Denmark set to allow return of 'physical force' in school | Hacker News Reader

Denmark set to allow return of 'physical force' in school

lemonde.fr

80 pointsjanisz69 comments

As others have pointed out, this is just allowing teachers to physically restrain kids as a last resort. This should never have been removed in the first place. It's a testament to how the pendulum swung MUCH too far in the direction of permissive parenting/teaching. Contrary to the belief in these (often academic) circles, children are not perfectly rational. It is not always possible to talk kids out of hysterical or violent episodes. Especially when there are exacerbating cognitive, behavioural, and cultural problems. Some kids need time out, and sometimes they need to be physically put there to prevent disruption for the whole class (or much worse). Unfortunately teachers all over the West have been systematically disempowered from doing this over decades. Many schools now have zero contact policies, and this has resulted in pupils harming other students in front of teachers, while teachers stood back for fear of losing their jobs, lawsuits, or even potential prosecution.

I think the bottom line is teachers need to once again be empowered to control their classrooms. At minimum this means giving them the authority to remove students from the class - whether by force or otherwise. They must be able to expel violent students. We need to radically dismantle the "no child left behind" bureaucracy which has placed violent and special needs children into regular classrooms.

> Many schools now have zero contact policies, and this has resulted in pupils harming other students in front of teachers, while teachers stood back for fear of losing their jobs, lawsuits, or even potential prosecution.

Teachers can still lose their jobs for failing to control (with zero contact) said child and prevent the assault.

Absolutely. In Germany even a female sports teacher can't enter a girls locker room – unless she has provable fear for the health / security of one of her sutdents. Ie. screams of pain.

There is this elite ideology that produces rules like this, circles thinking of themselves as being progressive and socially concious. It is exactly the opposite: Kids from the bottom ranks of society are often in dire need of any feedback loop from society, as most often their own family does nothing or even worse promotes bad behaviour. Often a judge is the first person that gives them an honest assessment in their lives.

Of course the question is then why we need judges - or teachers - to fill out that role in the first place, but that is for another day.

But the fact is that in Germany physical attacks on teachers are now a daily occurance at most urban public schools, which in the long run will undermine the whole school system even more by parents voting by foot and moving their kids to private schools.

Fast forward a couple of decades and you get Paris-levels of private schooling market share (ie. > 40%) with the "socially concious" and "progressive" riots as a result.

I think disempowering public education at every possible level has been covertly pushed for the past 30+ years under different pretenses. There's a lot of money to be made in private schooling...

The funny thing is that it's the parents who demand that their kids behave when they start paying a pretty penny for their schooling, while when it was "free", they let them run wild and put the blame on the (underpaid) teacher.

Not sure if the parenting is so much motivated by the paying of school as it is the prevailing socio-economic conditions. Think its a fair generalisation that those who can afford private school live comfier and more stable lives than a working class family with a child in a comprehensive.

I strongly agree. Often it is the poorest students who are hurt most by these policies because their parents can't move to a nicer neighbourhood or pay for private schooling or tutoring.

A cavalier attitude to things like this is the problem. Not slow change and correction.

In my English school sports teachers watched us change and shower, I saw one re-locate a dislocated hip on the rugby field. We would stop midway through a cross country run to to press-ups on snowy ground and classroom misbehavior could result in a letter home or “the slipper” (a leather paddle) at the child’s discretion.

For all this my school wasn’t a hotbed of abuse and paedophilia. However many were. The current restrictions were designed to deal with that, the bigger issue, the abuse of kids by adults.

Decrying all the work that’s been done to make schools safer for children from predators is incredibly short sighted.

It's easy to not think things through. You know who else can't be talked out of hysterical or violent episodes? Adults. But it's still very much a crime for a good Samaritan to physically restrain an adult going through a violent episode. It's the definition of kidnapping and assault and battery.

> Starting in August 2027, they will be allowed to 'hold a student, keep them in place, or take them to another room' if the student disrupts the class.

Far from what I imagined as 'physical force'.

Primed by discussions of Americans on corporal punishment of children, I expected much much worse.

Yeah, using "physical force" in the headline feels extremely dishonest on the part of the publication.

From the draft law: "(Explicit provisions on the school's responsibility for care and access to physical intervention, including an extended legal basis for the use of force, etc.)"

