Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 3; May 2000

In this issue we are reviewing a manuscript and three books that deal with ways in which some children are mistreated some of the time by the adults who look after them. This "Black Pedagogy" is the other end of the spectrum from the way a humanistic teacher will try to cope with her students, and therefore I feel these texts may be of interest to readers of HLT.

The first book is

For your own Good- the Roots of Violence in Child-rearing
Alice Miller, Virago, 1987 . This is a translation of
Am Angfang war Erziehung, 1980.

Excerpts from the book's Contents page give a clear guide to Miller's thinking:

How Child-rearing crushes spontaneous feeling: Glimpse of a revered Tradition.

" Poisonous Pedagogy"

Breeding grounds of Hatred: guides to child-rearing from two centuries.

The " Sacred" values of child-rearing

The central Mechanism of "Poisonous Pedagogy": Splitting off and Projection.

Miller then goes on the examine the childhood experience of Adolf Hitler and Juergen Bartsch , a 1960's serial child murderer, her thesis being that the way they were mercilessly brutalised as children lay at the root of their criminality, which she neither condones nor tries to exonerate them for.

Miller suggests that the "Poisonous Pedagogy" has many articulate theorists among European educationalists from the 18th century to our own day. Many of its tenets are enshrined in popular sayings like " La letra con sangre se entra" ( learning goes in with blood )

" Children should be seen but not heard."
" Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child"

On Page 59, she summarises the main tenets put forward by these by theorists of sadism:

1. Adults are the masters, not the servants, of the dependent child.
2. They determine in God-like fashion what is right and what is wrong.
3. The child is held responsible for their anger.
4. The parents must always be shielded.
5. The child's life-affirming feelings pose a threat to the autocratic adult.
6. The child's will must be "broken" as soon as possible.
7. All this must happen at an early age, so the child " won't notice" and will therefore not be able to expose the adults.

She continues: " It is also part of the "poisonous pedagogy" to impart to the child from the beginning false information and beliefs that have been passed from generation to generation and dutifully accepted by the young even though they are unproven and demonstrably false. Examples of such beliefs are:

1. A feeling of duty produces love.
2. Hatred can be done away with by forbidding it.
3. Parents deserve respect simply because they are parents.
4. Children are undeserving of respect simply because they are children.
5. Obedience makes a child strong.
6. A high degree of self-esteem is harmful.
7. A low degree of self-esteem makes a person altruistic.
8. Tenderness (doting) is harmful.
9. Responding to a child's needs is wrong.
10. Severity and coldness are a good preparation for life.
11. The way you behave is more important than the way you are.
12. Parents are always right.

For your own Good is typical of many European and US texts on psychology in that it implicitly claims to be talking about parents, about children, about the family everywhere in the world. Its unstated claim is universalist. This "unlimited", First -Worldist state of mind and feeling is childish in its unawareness of Arab culture, of the values of the societies across Africa, of mores beliefs and behaviours in the Confucian societies of East Asia.

Alice Miller has written a spate of books and you might move on from the one described above to The Drama of Being a Child or to Thou shalt not be aware.

While Miller writes at a high level of generality, albeit with copious examples, the next text is autobiographical:

Family Life ( manuscript )

Jim Brims ( contactable at jimbrims@lineone.net )

The best way to give an idea of what Jim lived through is to let his text speak for itself:

" Christmas. Every part of the downstairs was warm. I couldn't remember seeing all the bars of all the fires on before. The cooker has been blasting out hot air all morning. Every part of the house smelt of meat. The silvery decorations reflected the light bulbs that were on even in the middle of the day, and the fairy lights flashing on the Christmas tree. There were wrapped presents from friends, neighbours and relatives under the tree, with little labels on them saying who each one was for. When dinner was over, we all went into the living room to open the presents. Mummy picked up the first one. She was quivering with excitement and laughter.

" Now this is for Donald from Auntie Nita." Donald chubbily ripped the Christmas paper. It was a truck. It rattled inside its cardboard Hornby box. I waited for my turn. Mummy picked up the next present.

" And this is for Donald from the Farren family."

She picked up the next one. It was for Donald too. And the next one and the one after that. Soon there was a row of toys along the floor, all for Donald, even two of the same thing.

