Poisonous pedagogy
Encyclopedia
Poisonous pedagogy, also called black pedagogy, from the original German name Schwarze Pädagogik, is a term used by some present-day psychologists and sociologists to describe a subset of traditional child-raising methods which they regard as repressive and harmful. It is a negatively loaded umbrella concept, comprising behaviors and communication that these theorists consider to be "manipulative" or "violent", such as corporal punishment
.
in her 1977 work Schwarze Pädagogik. Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung. The psychologist
Alice Miller
used the concept to describe child-raising approaches that, she believes, damage a child's emotional development. Miller claims that this alleged emotional damage promotes adult behavior harmful to individuals.
"Poisonous pedagogy", it is alleged by these theorists, is what happens when a parent (or teacher, nurse, or other caregiver) believes, or claims to believe, that a young child's behavior demonstrates that the child is infected with the "seeds of evil", and therefore attempts to weed out the evil, either by emotional manipulation or by brute force. Simple examples include the beating of children as punishment for lying, or mothers who refuse to feed their newborn until a set time, in order to "teach him patience, which will be useful for him in later life".
Poisonous pedagogy, in Katharina Rutschky's definition, aims to inculcate a social superego in the child, to construct a basic defense against drives in the child's psyche, to toughen the child for later life, and to instrumentalize the body parts and senses in favor of socially defined functions. Although not explicitly, "poisonous pedagogy" serves, these theorists allege, as a rationalization of sadism and a defense against the feelings of the parent himself or of the person involved.
For methods, Rutschky claims, "poisonous pedagogy" makes use of initiation rites (for example, internalizing a threat of death), the application of pain (including psychological), the totalitarian supervision of the child (body control, behavior, obedience, prohibition of lying, etc.), taboos against touching, the denial of basic needs, and an extreme desire for order.
common notions of the evil nature of children or of taming bear witness to superstitions and the wish to be able to train human beings like animals.
One German child-raising book in the 18th century said: "These first years have, among other things, the advantage that one can use force and compulsion. With age children forget everything they encountered in their early childhood. Thus if one can take away children's will, they will not remember afterward that they had had a will."
In Germany
the parental right to discipline was abolished by a change in the law in 2000. The Federal Minister for Family Affairs from 1994 to 1998 Claudia Nolte
had wanted to maintain parents' right to use mild spanking, contrary to the views of Alice Miller in her 1980 book For Your Own Good.
Miller has written: "I understand 'black pedagogy' to be a parenting approach that is directed toward breaking the will of the child, in order to make it an obedient subject, with the aid of open or concealed use of force, manipulation, and repression."
All these Civilisations had practices designed to dominate the child, to direct the child.
, cruelty
, or a tendency toward violence
, or if strong negative emotions such as anger
or hate are being discharged, emotions against which the juvenile or infant psyche, with its age-based limitations, cannot defend itself.
Miller also came to the conclusion, as a result of her therapeutic work, that she needed to "work on" her own childhood in order to understand her clients better. She takes the view that "poisonous pedagogy" is a behavior that is passed on from generation to generation by being euphemized and sanitized.
Other themes of the controversial author Katharina Rutschky are parenting, feminist criticism, and abuse.
, Moritz Schreber, and others.
, there is no universally accepted definition of either of these terms. Advocates of spanking, caning, paddling, and other forms of corporal punishment
naturally dispute that these disciplinary methods are "poisonous". Academic research on corporal punishment is not unanimous, as discussed in Corporal punishment in the home
.
Alice Miller describes as poisonous pedagogy all types of behavior that she believes is intended to manipulate children's characters through force or deception. Her focus is not merely on smacking (although she has said that "Every smack is a humiliation" and is clearly opposed to corporal punishment) but also on various other forms of what she sees as manipulation, deceit, hypocrisy, and coercion, commonly practiced, in her view, by parents and teachers against children.
Critics such as sociology professor Frank Furedi
regard such declarations as too sweeping and disconnected from reality. Furedi suggests that many advocates of a total ban on physical punishment are actually against all forms of punishing children. He sees the underlying agenda as an anti-parent crusade, and argues that some research on the effects of spanking is far less clear-cut than the claims made on its behalf by what he calls "anti-smacking zealots".
Social psychologist David Smail
contends that society bears a large part of the responsibility for individuals' dysfunctional behavior, and as yet has not addressed this in any meaningful way.
