80 Inside the System
liberal, thrust comes from the community-integration ideology
and takes the form of incorporating the school as a preventive,
diagnostic, screening or diversion agency. The hard thrust, provoked
by concern over violence, disruption, vandalism, unruliness or indiscipline
in school, takes the form of target hardening, drug or
behaviourist controls and increasing segregation of troublemakers.
As these movements often share common technologies, such as
behaviourism and early prediction techniques, it is not always
easy to keep them apart in practice.69 The discovery of hyperkinesis
nicely illustrates the convergence of the benevolent treatment
rhetoric with the need for a technology of pacification. 70
At the soft edge, an increasing array of professionals, paraprofessionals,
counsellors, social workers, psychologists and experts
of all sorts have attached themselves to the school. Their
task is to 'pick up' deviancy problems at their source and, where
possible, contain them without formal referral to the system. The
fact that these personnel are themselves part of the machine is not
usually seen as a contradiction, despite the increasing formalization
of their methods, for example the use of diagnostic rating
scales to weed out the potential delinguents, the inclusion of
schools in behaviour-contract agreements with criminal justice
agencies and the incorporation of token economy programmes
into the routine of the classroom.
At the hard edge, the legendary vision of the blackboard jungle
has dominated social control policy. In Britain, the strategy has
been exclusion and isolation - the setting up over the seventies
of special units for the segregation of disruptive pupils. 71 From
1947-1977 alone, the number of these units (on or off the site
of the school) increased from 40 to 239. The model is the classic
one of individual pathology. The benevolent rationale was to 'help
young people who find it difficult to adjust to schooling' while at
the same time saving the rest of the class from being disturbed by
these troublemakers. Referral takes place on the vaguest of diagnostic
criteria (including restlessness, 'potentially disruptive behaviour',
answering back, irritability, not wearing uniform or
'difficulty in making relationships') and pupils might spend anything
from a month to a few years in the segregation unit before
being returned to the ordinary school or the outside world. The
units are given names such as sanctuaries, withdrawal groups, and
even pastoral care unit (see appendix).
The harder forms of school 'controlization' in the USA have
little room for such euphemism. From the 1978 'Safe School
Study' onwards, the entrepreneurial direction has been towards a