Mediation Minus Morals

[brelief@xxxxxxx]

--=====================_825797186==_
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"



--=====================_825797186==_
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

The Washington Post 
in coopertion with the Yomiuri Shimbun
The Daily Yomiuri 
March 1, 1996

MEDIATION MINUS MORALS

The 'Conflict Resolution' Con

By Cheryl Benard
(Cheryl Benard, research director of the Boltzmann Institute
of Politics in Vienna, Austria, is the author of numerous
books on contemporary social issues.)

THEY HAVE become our education system's magic bullet
in recent years, these fashionable "conflict resolution" pro-
grams. As a response to escalating levels of violence in our
society and in our schools, the idea is to teach young people
not just about reading and arithmetic, but about how to
cope with conflicts more constructively. Some of the
programs involve games and exercises, some use guest
speakers, some employ other children to train classmates in
the finer points of mediation.

Learning to handle conflict more competently and to live
together more rationally -- that sounds good. But does it
work.? Empirical evidence is anecdotal at best. Educators at
a few schools say they are experiencing less violence after
instituting such a program, while some children say they feel
better equipped to handle their emotions. But no real studies
have been done to measure this, and even anecdotal
evidence is slim because the programs mostly rely on
volunteers, have high turnover rates and are implemented
sporadically.

The undertaking is certainly laudable, and some of the
techniques seem useful. At the least, these programs provide
the framework for untangling the emotional from the
pragmatic content of conflicts, they teach our children ways
to cool off and think things through, and give them practice
in talking constructively to other people.

That's the good news. But there are a number of things that
bother me about conflict resolution curricula, and
enthusiasts show little interest in addressing them.

Chief among the flaws undergirding these programs is the
notion that they work on every kind of conflict, for all age
groups across the board from a sandbox tussle to global
war. I doubt this.

Rather, the techniques seem tailored to a middle-class
setting where everybody is basically nice and reasonable and
fighting over things like who gets to use the red crayon. It's
hard for me to imagine that two drug dealers, fighting over
turf or money, are going to benefit from methods like
SIGEP: Stop what you're doing. Identify the problem.
Generate ideas on how to solve it. Evaluate these ideas.
Plan how to implement them. ("Okay, let's see. The problem
is, I want to kill this guy. I could shoot him or I could stab
him. Actually, a drive-by shooting sounds good. Okay, Joe,
get in the Chevy!")

Enthusiasts scoffingly attack any inner - city principals who
are resistant to these programs as ignorant for wanting to
"spend their money on metal detectors instead of mediation
programs." Instead, the principals' reluctance may be an
accurate assessment of the programs' current limitations.
Another drawback is that the programs are designed to stay
away from the question of right and wrong. This obviously
simplifies matters for mediators, relieving them of having to
decipher who did what to whom from the barrage of mutual
accusations. But this approach has long-term costs. It is
dishonest, it offends peoples' -- particularly children's --
need for justice, and most paradoxically of all, it tends to
reward aggression.

Consider how these programs work. As soon as one child is
involved m a conflict even if he was just peacefully minding
his own business and another child shoved him to the
ground, both the child who was hit and the perpetrator
suddenly become equal "partners" who must work things
out "together."

When there is a conflict between two pupils both have to
stand up and say "how I contributed to this problem." If
they don't, and if no solution is reached, both get no recess.

In real - life school applications, parents have a very hard
time dealing with this philosophical approach in which there
is no role for truth or simple justice. Whether or not their
kid did anything or started anything, whether he was just
defending himself, all of this is not supposed to matter
anymore. "If you are hit," a parent is supposed to tell little
Stevie or Suzie, "call a mediator" -- it's going to take a long
time for parents to feel comfortable with that. Many
parents, of course, privately subvert the program by
continuing to instruct their children that when they are hit,
they should damn well hit back, twice as hard.

But okay, for the purposes of discussion, let's say "hit -
them - back" is the kind of macho thinking that got us
nowhere, and it's time for new ideas. That still leaves me
with the suspicion that "conflict resolution" tends to favor
the aggressor. If you cause a disturbance, and negotiation
sets in, you are likely to get at least part of what you were
trying to grab illicitly.

If you snatch someone's new toy, a "compromise" has to be
found, so the solution is likely to be that they have to
"share" it with you. The approach seeks to "validate"
everyone's feelings without trying to distinguish the
aggressor from the victim. ("So you, Jane, felt upset that
Susan had such a lovely new doll and you, Susan, were
angry when Jane threw it on the floor and stomped on it.
Now, what might we do about this situation. The intuitively
obvious solution namely to slap Jane's wrist and make her
stand in the corner, is no longer available under the new,
enlightened guidelines.

True, there may be practical wisdom in this. In the real
world, if you cause enough of a disturbance, you very often
will get part of what you wanted, deserved or not. That's
the logic that drives terrorism, ethnic cleansing and war.
Conflict resolution takes those bitter facts of political life
and coats them with sugar. But do we really want to
swallow so much realpolitik in elementary school and give
up any last pretense that there are morals, rules, rights,
wrongs and punishments?

