School can’t? Thinking about refusal in education

Morally the only reliable people when the chips are down are those who say “I can’t” (Arendt, 2003)

… school refusal is a normal avoidance reaction to an unpleasant, unsatisfying, or even hostile environment (Pilkington & Piersel, 1991, p. 290)

Refusals of and in education seem to be expanding exponentially; the school “can’t” movement, home educators, the opt-out movement in the USA, and teachers who are leaving for a variety of reasons (Santoro, 2011). Of course, there are many good reasons for students to go to school, and many good schools doing important educational work – but this work often flies under the radar in a system that sees itself through the self-regenerating logic of “performance.”

Is it time then perhaps to suggest that the purposes of schooling and of education have become radically misaligned and that what is happening in the schooling system might be being refused – on educational grounds? What is perhaps of most note in the recent “The national trend of school refusal and related matters” Australian Parliamentary inquiry (August 2023) is the recommendations indicate that the recently established Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) will be the main provider of research conducted in relation to the issues of school refusal. The designation of AERO as the chief provider of research rather than universities may tell us something about the federal government’s views on research in the Higher Education sector. It may also suggest to us that we need to mobilise our collective resources as researchers to engage with the government and offer alternative forms and outcomes of/for research; it is important to note the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) and other associations are increasing activity in this space. A reading of the School refusal and related matters report seems to indicate a conclusion of the inquiry is that the appropriate course of action on “school refusal” is mainly concerned with definition and data: we need to know what we are talking about, that is, defining a category - ‘school refusal’ as opposed to truancy, for example, then we need to know how many “refusers” we are talking about.

This all seems reasonable from the point of view of those whose job (e.g., politicians and bureaucrats) it is to “see like a state” (Scott, 1998): the state wants to know who/what “our people” are and how many of them fit into which category – and of course, those who don’t fit (see Bowker & Star, 1999). As teacher education researchers whose job it is to “see otherwise” to the state and perhaps be unreasonable, we will need to remain vigilant to the ongoing work that arises from this state knowledge production apparatus and its definitional and datafication work which may become couched as “research.” Related questions will be how this limits both what research is and what/who it is for.

Also, and of particular concern to us as teacher education researchers, is that the policy focus seems to land, in terms of “refusal,” squarely on the apparent pathologies of the students, the families and to an extent, the schools. We might note that research in the school refusal field also tends towards trying to understand the student and/or family, often with apparent good intentions, for example focusing on “more/better” inclusion and engagement. The overall foundations, mechanisms and modalities of the system itself seem to have missed out on any attention. It may well be too much to ask of governments to rethink the major aspects of the systems that they have put in place, as the systems gather an inevitability and inertia about themselves.

In what ways might the “school can’t” movement help us to think about “refusal”? The movement has emerged because many students are not physically able to make themselves go to school: they literally “can’t” go to school. Parents/caregivers have set up networks to support one another and in the public information about what they are doing, seek to make the distinction conceptually between “school can’t” and “school refusal.” The reason for this is that they want to emphasise both that it is not a matter of deciding or choosing not to go to school and that it is important to look in other directions for what to do. Following these views, we wonder if the answers to the problems lie not in trying to fix the individual schools (which may be doing incredibly difficult and complex work in this area), or the students or the teachers or the families. Is it possible that this is a system problem or set of interrelated problems?

The “school can’t” concept that the movement relies on leads us back to the quote at the start of this editorial and Arendt’s analysis of those Germans who were nonparticipants in Nazi activities. Her thinking showed how a group of people just could not bring themselves to commit the atrocities demanded of the German people, and this was not necessarily explainable in moral reasoning terms. There were no reasons necessary, apart from an incapacity to act in ways that they were expected to. Here we might see a logic of the “school can’t” movement that intentionally or not resists the ways that the government and many researchers seek to explain and give reasons for “can’t” – which may lie outside that which is reasonable or explainable. This refusal of the refusers to become knowable subjects to be explained or reasoned about is an important political move that we as teacher educators may learn something from. Refusing this angle of explanation and reason may allow us to shift the focus a little and rather than asking “why is it that students refuse to go to school?,” perhaps to ask “why is it that students do not refuse to go to school?”

We can list research on other seeming refusals of dominant schooling practices as they currently operate: home education (English, 2020), alternative schooling (McGregor & Mills, 2012), the teacher shortage (Carusi, 2022), the opt out movement in the USA (Chen et al., 2021) and students going to school but refusing to attend classes (Reynolds, 2023). Can we apply the same rhetorical inversion strategy to these phenomena? Let’s take the teacher shortage as a type of refusal to stay within the school system. There are endemic teacher shortages in many nation states. And there is a lot of head scratching about why teachers are leaving the profession and why potential teachers are not entering at all. The question might become not why teachers are leaving the profession, but why aren’t they? What is it that makes people persist even when the system and conditions are so difficult? The home-education movement and the opt-out of high stakes, standardised assessment movement are growing with parents/caregivers refusing what is on offer and seeking other ways of engaging with education. So, we might ask, why don’t all parents opt out of standardised assessment? Of course, there are many good reasons that we can give in response to these rhetorical questions but the issue remains – as the “school can’t” movement shows, good reasons to families may look different to those of the education departments and governments.

Clearly from history we can learn that there are times when it is important to refuse to do what we are told. Previously, in most nation states, schooling was perceived by many parents to be compulsory, so alternative choices were not entertained, or parents perceived alternatives to schooling to be inferior or disadvantageous, and were deterred.¹ So, as we are suggesting here, perhaps it is also important to think more carefully about refusal. We know that the discourse related to education is that it is hopeful; that the hope is that some good may come from it and that we may derive from education some valuable form of public goods. Yet, we might also see that this goodness makes schooling systems and schools vulnerable to experiments in neo-conservative, corporatised, standardisation agendas.

We might argue that as teacher educators we are in a privileged position of having a view on these questions that may be slightly different to others: we do work in schools, but not for the schooling system, and we do work with current and future teachers, but we do not employ them. In other words, we get to see what is going on with the system from the outside and from different angles. This is one thing that gives teacher education research a unique and valuable perspective. As teacher education researchers we can investigate the current policy imaginaries that haunt our education systems and perhaps we can be guided by Foucault (in Foucault & Chomsky, 1971, n.p):

It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

What Foucault allows us to do is to reorient our gaze back to our institutions – demanding from us an account of the political violence we do through our institutions – on ourselves and our students. In recognising this violence as referred to by Foucault (Foucault & Chomsky, 1971), we may then see that “school can’t” is perhaps an outcome of how our schooling is organised, and not maladjustment on the part of the students, their parents, individual schools, or teachers, and in need of correction or explanation. It may be up to us as teacher education researchers to be the ones to find ways to support others and ourselves to “disobey” the very systems that we are in and that paradoxically, support our work.

Drawing on Thoreau, Gros (2021) reminds us that,

no-one … can be me “in my place.” … No one can think in my place, and no one can decide in my place what is just or unjust. Likewise, no one can disobey in my place. Disobedience must arise from that point at which a person discovers themselves to be irreplaceable, in the precise sense of having this experience of the non-delegable, the experience that ‘this is for me to do (mea res agitur), that I cannot devolve onto anyone else the task of having to think the true, decide the just, and disobey what to me appears insufferable. (p.33)

Acknowledgments

Thank you very much to Dr Kathryn Bown for expert editorial assistance and who bears no responsibility for any errors or omissions in the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Interestingly, the covid pandemic gave rise to widespread awareness of home education options, alternative ways of educating, and more flexible family organisation, and subsequently there was a significant increase in home education (English, 2021).