So it uses the terms "physical intervention", and "use of force", although that's using Google Translate.

It is still physical force. If I grab and restrain you randomly in the street you're going to call it assault still. And this is good, we should carefully consider the different levels of physical force that are acceptable in different scenarios.

Yeah. The UK for example already allows use of 'reasonable force' to prevent a pupil from committing a criminal offense, prevent personal injury or damage to property, and most ambiguously, to 'maintain good order and discipline in the classroom', which sounds a lot like this.

This headline implies misleadingly that teachers in Denmark are reintroducing the cane or something.

In reality though you can easily lose your job in the UK over stuff like this if a kid/parent complains so teachers are afraid to use any force at all.

What the law says on paper is one thing, who the school administration will believe and back up is another

Even as much as a nudge can be escalated to safeguarding, which can lead to an investigation where people can say anything about you, which can lead you to getting sacked if they found a 'safeguarding breach', which can lead to a TRA panel (they get over a 1000 referrals per year), which can lead to a suspension and ends you up on the public government website with your full name (your life is ruined).

Notice none of the steps need your behaviour to amount to a legal assault. Just what your school and the Dfe thinks goes against "safeguarding" which is broad. God forbid if you are a man.

I was curious about the numbers. Apologies for the year mismatch. I can only report what I found. This year there are about 466000 teachers working in primary and secondary education in the UK. In 2024 there were 1684 complaints to the TRA about teachers. (No idea how many were to because of physical contact) of 1055 were dismissed. So around 600 upheld complaints. Or 0.3% of teachers. That doesn’t seem too bad to me.

The greater scandal is that the average time to clear each case was around 103 weeks.

>1000 referrals annually is a lot and can be damaging to ones wellbeing and lead to a dismissal even if it doesn't lead to a suspension. Most teachers are not men (only 14% in primary, 35% in secondary) and are almost certainly not doing what the above suggested is allowed.

It’s less than one per hundred teachers and that’s with the assumption that there’s never two complaints about a single teacher in a year. I guess we have different ideas of a lot, which is fair enough.

I have no direct experience of this being an engineer rather than a teacher. I have been subject to an HR complaint once in my career. At Cisco. I’m not sorry. I can easily believe that it’s a stressful and unpleasant experience, especially for those people, the great majority, who are exonerated.

I only consider it a lot because that's usually the final point of escalation after it goes through safeguarding or a formal investigation conducted by the school before it reaches the government. But it doesn't have to reach that point to hurt your career. I just know enough from teachers that I wouldn't try and practice what OP suggested.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting it, I'm sharing what the law says. FWIW, I am a qualified teacher and a man, if those things are important to the discussion.

What the law allows may still fall well below the professional standards expected of a teacher. In particular, a teacher who uses force to maintain good order and discipline is likely failing to create a safe environment, failing to manage behaviour effectively, failing to treat pupils with dignity, failing to safeguard children's wellbeing, amongst others.

I would fully expect a teacher who can't control their classroom without force to be investigated and to potentially lose their job pretty quickly. The point is that it's not illegal, provided the force is reasonable (another point of ambiguity).

Also, it's not 600 upheld complaints, it's 600 investigations resulting from referrals. After investigation, 244 hearings were held and 202 of those found serious misconduct, and 157 teachers were banned from teaching, most commonly for sexual misconduct or indecent images, not use of force.

466 000 is FTE for state-school teachers in England alone. Actual HC is 512 000, with another 75 000 FTE working in independent schools (couldn't find HC details), so 600 000 is a better estimate for the number of teachers under the jursidiction of the TRA - 202/600 000 is 0.03%, or one in every 3000 teachers (referrals is still around one in 350).

Obviously stuff handled before it reaches the TRA isn't in those stats, but mostly those cases are not career-ending.

well, i expected more from that title

> what I imagined as 'physical force'.

… and I "experienced" that (until class 7) – a lot. Became hostel prefect starting in class 8, so teachers were kinda scared of me after that. There were precedents for that though.

It (the "beating" kind) hasn't stopped in my country. Even in the cities, some parents look back on it nostalgically, and some, who are bigger morons, want it practised.

Danes calling their approach "physical force" feels like a personal attack and restrospective gaslighting :D

From Denmark. between 99 and 02 then I was 7-10 it was not uncommon for certain trouble makers to be placed in rooms, or in a broom closet or similar, until the class was up.

