Material, Structural, and Symbolic School Violence in Comparative Perspective

• In Event: School violence and security in comparative perspective

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to unpack three dimensions of school related violence and examine their interplay. By constructing a Bourdieuian framework, we can assess school related violence in its material, structural, and symbolic iterations. From a material standpoint, we can see how the traditional state guarantee that school premises will be safe from violent acts is being compromised with increasing frequency. Evidence of disturbing material violent acts toward children, teachers, and school authorities raises questions regarding the ability of the state to protect the school as a safe space for learning, along with ancillary issues involving the protection of children, staff, teachers and parents who identify with the school but are attacked outside of conventional school boundaries.

From the standpoint of structural violence, one can examine the institutional role schools play in contributing to or alleviating poverty, unemployment, gender, ethnic, religious discrimination etc. Specific issues involving dropout, school attendance, and community support or disengagement speak to the ways in which schools contribute to or ameliorate the violence of perpetual poverty that is a global concern for vast numbers of children and their families.

From a symbolic violence perspective, one can analyze the Foucaultian practices that subject students to bodily discipline, the ways in which school curricula and pedagogies reify modernist notions of development, progress, and competition, and the gendered ways in which such scripts are articulated. One can also examine the ways schools exclude, filter or reify surrounding cultural practices expressed within the community, the state, the family, and external media sources.

In this paper, an effort will be made to both offer evidence in support of the three categorizations and examine the interplay among the three realms. Under what conditions can a violent attack upon a school or its inhabitants represent an attack upon the state as the embodiment of modernism? In what ways do schools fail to immunize themselves as complicit actors responsible for helping to perpetuate the structural violence members of their surrounding community experience? And, in what ways do teaching practices including the dissemination of highly regulated and narrowly defined curricular and assessment materials, and a reliance upon authoritarian pedagogies, perpetuate the framing of education as a repressive violation of personal integrity, worthy of oppositional resistance? Is the school a neutral site of contestation, an easy target for those bent on perpetuating material violence, or the source of conflict inviting the expansion of its expression in extreme ways?

Although the evidence offered in a number of the papers on this panel speaks to these theoretical issues, data compiled by the Global Coalition to Protect Education From Attack, UNESCO and UNICEF will also be analyzed with reference to the forms of violence discussed above.

Author

• Irving Epstein, Illinois Wesleyan University