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ABSTRACT
There is a wide consensus that violence in schools is something so morally wrong that it must not be tolerated. Therefore, the intolerance shown by a teacher towards students’ violent behaviour in school could be understood as a virtue and his moral obligation and legal duty. On the other hand, extreme toleration towards an evil such as violence becomes a vice, for example, when a teacher makes it possible for an innocent student to become a victim of other students’ physical or verbal violence. It seems, therefore, that the idea of ‘zero tolerance’ policies is the right one, although the results of its application in practice have been many times problematic, inefficient and unjust.
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Notes
1. Council of Europe, Citation2018, Violence in schools, https://www.coe.int/en/web/children/violence-in-schools.
2. Ibid.
3. In addition to violence, the object of zero tolerance includes other things that can provoke violence, that can be used as a weapon in violent acts, or such behaviours that are physically unsafe or that might cause others to feel unsafe (See James and Freeze Citation2006, 584).
4. According to Skiba and Peterson, the term ‘zero tolerance’ (which refers to policies that punish all offences severely, no matter how minor), ‘grew out of state and federal drug enforcement policies in the 1980s’. The first known use of this term was in 1983. In 1989 two school districts (in California and Kentucky) introduced zero-tolerance policies that mandated expulsion for possession of drugs and participation in gang-related activity. By 1993, school boards across the nation were adopting zero tolerance policies which not only included drugs and weapons, but also tobacco-related offences and school disruption. In 1994, the American Congress passed the Gun-Free Schools Act, bringing zero tolerance school policies to a national level. This law requires those schools which receive federal funds to apply zero tolerance policies and expel any student for the duration of at least one calendar year for bringing a weapon to school. It also requires the student’s referral to the juvenile justice system. But this law also allows for one-year expulsions to be modified by the chief administrator of each local school district on a case-by-case basis (See Skiba and Peterson Citation1999, 1–2).
5. According to Wyckoff, violence need not be morally wrong. He admits that the claim that violence is usually morally wrong is probably true, but emphasises that violence is neither wrong nor bad by definition. He argues that notions like ‘wrongness’, ‘harm’ and ‘violation’ are not part of the concept of violence (Wyckoff Citation2013, 337–352).
6. Tolerance can be defined as permitting something that we know is morally wrong, although we could prevent it. For, if we permit something morally wrong because we do not know that it is wrong, then we do not tolerate it but we permit it because we believe that it is not at all something morally wrong. And if we suffer or endure certain things that are considered to be objectionable and in an important sense morally wrong, just because we are powerless against them, we are also not tolerant. Therefore, we are tolerant towards violence in school only if two conditions are fulfilled: First, we must consider it to be morally wrong, and second, we have to permit it despite this and although we could prevent it.
7. According to Primoratz, philosophical and scientific approaches differ: ‘While social sciences study the causes, main varieties, and consequences of terrorism and history traces and attempts to explain the way terrorism has evolved over time, philosophy focuses on two fundamental – and related – questions. The first is conceptual: What is terrorism? The second is moral: Can terrorism ever be morally justified?’ (Primoratz Citation2018, 1).
8. Robert Wolff, for instance, defines violence as ‘the illegitimate or unauthorised use of force to effect decisions against the will or desire of others’ (Wolff Citation1969, 606). Honderich also defines political violence in a similar way when he writes that it is ‘a considerable or destroying use of force against persons or things, a use of force prohibited by law and directed to a change in the politics, personnel or system of government, and hence to change in society’ (Hondrich Citation1980, 154). C.A.J. Coady, in his severe critique of wide definitions of violence, uses a very persuasive argument in order to show that both – but particularly the first one of the aforementioned definitions of violence as illegitimate use of force – generate absurd consequences since ‘if there are two sovereign states, both of which have politically legitimate governments, then they may not be engaged in violence, even though they bombard each other with nuclear rockets. This will happen if both legitimate governments legally authorise the particular resort to war’ (Coady Citation1986, 12–15).
9. According to Coady, this is a basic idea of the concept of structural violence, which was mainly developed in the work Violence, Peace and Peace Research of the Norwegian sociologist J. Galtung (Galtung Citation1969, 167–191; Coady Citation1998).
10. The questions raised by Levinas’s understanding of violence are discussed by Derrida in his famous text ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (Derrida Citation2003, 97–192; see De Vries Citation2002, 123–210).
11. However, many schools that adopted zero tolerance policies have punished also those students who defend themselves when attacked. But in 2017, the Georgia Supreme Court (in the case Henry County Board of Education v. S.G., No. S16G1700) decided that schools with ‘zero tolerance’ policies against school fights must apply the Georgia statute that gives individuals the right to call on self-defence as justification for the fight. Therefore, it seems obvious that we have a moral right to wound or even kill in self-defence although ‘it is generally wrong to injure or kill another’. ‘But what if the aggressor is innocent’ (let us say a young child who ‘is about to fire a gun at you, innocently thinking it a toy’)? Do we, in such a case, still have the moral right to defend ourselves against him? (Clark Citation2000, 145–155).
12. In the USA, school corporal punishment (‘the deliberate infliction of physical pain by hitting, paddling, spanking, slapping, or any other physical force used as a means of discipline.’ (Texas Education Code Citation2013)) is permitted. According to the Texas Education Code, for instance, corporal punishment is permitted ‘unless the students parent or guardian or other person having lawful control over the student has previously provided a written, signed statement prohibiting the use of corporal punishment as a method of student discipline’ (sec. 37.0011). ‘In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its Ingraham v. Wright decision that school corporal punishment is constitutional, leaving states to decide whether to allow it’. In fact, ‘school corporal punishment is currently legal in 19 states, and over 160,000 children in these states are subject to corporal punishment in schools each year’ (Gershoff and Font Citation2016).
13. ‘The moment we claim to be able to distinguish “good” violence from “bad”, we lose the proper use of the word, and get into a muddle. Above all, as soon as we claim to be developing criteria by which to define supposedly “good” violence, each of us will find it easy to make use of these in order to justify our own acts of violence’ (Muller Citation2002, 22).
14. ‘The moment we claim to be able to distinguish “good” violence from “bad”, we lose the proper use of the word, and get into a muddle. Above all, as soon as we claim to be developing criteria by which to define a supposedly “good” violence, each of us will find it easy to make use of these in order to justify our own acts of violence’ (Muller Citation2002, 22).
15. According to the retributivist theory of punishment, which stems from a deontological view on morality, the moral criterion of punishment ‘is the criterion of justice. Punishment is morally justified because it is just, because we execute justice when we punish. The standard of justice in punishment is to be found in the idea of desert: punishment is just because it is retribution – it is an evil the offender has deserved by his offence’ (Primoratz Citation1997, 12).
16. The very definition of zero tolerance is ‘treating both minor and major incidents with equal severity in order to “send a message” to potential violators’ (Skiba and Peterson Citation1999, 3).
17. These examples of punishments inflicted as a result of zero tolerance policies permit to draw the conclusion that within the boundaries of these policies there is no place for the other possibility of a disproportionate and as such unjust punishment (a too mild punishment regarding the offence committed).