Pathway to Peace: Highlighting Student Voices to End School Exclusion and Embrace Differences
Dr. Patricia O’Lynn highlights how ending school exclusion will build peace (Karina Bhatt/The Caravel)
Dr. Patricia O’Lynn, the first woman elected to her district in Northern Ireland and founder of Institute for Disruption, spoke to Georgetown students on Monday, October 7 about how school exclusion emphasizes differences between students and conditions them for violence. She discussed how, today, 26 years after the Belfast Agreement, mental barriers, rather than physical walls, contribute to violence in Northern Ireland.
The region has seen centuries of violence. When Protestant England conquered Catholic Ireland in the 1500s, it displaced Irish families and deepened the religious divide. To combat rising unrest, the English partitioned Ireland in 1921, which only spurred greater violence. In 1988, the Belfast Agreement—also known as the Good Friday Agreement—opened the border in an attempt to foster peace. However, 97 peace walls (barriers erected to temporarily stop hostilities) now dot Northern Ireland, and violent protests restarted in 2021. According to Dr. O’Lynn, youth groups are at the forefront of these riots.
The majority of the youth who participate in these riots face serious exclusion from their school communities, where they are often labeled too “damaged,” “disruptive,” and “undeserving” to learn. Students of color, from low-income backgrounds, with special needs, or who have had traumatic home experiences are the most likely to face exclusion. According to Dr. O’Lynn, schools are illegally excluding vulnerable students using covert methods that allow them to escape the law. Northern Ireland recognizes suspension and expulsion as means of exclusion, what Dr. O’Lynn termed formal exclusion. However, schools also resort to new mechanisms of informal exclusion, including class removal, rolling suspensions (smaller suspension timeframes), isolation units (in which students are locked up in classrooms or broom closets), reduced timetables (being taught for less time than mandated), encouraged absences, and managed moves (transferring students to another class). Indeed, excluded students are 75 times more likely than non-excluded students to become addicted to drugs and 90 times more likely to become homeless.
Highlighting student perspectives in her research, Dr. O’Lynn exposed the psychological damage school exclusion has caused. One student described how school left him behind after his mother died from drug abuse: “I would go into classes and they would be like ‘there is no point in you even being here.’” Given no work or instructions, he fell further behind in his studies. Meanwhile, a student named Lisa explained how she was not only judged but violated by a school system that did not trust her: “I literally had to pull my bra out like that there because I was being searched for drugs […] this was a man […] without my permission.” Other students reported being stalked on social media, singled out in class, and scrutinized if they had been labeled as “disruptive.” More than a few students even called school “prison.”
Excluded students learn to view the world through a lens of division, and when the school system fails them, they turn to violent protests. Dr. O’Lynn admonished, “We are readying them for war, not peace. […] We need an education system that will teach kids how to value difference.” Coílín Parsons, Director of Georgetown’s Global Irish Studies Initiative, reflected, “I was really impressed with the idea of looking at school exclusion from the perspective of the child.” Meanwhile, the new Director for the Northern Ireland Bureau Richard Cushinue, called Dr. O’Lynn’s study promising: “We are looking for nuance […] It is part of the story of Ireland.”
Dr. O’Lynn’s mission is to reduce and eliminate school exclusion through her company, Institute for Disruption. She aims to increase school funding, regulate informal mechanisms through auditing, de-stigmatize both students and teachers, and create five-citizen juries of students, parents, and educators who can be the voices for change. She clarified, “I am not averse to school discipline. School discipline is essential. Believe it or not, children crave discipline, but they crave discipline that is fair.” A student with the pseudonym Millie echoed this sentiment: “Schools just set young people in straight lines, tell them what to do, what to eat, tell them what to think, tell them what to do about everything and that is what my school did to me […] treat us like human beings, treat us like we are people and not dirt, and then we’ll give you respect.”