Developmental psychologist James W. Prescott
, in the 1970s, carried out research into primate child-mother bonding and noted a link between disruption to the child-mother bonding process and the emergence of violence and fear based behaviour in the young primates. He suggests that the same dynamic functions for human beings, through the breakdown of empathy.
In 1975, Prescott outlined a link between violence and disruption of the child-mother bonding process in human societies, drawing on a cross-cultural study of Aboriginal Societies and a statistical analysis of those cultures' practices towards the nurturing of the natural child-mother bonding process, and an examination of historical attitudes towards children from Euramerican literature and the historical record.
He concluded that the disrupted child-mother bonding process was an absolute predictor of the emergence of violence, hierarchy, rigid gender roles, a dominatory psychology and violent territorial acquisition. Intervening upon and disrupting natural adolescent sexuality also formed part of the overall picture. This discovery was not expected. Most societies were peaceful, and the incidence of extremely violent societies was low.
The research showed that over time, disruptive practices become the 'norm' and as generations grow and pass on these practices, the society in question begins to demonstrate a clear lack of empathy, and violence is codified. The history of Poisonous Pedagogy is the history of this codification of these non-nurturant practices. It is upon these that current transmitted practice is found.
Prescotts work and insights have been confirmed by neuroscience, neurobiochemistry, psychology, peri-natal science, birth psychology and more anthropology.
Discussions of the concept of poisonous pedagogy are frequently reduced to discussions of whether or not a smack must be regarded as damaging, as Miller asserts.
Recent research into living Aboriginal Societies and a review of the historical record of first contact data, and other recorded observations, over the past 400 years have shown that the majority of Aboriginal Cultures do not chastise children. Indeed the data shows that children are treated with much more respect, trust and empathy than was previously believed.
Support for the view that corporal punishment is harmful, and in the long term, ineffective, is emerging from Neuroscience, Psychology, Biochemistry and longtitudinal studies. The ACE study adds yet more to the picture.
Corporal punishment in the home
Domestic corporal punishment typically involves the corporal punishment of a child by a parent or guardian in the home—normally the spanking or slapping of a child with the parent's open hand, but occasionally with an implement such as a belt, slipper, cane or paddle.In many cultures,...
.
Origin
The concept was first introduced by Katharina RutschkyKatharina Rutschky
Katharina Rutschky was a German educationalist and author. She coined the term "Schwarze Pädagogik" in her eponymous book from 1977. The term was later translated to poisonous pedagogy by Alice Miller...
in her 1977 work Schwarze Pädagogik. Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung. The psychologist
Psychologist
Psychologist is a professional or academic title used by individuals who are either:* Clinical professionals who work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts .* Scientists conducting psychological research or teaching psychology in a college...
Alice Miller
Alice Miller (psychologist)
Alice Miller née Rostovski was a psychologist and world renowned author, who is noted for her books on child abuse by their own parents, translated in several languages...
used the concept to describe child-raising approaches that, she believes, damage a child's emotional development. Miller claims that this alleged emotional damage promotes adult behavior harmful to individuals.
"Poisonous pedagogy", it is alleged by these theorists, is what happens when a parent (or teacher, nurse, or other caregiver) believes, or claims to believe, that a young child's behavior demonstrates that the child is infected with the "seeds of evil", and therefore attempts to weed out the evil, either by emotional manipulation or by brute force. Simple examples include the beating of children as punishment for lying, or mothers who refuse to feed their newborn until a set time, in order to "teach him patience, which will be useful for him in later life".
Poisonous pedagogy, in Katharina Rutschky's definition, aims to inculcate a social superego in the child, to construct a basic defense against drives in the child's psyche, to toughen the child for later life, and to instrumentalize the body parts and senses in favor of socially defined functions. Although not explicitly, "poisonous pedagogy" serves, these theorists allege, as a rationalization of sadism and a defense against the feelings of the parent himself or of the person involved.
For methods, Rutschky claims, "poisonous pedagogy" makes use of initiation rites (for example, internalizing a threat of death), the application of pain (including psychological), the totalitarian supervision of the child (body control, behavior, obedience, prohibition of lying, etc.), taboos against touching, the denial of basic needs, and an extreme desire for order.
In Germany
In the 18th century18th century
The 18th century lasted from 1701 to 1800 in the Gregorian calendar.During the 18th century, the Enlightenment culminated in the French and American revolutions. Philosophy and science increased in prominence. Philosophers were dreaming about a better age without the Christian fundamentalism of...
common notions of the evil nature of children or of taming bear witness to superstitions and the wish to be able to train human beings like animals.
