At times, schools insist on promoting viewpoints that, in my opinion, can be harmful to students’ development—viewpoints that conflict with the goal of educating people who can contribute to society. Below, I’ll describe an incident involving a mistaken point of view, which I’ll discuss throughout this post.
by http://www.flickr.com/photos/52636849@N00/
The incident took place at a high school. I’ve seen the same scene in both public and private schools: one day, a teacher had to be absent, so another teacher had to take responsibility for teaching two classes at the same time.
The teacher went into the first-year classroom and made the following agreement: “Everyone, I have to continue the lesson with the second-year class, but I’ll leave you an assignment, and no one may leave the classroom. When I come back, you can go home early.”
When the teacher returned, she noticed three girls standing by the classroom door. She asked them to go back to their places and told the class that, since they hadn’t kept their agreement to stay quietly in their seats, everyone would have to remain in the classroom all afternoon. One student objected: “But, teacher, they were the ones who disobeyed. Why should we pay for their mistake?” The teacher replied, “Only they disobeyed, but I made the agreement with all of you, and the others who weren’t at the door were wrong by omission.” The conversation ended, and all the students were punished for a mistake made by three girls.
I won’t make a value judgment about whether the teacher’s action was right or wrong. Under current laws, each institution is free, within moral principles, to use its own rules and instructions to achieve its goals effectively.
I’ll focus only on the possible short- or long-term consequences this action could have for the students.
During their school years, most adolescents are still dependent on their parents or another family member. Obviously, they aren’t yet autonomous people who can be held fully responsible for their actions. Common sense and state laws recognize that young people need to pass through a period of maturity and instruction before they’re ready to participate actively in society.
In a certain sense, school is a microcosm that helps young people mature. Like every microcosm, it has standards, rules of conduct, procedures, and so on. But it’s very important for this microcosm to be as consistent as possible with the world outside school, so students are prepared and don’t feel out of place when they eventually encounter the realities of working life.
What we can see is that the teacher’s decision to punish everyone for the mistake of a few doesn’t happen in the macrocosm of real life. Most workplaces that students will join in the future follow this general rule: “Praise in public, discipline in private.”
The workplace wisely adopts this approach. Public punishment—and, worse, punishing everyone on behalf of a minority—creates tension and distrust within a group. That can affect people’s mental and emotional health and consequently reduce productivity, which is the general goal of every company. Public praise, on the other hand, makes the person who receives it feel good and creates a healthy sense of competition: everyone knows that if they do a little more, they could be the next to receive praise or a raise. Of course, there are exceptions, and some companies take this approach too far, making productivity at any cost the rule. But my point is that this is the prevailing approach, and it has worked well in many cases.
Returning to the students, there’s a strong likelihood that they’ll struggle to adapt when they eventually enter the workforce because, during their formative years, they absorbed situations that don’t fit this new reality. The change is very abrupt—not gradual or complementary, but the opposite of what they were taught. This can affect their productivity and their sense of satisfaction at being useful to society. Former students may be left wondering, “What was all that time at school for?”
It’s important to remember that the teacher should have autonomy, and this action was consistent with the autonomy she should have. So, even if it was misguided, what happened shouldn’t be grounds for complaints about the teacher’s past actions. What I want to emphasize is a different point of view that, if adopted, could further the school’s role and prevent many embarrassing situations in classrooms, as well as future problems with students adapting to society’s rules outside school.
But does having autonomy mean acting however one’s individuality dictates? Isn’t it important for that autonomy to be based on principles that serve a greater good? To create an atmosphere of justice and balance in the classroom? To prepare young people with rules that are consistent with the everyday life they’ll face in the future? If we look closely at the teacher’s decision to punish the class publicly and make the majority pay for the mistake of a minority, we can see that she created a rule she doesn’t follow herself. This is the “Do as I say, not as I do” adage, which contributes even more to a hostile environment. Just as she corrected the student who called for justice (punishing only those who disobeyed the instruction) by saying that her agreement was with the whole class, she also made an agreement with the state—in fact, a contractual agreement. That agreement applies to her and to all the other teachers at this and other institutions. But when a teacher does something wrong, the institution doesn’t punish all the teachers for the fault of one; only the person who made the mistake is punished.
She also said that the other students were being punished for their omission. One student said he didn’t want to make an enemy over it. That was, at the very least, a wise choice. All the students are at the same hierarchical level—that’s why they’re all called students. None has any privilege over another, and they’re still learning how to navigate relationships. In many cases, they won’t yet have the good sense needed to handle different situations while causing as little conflict as possible. That’s why teachers are there: in addition to teaching, they are responsible for creating a balanced atmosphere and reducing conflict in the classroom. The student used the survival instinct all humans have: he realized he would be around the other student for many years, while he would only see the teacher occasionally. Another possibility is that the students who disobeyed were physically bigger and could exert some kind of abusive influence over the others. Out of self-protection, the others may have chosen to keep quiet. Which brings us to another saying: “Might makes right.” By judging the others guilty of omission, the teacher actually demanded something dangerous to the students’ emotional and mental health: intervening in the behavior of someone at the same level can create conflict, from ordinary classroom disputes to dangerous situations such as demands for repayment from people of ill intent.
Technically, the teacher was the one who failed to act: the appropriate thing would have been to punish only those who had actually done something wrong. Out of common sense, she could have let the students who said nothing off the hook; they were simply exercising their right to survive in the heterogeneous microcosm of human interaction. She failed because she gave the students a task that she should have handled herself. She failed by advocating an approach she doesn’t even follow in the workplace, where discipline is individual. She failed because people who serve as role models should constantly seek to improve, so their work can be as efficient and effective as possible. If a school can’t prepare young people for the future because of structural limitations, then at least it shouldn’t get in their way. We need to avoid situations in which students are assigned tasks or given judgments that stifle their creativity and make it harder for them to take an active role in society in the future. She also failed because she only tried to see the problem from her own perspective. If she had talked a little more with the student who asked for punishment only for those who were at fault, she might have discovered that he stayed quiet because he was on the same level as the other student, and perhaps physically smaller and at a disadvantage in a direct confrontation. It wasn’t only the teacher who failed to act; the institution did too, because it’s helping to spread this mistaken idea, which could even undermine the progress of many students who are still on their way to becoming autonomous.
I didn’t want to take the argument this far, but I’ll offer this for reflection: just as decent people don’t pay for the crimes of thieves, rapists, and other malicious people who harm others, students in the microcosm of the classroom don’t deserve to be judged for the mistakes of a minority who didn’t follow the institution’s rules.