School discipline in moral disarray

Abstract

It is argued that current school disciplinary policies are ineffective instruments for delivering moral messages: they are poorly justified; fail to distinguish moral violations (violence, vandalism, deception) from conventional school‐limited violations (attendance, dress codes, eating venues), leaving the impression that dress code violations and forgery are equivalent; conflate sanctions, including presumed punishments (detentions and suspensions), with other forms of corrections (parent‐conferences, positive and negative reinforcement) and apply them without distinction to moral and non‐moral wrongdoing. To be morally instructive school disciplinary codes should separate three types of infractions – moral, derivatively moral and conventional. The derivatively moral include rules that while not moral in isolation (eating outside the cafeteria) become imbued with moral attributes under particular interpretations; conventional wrongs have no moral valence but are rules designed for orderly school management. Sanctions, too, should be applied differentially according to category of infraction. Punishment, if used, is appropriate only for intentional moral wrongdoing, connected to acknowledgement of culpability, and conditional upon a clear articulation of the school's moral objectives that is persuasive to children and the community.

Notes

1. Although within schools authorities perceive order as an obvious requirement for learning, and so obviously justified, on the outside order has its vociferous critics. ‘Teachers who declare their comfort zone as one defined by quiet require of all students who walk into the classroom that they be quiet. There is no concern whether that paradigm works against students' ability to learn. Too often the methods employed to achieve a quiet, obedient classroom are detrimental to building a climate in which every student can learn successfully … Constantly quiet classrooms look as they do because the students are being controlled through fear, intimidation, frequent appeals to competition, and public embarrassment. While any of the above approaches may be deemed to “work”, inasmuch as they are effective tools for control, they most often work against students who already find themselves on the fringe of the school's environment. While some students may be willing to bend to the control systems practiced by educators, particularly when those practices are consonant with the homes from which the students come, there are others who will view imposed, arbitrary rules as a call to arms (McEwan, 1998, p. 143).

2. Of ten (out of 50) districts that listed rules by levels and included both cheating and dress violations, six had both at the lowest level, one listed dress as more serious, three cheating as more serious.

3. Not everyone agrees that punishment emphasizes retribution rather than deterrence. Richard Smith, for example, argues that the purpose of punishment ‘is to secure greater obedience to laws and rules by deterring offenders, both those who have already offended from doing so again and those who so far have not but might if not deterred’ (1985, p. 69). Peters (1967) also speaks to the behaviour‐changing purposes of punishment. While recognizing the deterrent and rehabilitative aspects of punishment I have chosen to emphasize its retributive looking‐backward functions so as to link it with moral wrong‐doing. Punishing children, I believe, should be rare in school, reserved for those misdeeds that demand moral accountability; narrowing its meaning is a step toward narrowing and clarifying its scope.

4. Mary Warnock (1977) argues that school rules should be restricted to ‘convenience, safety, orderliness and other such non‐moral considerations’ (p. 137). However, ‘[a] rule against bullying or theft would be an absurdity. It would suggest that the school had made the rule for some reason of convenience and that, apart from the existence of the rule, there might be nothing against bullying or theft … A teacher would have failed in his duty if all he had succeeded in passing on to his pupils was that certain forms of behaviour were “ruled out”’ (p. 138).

5. Richard Smith (1985) takes issue with Wilson's distinction between penalties and punishments. He argues penalties are only demanded for acts that are wrongful. ‘[I]f I leave my car [in front of my house] for the sake of convenience, confident that police or traffic‐wardens rarely come past, I am acting selfishly and risking causing an accident. If I keep my one‐week loan for longer, deciding it's well worth the fine, I am keeping it from another reader who might well have planned his work on the assumption that the book would be back when it was due. Similarly with offences against the smooth running of the classroom or school: if they really matter, if for example they selfishly cause inconvenience to other people, let us think of detention or whatever as a punishment … If on the other hand they matter only a little or not at all let us scrap the relevant rule or respond with remonstrance, reminder, reasoning or in some other way. Thus penalties are confusing because they convey the message that the behaviour penalized does not really matter, while the child still finds itself on the receiving end of what looks remarkably like a punishment’ (p. 67). I find this partially persuasive. True, penalties are given for inconsiderate behaviour but inconsideration is only a minor moral wrong. While selfishness annoys us, we are accustomed to it, granting people some moral slack. Morality slides into politeness which slides into the customary; we all draw our own lines yet agree that there is a continuum of greater to lesser offences.