And there certainly was elements of "holding students" for my entire period of elementary school, as certain groups of kids are just insane hurting each other.

But glad for the teachers they get tools to control a situation as police is not likely to be available to come to every school all the time. and hope the teachers are not getting hurt in the process, as some kids can be quite violent.

Generally teachers have suffered from increased scrutiny from all directions in Denmark for the last 8 years, which have caused a lot of people to leave the career and choose another career. This, same as rest of the world I imagine has mostly been due to the parents not taking responsibility of their kids, and the kids have been uncontrollable and the parents have always taken the kids side in any argument where a kid was not succeeding in school. Which in the 90's and 00's was much less frequent.

> not uncommon for certain trouble makers to be placed in rooms, or in a broom closet

That is shocking to me and I went to school in the 80s. Sounds like there was good cause but the pendulum swung too far. Now it’s coming back and things are settling.

It’s funny because you normally think of the Nordics as being so far ahead in things like this but I guess we all have our blind spots.

The broom closet seems a bit creepy as a punishment. But my primary school teachers in the 80s used to lock me in the school library as "punishment", which turned out to be the wrong incentive.

Seeing as you’re here, I’m getting the feeling that their task failed successfully. Classroom learning is not for all kids.

What the article actually says: the threshold for "force" rises from "student is actively endangering someone" to "student is being disruptive" (throwing food around the classroom is given as an example).

There is no mention of force as a punishment (such as spanking), and force means things like holding a student's hand firmly to stop them throwing food. It's not whacking them with a nightstick.

Well, one step at a time.

Sometimes only words don't work. That's why we have police, guards and armies.

The guiding idea should be "minimum necessary force used". Sometimes the this includes physical force.

My partner is a special needs childcare worker. Children under her care are approximately between 6 - 10 years and on the spectrum. She constantly deals with kids attempting to elope. It's a constant struggle when regulations prevent them from grabbing the child to take them back to daycare in fear of losing her jobs. She can't abandon other kids nor abandon this kid.

"Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school" 06.may.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032968 665 comments

If a teacher had to hold my kid as a last resort, instead of being mad at the teacher, I'd be motivated to do better on teaching my kid how to behave, and apologize from the teacher.

You also need to restrain kids sometimes (could be often, if for example they are in the spectrum), because they have trouble regulating their emotions and they can hit others, and even themselves in crisis situations. However, you should explain them later, why that was necessary.

The teachers not being allowed to do that is mind-boggling to me. What do they do now, bring their parents with a helicopter?

Sure, it's always easy to imagine the "positive scenario" (the kid really did something wrong and got lightly restrained).

Now when you authorize a restrictive / possibly violent behavior on people having authority, and you will default to "believe them" (because they're the literal "adult in the room") you also open it to abuse

See what happened with police in the US...

I never had a problem with students having rights. I have a problem with those rights not coming with responsibilities and proper sanctions when those are violated. There should be zero tolerance of students using violence either against the teachers or other students. They should be moved to a reform school immediately.

Alas, those classes was wound down a decade ago to save money, that is I mean be more inclusive.

Zero tolerance also means zero opportunity for the minor to improve and learn. School is also for learning how to function in society, not simply to study the curriculum.

Not to mention that such sanctions end up being applied in a very selective and classist way. Try to send a kid from an affluent family to reform school, and you will have their parents, their parents' friends, the local council, and the local MP on your neck, trying to sway you. But it's "rules are rules" for the kid from the single-parent family who works 10h to make ends meet.

I don't accept your premise and I reject your attempt to appeal to empathy creating some made up anecdote about how you think the world works. You are saying the other children must must suffer for the benefit of one. You cannot convince me this is the moral position. I don't care about what "class" the child comes from it's irrelevant to the point I'm making. This is about the rest of the society not having to live in misery.

This affect the poor more than the rich and to not sort it out affects the learning and safety of the people with less resources.

>Zero tolerance also means zero opportunity for the minor to improve and learn

This sounds smart, but how do you imagine tolerance in this case? Student can beat other students and teachers, but only once a week?

School is also for learning how to function in society, and this means precisely that we need to teach students consequences for their actions. Beating someone up when they are adults will not end up with just stern talking.