" But I didn't get anything," I said.

" Well people all sent toys to Donald, not you, " said Mummy. She was rocking with suppressed laughter.

" But they're not all for him," I said. "He's got two Aladdin books. One of them must be for me."

" Oh, no," she said triumphantly. " They're Donald's. Look, here's the label it says 'Donald' on this one , and 'Donald' on this one too. " She was actually crying with laughter, holding her knees together and shaking. Her whole face was lit up; I'd never seen her so happy.

" But that's your writing," I said. "You changed it. You wrote 'Donald' on it." She wiped her eyes and didn't answer.

I went over to Daddy and looked up at him. I had an empty feeling where the Christmas feeling had been. It was starting to hurt.

" Mummy's changed the names on all the presents," I said. " She's written Donald's name on all my presents".

" No, no," said Mummy, "everybody's sent presents to Donald." She was practically hysterical with laughter, tears running down her face. My father's normally dour expression lit up looking at her.

" Some of them are my presents."

" Ach, you're always trying to spoil things," he said to me. "

The whole of Family Life chronicles a child's struggle to make sense of and survive the doings of a hysterical and sadistic mother and a conniving, colluding father. It horribly and pithily illustrates many of the points made by Alice Miller in For your own Good.

The third book I want to bring to your attention is the autobiography of a child with an alcoholic mother

A Child called 'It'
Dave Pelzer, Orion, 1995, £9.99 (hardback)

Let Pelzer speak for himself:

" When Mother decided that the 'corner treatment' was no longer effective, I graduated to the 'mirror treatment'. In the beginning it was a no-notice form of punishment. Mother would simply grab me and smash my face against the mirror, smearing my tear-streaked face on the slick, reflective glass. Then she would order me to say over and over again:

" I'm a bad boy! I'm a bad boy! I'm a bad boy!" I was then forced to stand staring into the mirror. I would stand there with my hands locked to my sides, weaving back and forth, dreading the moment when the second set of television commercials aired. I knew mother would soon be stomping down the hall to see if my face was still against the mirror, and to tell me what a sickening child I was. Whenever my brothers came into the room when I was at the mirror, they would look at me, shrug their shoulders and continue to play- as if I was not there.

At first I was jealous, but soon I learned that they were only trying to save their own skins" "

The final book in this selection is

Victims of Memory- Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives
Mark Prendergrast, Harper Collins , 1997.

Victims of Memory demonstrates how families are being torn apart by a minority of misguided therapists who use dreams, hypnosis and persuasion to bend minds and unintentionally create false memories of terrible events that never occurred. Real cases, real lives are examined and the whole terrifying phenomenon of " recovered memory" is clearly described, as perceived by accused parents accusing children, retractors ( accusing children who later withdraw their accusations) and therapists.

Mark Prendergrast comes to the task of writing about false memories driven by the pain of his daughters falsely accusing him of molesting them in early childhood. At the time of writing these two women had broken off all contact with him. His book is thus a passionate piece of reporting but as he is well aware of his own anger he is able to use its energy but retain a fairly objective keyboard even when reporting some of the more outrageous statements made by the therapists who earn their bread by stimulating the recovery of memories unlinked to reality.

Writings like those of Alice Miller, Jim Brims and Dave Pelzer, the credibility of which is beyond question, have helped create a climate, especially in the US, which is conducive to the 'recovered memory" phenomenon. However, Prendergrast is careful to make clear that he is not trying to minimise the seriousness and size of the incest problem, when this is genuinely the case; he writes: " There is no question that sexual abuse in "civilised" countries is far more prevalent than anyone was willing to admit just a decade ago. Despite the immense amount of publicity given to the subject in recent years, it is still likely that real incidents of sex abuse are woefully unreported, because victims are often too fearful or ashamed to reveal it. "

Were an HLT reader to be foolish enough to read all four texts reviewed in this issue one after the other (desperately depressing) they would enormously strengthen their resolve to avoid all anger and sadism in their teaching, an avoidance that is not easy if we ourselves carry the burden of our seniors' anger and sadism. It is much easier to inflict on students what was inflicted on us than to break the cycle and teach from a clean slate.