ABSTRACT
While compliance may be a quiet problem that passes under the radar in many schools, defiance is an altogether touchier topic. What does it mean to suggest that acts of defiance or antisocial behaviour might be an unconscious, creative response from one’s affective core, one’s True Self? How are schools to make sense of children who steal, lie or otherwise defy their teachers? Is it ever possible to understand children who display aggression to others or who are destructive of their own, their peers’ or school’s property? Or is seeking such understanding a form of condoning the actions concerned? Should such behaviours be thought about at all? Should we use zero-tolerance policies to shut them out of our schools and out of our minds? When rocking back on a chair comes to be defined as disruptive (OfSTED, 2014), how can we even think about more extreme behaviours? Are there other ways of thinking about non-compliance that can help us think constructively about ‘disruptive’ behaviours wherever and whenever they occur? Might we be able to find any sympathy with Winnicott for his belief that antisocial behaviour is best understood as a child’s S.O.S. to the adult world?
