Book Review: Schooling as Violence: How Schools Harm Pupils and Societies:

TLDR: In this paper, Harber argues that violence towards children is systemic to schools and that schools can thus be a forum to fight against it, and suggests that formal education is a paradox: learning can either be very good or very bad depending on what is learnt, how it is learnt and what it is designed to do.

Abstract: This book concerns itself with the relationship between society and schooling, focusing particularly on how violence is endemic in schools. The author argues that violence towards children is systemic to schools and that schools can thus be a forum to fight against it. Harber’s use of the term ‘violence’ is broad and inclusive, being physical or psychological, through authoritarianism or indoctrination. He sees it from a very wide international dimension, using a number of different countries to illustrate diverse views. In setting the scene for his argument that schools are violent in a number of ways, Harber discusses political violence throughout the world where schools, children and teachers are used as pawns. He suggests that formal education is a paradox: ‘Learning can either be very good or very bad depending on what is learnt, how it is learnt and what it is designed to do’ (pp. 7–8). His initial discussion suggests that formal schooling is economically, sociologically and ideologically a negative thing for many children and communities throughout the world. Is it basically a western construct of control? This is very much the theme of other Harber (1996, 2005) works, where he challenges politically the marketization of children in a ‘one size fits all’ system. Harber goes to some length to give examples and statistics about truancy, as well as critiquing some of the claims of the school effectiveness and school improvement movements. He argues passionately that we need to analyse who schooling is for, and suggests that within schools there is a strong element of ideological control. At times his arguments, legitimate as they are, border on the sensationalist with graphic accounts of incidents and events underlying how education leads to social violence. I felt this approach marginalized his argument, and would have welcomed a more critically engaging and balanced discussion. Harber could have brought in a more detailed analysis of formal education in western societies, rather than juxtaposing it so acutely with the debatable claim that education creates violent societies, as in the case of Rwanda and neo-fascist or religiously demarcated communities. In the second chapter Harber investigates how authoritarian schooling creates violent societies, focusing particularly on the issue of compulsory education as a form of abuse. Schooling can certainly be regarded as an act of control, of normalization and creating governable products (Hargreaves, 1997). ‘Most schools are essentially authoritarian institutions, however benevolent or benign that authoritarianism is and whatever beneficial aspects of learning are imparted’ (p. 24). Harber illustrates this point with examples of various international contexts where control in schooling is authoritarian and where