Secret violence

In France, the transition to middle school exposes young people to a secret violence, reproducing school authoritarianism in their autonomous social structures, where silence becomes the norm for survival.

Self-organized adolescent communities

In France, when young people enter middle school and collectives are no longer under the responsibility of one person, the teacher, but become autonomous, they are much more left to themselves in all spaces, whether in classrooms, the schoolyard, or social networks. The system is similar, both in contexts of wealthy social classes or in contexts of working-class backgrounds. And this includes contexts of private schools, as well as public schools, with only a few rare exceptions.

Adolescent communities, like any communities, organize themselves to be able to form society together, since they now find themselves in a form of autonomy, in much broader temporal and spatial spaces than before. The problem here is that these young people have absolutely not received any education in democracy. They have experienced their previous school journey in kindergarten and elementary school, which was an essential social space in their lives, alongside the family social space and the social space of friends or the neighborhood in which they live. However, the school space remains very important in their political formation, in terms of the modalities of social life. And in the school space, democracy is virtually non-existent. Teachers have all the power. Children’s rights are violated throughout the day. And the only way to be at peace, in safety, is to obey authority without ever questioning it. Questioning authority in the school context is severely reprimanded, even when this authority is arbitrary and unjust.

Learning secrecy to save your skin

Thus, to protect one’s physical, mental, social, and political integrity, it is appropriate to learn, and this is what children are taught, to keep quiet, to obey without flinching, to never contest even the worst authoritarianisms and the worst systemic violence. I do not wish hereby to blame teachers who are extremely poorly trained in pedagogy and respect for human rights, but it must be noted that the authoritarian and authoritarianist violence suffered by children is forbidden to be questioned, under penalty of exclusion of children from the social space and under penalty of potentially significant harm to their parents.

Thus, children learn in kindergarten and elementary school to deny the violence they suffer, to preserve their own safety in this social space and their own psychological integrity. When they arrive at middle school and have much greater autonomy, they have internalized these rules of social functioning. And so, in the groups that form immediately within the middle school, because there is much more space for the formation of groups and communities independently of the class, within the school institution itself, they implement the political principles they have learned through their lived experience at school. Group leaders take on this function, which was previously the function of the teacher and the school institution. Some become scapegoats necessary for the balance and catharsis of the group, as was also the case in classrooms, and above all, any attempt to reveal violence is repressed in an excessively severe and radical way, just as was the case in elementary school from teachers.

If, for example, a child is being bullied by others and another child chooses to report this violence to the adult class, either their testimony is not taken into account because adults do not wish to interfere in these social spaces over which they have no control and of which they know none of the rules, so they cannot enter, because if they did, they would have to become the leaders there too, and this is neither within their prerogatives, nor within their capabilities, nor within their possibilities, and it would probably not be desirable anyway. So, adolescents are often simply ordered to solve their problems on their own, but if it is learned among the children that someone has tried to break the code of silence, they will be severely punished by their peers. And if certain involved adults choose to try to restore the law, they will do so in a certain place, but they cannot in any way control everything that happens in the social space of young people. And so, even if adults have interfered, the consequences for the “traitor” can be extreme. This can sometimes go as far as murder. To stay alive, one keeps quiet, it’s the only solution, as at school.

The responsible school

Thus, violence must be secret, this is what has been instilled in them by the school. And since they are beings in construction, they try to do their best, to do even better than what they have been taught, because they are founding their world by emphasizing the rules, which is necessary to learn and test them. The reasoning is, for children, that if someone is being bullied, well, it’s better to say nothing so that there aren’t two victims, but only one. Thus, everyone, to protect themselves, to protect their physical and moral integrity, becomes complicit in the system. No one has a choice. And the secrets being absolutely kept, just like the secrets within the school, we see it well with the Bétharram scandal currently, where even with all the most damning evidence, the secret continues to be cultivated at the highest level of the State, because revealing it would explode an immense system.

Therefore, adolescents know that they cannot expect anything from anyone and that their only choice, their only possibility is to live “at war,” in an absolutely unjust space. At the age of 11, everyone knows that they live in a dreadful world, that they have no right to tell adults, who also do not want to see, and that no one will ever be able to help them. What does this build for the construction of a democratic society?