, verbal violence in girls.” Were the subject not so serious, one would almost smile at this faithful adherence of those concerned to the sociological codes of sexuation.
The more or less radical break from the parental environment and the hope for new identifications define the pubescent. But, it is “in principle” equipped with the baggage of his education and cultural learning that the adolescent sets off to discover “the vast world.” If the “repression” operated by the “constraints of civilization” does not work, as Freud once wrote to his colleague Karl Abraham, we “end up with scoundrels and not neurotics.”
School violence screams these multiple deficiencies. Firstly, a society that, for a long time now, does not offer enough cultural support, even less an attractive social model: the latest report by Jean-Paul Delevoye, the Ombudsman of the Republic, speaks of a French society “psychologically tired” and marked by “the anxiety of downgrading.” Then, note a decay of speech like a decline of writing, two unquestioned means of “self-recognition” and “informing the other” that accompany this feeling. Finally, a resignation of parents that the educational framework can no longer “manage”: the judiciary notes a strong trend over the past ten years of cases reaching judges’ offices that, in other times, would have been addressed by national education professionals. This call for outside help can be understood but it de facto signifies the loss of authority of the teaching body.
Living witnesses of these deficiencies, those who throw themselves – or abandon themselves – into school violence refuse thus to enter the adult world: they are more tempted by mimetic and substitutive forms of brutality to the state apparatus by joining aggressive gangs: thus, school violence has “changed in nature to become more collective” it is noted today. A finding unfortunately in line with this general trend within the population of an identity difficulty “to be,” to assert one’s existence as singular. It is more about drowning, effacing oneself in the group rather than constituting it: others prefer to take refuge, as evidenced by the widely consulted psychoanalytic clinic for this “contagious pandemic” that worries parents, in the virtual world through the anonymity of their computer. Could it be the “France of the invisibles” also mentioned in this report by the Ombudsman of the Republic?
As for the remedy of “sanctuarizing” the school, it could prove worse than the harm: the “porosity” between the street and school establishments was indeed highlighted as early as 2006 by a report from the ancestors of the DCRI, the General Intelligence, which noted a 73.2% increase in the presence of weapons in schools. But a lively school worthy of the name must remain at the heart of the city, unless one wishes to transform the humans who teach there into “knowledge androids” and to consider those who come to learn as disembodied receptacles. It is not surprising that teaching staff is more targeted by these violences: doesn’t it represent “true knowledge,” supposed to soothe the symbolic demand, always lingering in the student where intellectual curiosity becomes a sublimated form, a psychic dressing, so to speak, of tortuous sexual curiosity?
Eric Debarbieux, Director of the International Observatory on School Violence, recalls in one of his past studies, the “carefully hierarchized” criteria that, according to high school students, define a “good teacher”: “respect, stable mood, clear and consistent evaluation criteria, competence combined with a passion for the subject taught” (In “Questions d’autoritรฉ, Eres Editions, 2005). We are far from just the issue of a submission to legal authority: “In delinquency,” already explained child psychoanalyst and specialist Winnicott, “secondary benefits have become more important than the original cause which is forgotten.”
In a surprisingly prophetic vision of 1957, philosopher Hannah Arendt expressed it clearly: “Authority has been abolished by adults and that can only mean one thing: that adults refuse to assume the responsibility of the world in which they have placed children.” The return to the security option, a political tourniquet to this hemorrhage of violence, represents only a very short-term palliative. Would it not be appropriate, in the longer term, to restore meaning to the school, re-sanctify – secularly speaking – the rite of passage from one year to another, in order to value progression and allow the teacher to reconnect with the desire to transmit and for the young person, with that of learning?