One German child-raising book in the 18th century said: "These first years have, among other things, the advantage that one can use force and compulsion. With age children forget everything they encountered in their early childhood. Thus if one can take away children's will, they will not remember afterward that they had had a will."
In Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
the parental right to discipline was abolished by a change in the law in 2000. The Federal Minister for Family Affairs from 1994 to 1998 Claudia Nolte
Claudia Nolte
Claudia Nolte was born Claudia Wiesemüller on February 7, 1966 in Rostock, a town that then lay in East Germany. Nolte became a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union party , becoming the youngest cabinet minister in German history whilst in office from 1994–98...
had wanted to maintain parents' right to use mild spanking, contrary to the views of Alice Miller in her 1980 book For Your Own Good.
Miller has written: "I understand 'black pedagogy' to be a parenting approach that is directed toward breaking the will of the child, in order to make it an obedient subject, with the aid of open or concealed use of force, manipulation, and repression."
In ancient cultures
"Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child" was a saying that was recorded in Greece, by Juvenal, and is adapted in the Bible, Proverbs 13:24, was also recorded with variations in Sumeria and China prior to the emergence of western European civilisation.All these Civilisations had practices designed to dominate the child, to direct the child.
Psychological background
A relevant criterion is if a manipulative approach reveals behavioural issues such as a blindness to feelingsAlexithymia
Alexithymia from the Ancient Greek words λέξις and θυμός modified by an alpha-privative—literally "without words for emotions"—is a term coined by psychotherapist Peter Sifneos in 1973 to describe a state of deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing...
, cruelty
Cruelty
Cruelty can be described as indifference to suffering, and even positive pleasure in inflicting it. If this is supported by a legal or social framework, then receives the name of perversion. Sadism can also be related to this form of action or concept....
, or a tendency toward violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
, or if strong negative emotions such as anger
Anger
Anger is an automatic response to ill treatment. It is the way a person indicates he or she will not tolerate certain types of behaviour. It is a feedback mechanism in which an unpleasant stimulus is met with an unpleasant response....
or hate are being discharged, emotions against which the juvenile or infant psyche, with its age-based limitations, cannot defend itself.
Miller also came to the conclusion, as a result of her therapeutic work, that she needed to "work on" her own childhood in order to understand her clients better. She takes the view that "poisonous pedagogy" is a behavior that is passed on from generation to generation by being euphemized and sanitized.
Other themes of the controversial author Katharina Rutschky are parenting, feminist criticism, and abuse.
Personalities
Influential advocates of various forms of corporal punishment include John Harvey KelloggJohn Harvey Kellogg
John Harvey Kellogg was an American medical doctor in Battle Creek, Michigan, who ran a sanitarium using holistic methods, with a particular focus on nutrition, enemas and exercise. Kellogg was an advocate of vegetarianism and is best known for the invention of the corn flakes breakfast cereal...
, Moritz Schreber, and others.
Discussion and criticism
While "poisonous pedagogy" is intended as a pejorative term, similar to child abuseChild abuse
Child abuse is the physical, sexual, emotional mistreatment, or neglect of a child. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Children And Families define child maltreatment as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or...
, there is no universally accepted definition of either of these terms. Advocates of spanking, caning, paddling, and other forms of corporal punishment
Corporal punishment
Corporal punishment is a form of physical punishment that involves the deliberate infliction of pain as retribution for an offence, or for the purpose of disciplining or reforming a wrongdoer, or to deter attitudes or behaviour deemed unacceptable...
naturally dispute that these disciplinary methods are "poisonous". Academic research on corporal punishment is not unanimous, as discussed in Corporal punishment in the home
Corporal punishment in the home
Domestic corporal punishment typically involves the corporal punishment of a child by a parent or guardian in the home—normally the spanking or slapping of a child with the parent's open hand, but occasionally with an implement such as a belt, slipper, cane or paddle.In many cultures,...
.
Alice Miller describes as poisonous pedagogy all types of behavior that she believes is intended to manipulate children's characters through force or deception. Her focus is not merely on smacking (although she has said that "Every smack is a humiliation" and is clearly opposed to corporal punishment) but also on various other forms of what she sees as manipulation, deceit, hypocrisy, and coercion, commonly practiced, in her view, by parents and teachers against children.