Yet even when evaluated on a pragmatic basis, conflict
resolution often falls short. Let's look at a typical example
of how its architects view the subject. In his book, "The
Eight Essential Steps of Conflict Resolution," one of the
field's gurus, Dudley Weeks, gives the following example
from an adult application of his program.

Dot and Rae work for a computer company. While Dot is
on vacation, Rae steals one of Dot's marketing ideas and
gets put in charge of its implementation. When Dot returns,
she finds herself working for Rae and Rae being praised for
the brilliant idea. Dot is very upset and refuses to cooperate
with Rae.

Intuitively, we may feel that Rae is a vicious, back-stabbing
witch and that Dot had better fight back lest she be edged
out completely. But no. Dudley Weeks wants her to "look
to the future" and cooperate nicely with Rae in the interest
of completing a successful presentation for the company
they both work for. Then, afterward, when the pressure is
off, she can use her "partnership skills" to constructively
share her concerns with Rae and try to overcome their past
''misunderstanding."

While many may see conflict resolution as a benevolent
outgrowth of peacenik thinking, as the educational
equivalent of flower children writing how - to books on
peace, love and harmony, there is on the contrary a
disturbing element of Darwinism, indeed of almost
Orwellian manipulation of the weak, in many of these
approaches. We all know that Dot hasn't got a chance of
asserting her rights after the presentation is finished.  If she
waits for several weeks to speak up and claim the idea as
her own, she will come across as a lunatic. Her only hope is
to seize the situation precisely at the moment that Weeks
wants her to let it pass. 

The truth is that sometimes it's good to talk but sometimes
you need some muscle. A week of bombing did more to
bring the Serbs to the bargaining table than years of talk and
pleading.

Beyond its basic philosophical underpinnings, proponents of
conflict resolution also leave children with the
misimpression that settling disputes is very easy. Why, it's
so simple, in fact, that you can learn it in kindergarten You
can solve most problems in "eight steps." There is almost
always a win - win solution.  Most problems are the result
of a misunderstanding.

This may be a good way to approach problems, but it
behooves one to be very aware, at least at the back of one's
mind, that this is not the whole story. Yes, Virginia, there
are bad guys, not just nice guys whom you have tragically
misunderstood. There are people who want your country,
and are ready to kill elderly grannies and little babies to get
it. There are people who hate other people enough to build
gas chambers, and "partnership skills" aren't going to cut it
with them. Conflict resolution has no room for evil. It
fosters a happy, upbeat, Disneyland sort of world view, and
children who absorb it may be in for a rude awakening.

In one of the basic, hands - on guidebooks, "Learning the
Skills of Peacemaking," Naomi Drew proposes a classroom
exercise called "Problems in the News -- Kids Have the An-
swers".  For this exercise, you need a newspaper. You read
the front page to identify some "global problems," because
your task is to come up with a solution for "at least one of
them."

The class then divides into groups, each of which is given "5
- 10 minutes to brainstorm solutions." Upon completion, the
recommendations are sent "to the U.N., the newspapers, the
president of the country concerned" and others. If any of
them send a thank - you note, it is to be posted on the class
bulletin board.

This is all very nice, and well intentioned to encourage
young people to take a fresh, optimistic approach while
remaining undaunted by huge problems. There are countries
and cultures whose school systems, rigid and authoritarian
would benefit from such an approach. But in the United
States, a naive get - up- and - go attitude does not require
further reenforcement; we have it already, plentifully. It
sometimes seems that our political leaders are doctoral
graduates of such courses. (Somalia? Sure, we can fix it.
Where is it again?) Clearly, some kids do not want a
peaceful classroom, and it will take more than chatty little
discussions to find out why.

Finally, there is something insincere about our teaching of
conflict resolution. In one recommended exercise, the
children are supposed to describe what kind of classroom
they want. "When they have finished talking, write on the
board, 'The Peaceful Classroom,'" one guru's manual
instructs the teacher. In other words, the kids can talk all
they want, but the outcome is already known.

The problem, of course, is that when "peaceful" behavior is
learned by rote, it remains on the surface. Underneath,
things can be seething. If the teacher doesn't deal with
deeper problems such as peer group pressure, then all the
trained mediators in the world won't succeed because, as my
teenage nephew assures me, your friends will utterly
humiliate a child who is forced to call on an outsider to
work out a problem. "They'll say hey, whatya doin! It will
be like you couldn't handle it on your own, like you were
scared"

Teaching conflict resolution skills is a good idea and many
of the emerging concepts could ultimately prove useful. 
But more thought must be given to the methods, to what
works and what doesn't. If we really want to stop Johnny
from bringing guns to school, he'll need more than an eight -
step guidebook and a clever lexicon of behavioral terms.


--=====================_825797186==_--