How do you imagine "zero tolerance" to work? Say a group of students attest to seeing one student hit another, and the offender gets shipped off to reform school immediately. How do you ensure the students don't lie to get rid of a classmate they dislike? Or how do you ensure a teacher doesn't lie to get rid of a student they dislike?

A zero tolerance policy doesn't even sound smart, so it's even more surprising to see people arguing for it.

Dude in India, it was fairly common for teachers to whoop asses. There were some teachers (the good ones) whose punishment included doing squats or running around the field but there were some monsters who would horribly hit students, me in the 9th grade was beaten so bad that it started from the first row of bench and ended at the end of the last bench, the fucking monster did not even stop after me being cornered.

Famously, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein beat a pupil unconscious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidbauer_incident

Ludwig Hittgenstein, they used to call him. (But only in their private language.)

no wonder what he wrote is shite. i couldn't progress beyond a few pages, the man is so full of himself.

And I say this as someone who can comfortably read Kant in (the original no less).

He almost hit Popper with a fire poker! Allegedly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_Poker

As a fellow Indian growing up in 90s, I feel you. I had my fair share of beatings from teachers in school.

There were cases where parents who found it challenging to control their kids, would encourage teachers to use physical force on them. Parents deemed it was school's responsibility to instill discipline in their children.

As far as I can recall, use of violence to control kids was pretty common back in the day, both at home and at school. I don't see that happening nowadays, though.

Thankfully, My parents who were both teachers specifically told my teachers not to hurt me physically and my teachers actually listensed to them.

Taking the occasion here to talk about my case (the article itself is not worthy of any attention).

I am a parent with two young kids. My older one is difficult. He has had behavioral problems since very early on. Looking at the current set of "disorders", he checks all the boxes for OCD. I am putting "disorder" in quotes, because I don't consider it an illness to be defiant. It's annoying AF, but in the wild he'd be just another ape. Btw, there is no "cure" either, the "treatment" is to help parents dealing with it.

So my kid does talk back to teachers. He does hit his friends. He probably steals. He probably lies. I dont know the full extent.

Day in, day out we hear:

- kids these days are treated like kings

- their parents let them do whatever they want

- kids hit their teachers and nothing happens

- schools level plummet cause kids are making a mess

- it wasn't like this in my days

and so on and so forth

As the parent of my kids, I can assure you that we've never been permissive or lax with them, and neither have been their grand parents, or their teachers. The older one getting under our skins easily, we did use quite a lot of "force" in trying to stop him as the article puts it.

I think there might have been a time when those children were meant to be "broken", as in beaten so much so you suck the life out of them. My father got whipped, not sure he came out much wiser for it. So yeah, maybe there was a time when the "bad seeds were rooted out" and life was better for everyone else.

Luckily, many professionals are aware of this, his teachers understand how it works. The people we've seen were very helpful.

My personal experience is that: it's not permissivity, it's physically wired in the brain. If kids overall have more problems than they used to, look not for parenting problems, look for environmental problems.

Maybe it's the ecology, maybe it's increased overall stress. I don't know. Just don't blame it on parents.

Most of us try our best.

> it's not permissivity, it's physically wired in the brain.

It's not. You figure this out when you drag someone into the woods. And again a couple weeks later.

What does drag someone into the woods mean?

>he checks all the boxes for OCD

Did you mean ODD? OCD doesn't make a lot of sense for the rest you've written.

yes sorry ODD… so many Ds…

Reminds me of this Korean show called 'Teach You A Lesson' that came out recently.

An ex-military guy is given full immunity to go to schools and "discipline" students (he's basically having violent, over-the-top fights with students).

Based on Wikipedia, looks like it lead to a good amount of controversy in Korea.

One thing about that show is it explored various aspects of the problem, not just blaming student behavior but also parents, teachers and administrators. It illustrated how the problem is quite complex and not just solved by beating up students.

The nuns used to slap our palms with a ruler and that hasn't led to any weird fetishes or anything like that...

Really? Nothing happened in church? No generalized paedophilia? No kids that got completely abused?

You probably never read about the stories, that's why you only remember your anecdotal story

They didn’t say “nothing happened in church” but yeah go off

From someone who's watched Robocop a few too many times, that's a disturbing headline.

If a kid isn't dangerous the answer is support not physical force.

If a child’s actions are ultimately going to get them hurt in life restraint is support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com