Critics such as sociology professor Frank Furedi
Frank Furedi
Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. He is well known for his work on sociology of fear, therapy culture, paranoid parenting and sociology of knowledge....
regard such declarations as too sweeping and disconnected from reality. Furedi suggests that many advocates of a total ban on physical punishment are actually against all forms of punishing children. He sees the underlying agenda as an anti-parent crusade, and argues that some research on the effects of spanking is far less clear-cut than the claims made on its behalf by what he calls "anti-smacking zealots".
Social psychologist David Smail
David Smail (psychologist)
David Smail is a clinical psychologist who is a proponent of a social materialist explanation of psychological distress. Born in Putney, London, on 23 April 1938, he grew up in Epsom and Wimbledon....
contends that society bears a large part of the responsibility for individuals' dysfunctional behavior, and as yet has not addressed this in any meaningful way.
Developmental psychologist James W. Prescott
James W. Prescott
James W. Prescott is an American developmental psychologist, whose research focused on the origins of violence, particularly as it relates to a lack of mother-child bonding....
, in the 1970s, carried out research into primate child-mother bonding and noted a link between disruption to the child-mother bonding process and the emergence of violence and fear based behaviour in the young primates. He suggests that the same dynamic functions for human beings, through the breakdown of empathy.
In 1975, Prescott outlined a link between violence and disruption of the child-mother bonding process in human societies, drawing on a cross-cultural study of Aboriginal Societies and a statistical analysis of those cultures' practices towards the nurturing of the natural child-mother bonding process, and an examination of historical attitudes towards children from Euramerican literature and the historical record.
He concluded that the disrupted child-mother bonding process was an absolute predictor of the emergence of violence, hierarchy, rigid gender roles, a dominatory psychology and violent territorial acquisition. Intervening upon and disrupting natural adolescent sexuality also formed part of the overall picture. This discovery was not expected. Most societies were peaceful, and the incidence of extremely violent societies was low.
The research showed that over time, disruptive practices become the 'norm' and as generations grow and pass on these practices, the society in question begins to demonstrate a clear lack of empathy, and violence is codified. The history of Poisonous Pedagogy is the history of this codification of these non-nurturant practices. It is upon these that current transmitted practice is found.
Prescotts work and insights have been confirmed by neuroscience, neurobiochemistry, psychology, peri-natal science, birth psychology and more anthropology.
Discussions of the concept of poisonous pedagogy are frequently reduced to discussions of whether or not a smack must be regarded as damaging, as Miller asserts.
Recent research into living Aboriginal Societies and a review of the historical record of first contact data, and other recorded observations, over the past 400 years have shown that the majority of Aboriginal Cultures do not chastise children. Indeed the data shows that children are treated with much more respect, trust and empathy than was previously believed.
Support for the view that corporal punishment is harmful, and in the long term, ineffective, is emerging from Neuroscience, Psychology, Biochemistry and longtitudinal studies. The ACE study adds yet more to the picture.
See also
- Child abuseChild abuseChild abuse is the physical, sexual, emotional mistreatment, or neglect of a child. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Children And Families define child maltreatment as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or...
- Child disciplineChild disciplineChild discipline is the set of rules, rewards and punishments administered to teach self control, increase desirable behaviors and decrease undesirable behaviors in children. In its most general sense, discipline refers to systematic instruction given to a disciple. To discipline thus means to...
- Corporal punishmentCorporal punishmentCorporal punishment is a form of physical punishment that involves the deliberate infliction of pain as retribution for an offence, or for the purpose of disciplining or reforming a wrongdoer, or to deter attitudes or behaviour deemed unacceptable...
- Critical pedagogyCritical pedagogyCritical pedagogy is a philosophy of education described by Henry Giroux as an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive...
- Emotional abuse
- PedagogyPedagogyPedagogy is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction....
- Physical punishmentPhysical punishmentPhysical punishment is any form of penalty in a judicial, educational or domestic setting that takes a physical form, by the infliction on the offender of pain, injury, discomfort or humiliation...
- PsychohistoryPsychohistoryPsychohistory is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It attempts to combine the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present...
- PunishmentPunishmentPunishment is the authoritative imposition of something negative or unpleasant on a person or animal in response to behavior deemed wrong by an individual or group....
- SpankingSpankingSpanking refers to the act of striking the buttocks of another person to cause temporary pain without producing physical injury. It generally involves one person striking the buttocks of another person with an open hand. When an open hand is used, spanking is referred to in some countries as...