Discourses of indiscipline: an informal Hobbesian riposte to Cate Watson

Abstract

Classroom battles are real and not a metaphor. Warfare is a historical and present fact of human life. Life really is a battle and conflict inevitable; injuries to the psyche are just as real as those to the body. Schools cannot step outside society. It is not Foucault but Thomas Hobbes who offers the most perceptive insight into human behaviour and the best advice for coping with trouble in schools.

Notes

¹School of Social Science, Edward Wright Building, Dunbar Street, Old Aberdeen, AB24 3QY, UK. Email: [email protected]

1. The UN epidemiological survey after the first Gulf War is titled United Nations Commission on Human Rights: situation of human rights in Occupied Kuwait (Geneva, UNESCO), 1992.

2. Leviathan, 1651, by Thomas Hobbes is available in numerous editions and has never been out of print. A recent text for those tempted to explore Hobbes further is Aspects of Hobbes, by Noel Malcolm (Oxford, Clarendon Press), 2002.

3. French obscurantism, and English rudeness about it, go back a long way. Henry Fielding, in Book 8 of Tom Jones, published in 1748, took a swipe at a M. Dacier who believed that a ‘thing which is impossible may yet be probable’. Fielding, in a wicked footnote, remarked that ‘It is happy for M. Dacier that he was not an Irishman’.

4. Vicktor Frankl's book is called Man's search for meaning, published by Random House, and has sold 9 million copies since 1945.