Avoid Petty Discipline Battles at School
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why schools lose support when they turn discipline into a petty fight over things like water or pencils.
Key Takeaways
- Keep the moral high ground - Discipline works better when the issue is student behavior, not a petty dispute over a cheap resource.
- Focus on respect and responsibility - The real lesson is listening to adults, coming prepared, and acting responsibly.
- Be generous with basic needs - Water and pencils are not worth making into symbolic battles that damage trust.
- Separate the resource from the behavior - A student can still receive the water or pencil while being held accountable for defiance or running away.
- Petty enforcement weakens leadership - When leaders hinge consequences on something that seems trivial, families and the public often side with the student.
Full Transcript
Did you see this about the British kid that got in trouble for taking two bottles of water at sports day? A British kid named Noah got an after-school detention for taking more than one bottle of water and then running away when a staff member asked him to put back the, uh, the extra.
And this is a really interesting kind of cultural difference between British educators and I think what probably most American educators would say. And I want to talk about why I think the school lost the argument here. Why I think people are turning against the school
and saying, you know what, let the kid have two bottles of water. A lot of my friends over on Twitter are rightly pointing out that it is a good idea to ensure that kids listen to adults.
It is appropriate to have accountability when kids don't listen. And it is good for learning and safety and order. to have consequences when kids don't listen, so I don't disagree with the idea of consequences here. I think what went wrong in this case is the school lost the moral high ground by being petty about something that did not matter that much. One bottle of water... Like, water is supposed to be free.
And a lot of people are pointing out, like, hey, we're gonna run out of water if we have, you know, 500 kids, 500 bottles of water. There's not enough for everybody to have two. That may be true, but that fact cannot be what we hinge the situation on, right? If I look like an idiot because we didn't have enough bottles of water, like, I'm gonna lose this fight, right? Water is cheap. Water is free.
Water is an entitlement. And, yes, bottled water costs money. There are various ways they could have handled this. But I think staking the whole situation on, we don't have enough water for you, is a losing battle. And often what comes up in American classrooms is pencils, right? The kid comes to class without a pencil.
I don't want to be so petty as to say, I can't afford a pencil, I can't give you a pencil, you have to bring your own pencil, you can't learn today. The thing we have to emphasize to keep the moral high ground is we are here for more than pettiness over pencils
and water. We're here to teach something deeper, and that is respect. That is work ethic. That is responsibility. And when a student comes to class without a pencil, it's not that I don't I have the ability to give them a pencil.
I do, and I'm willing to do that. It's that we're also trying to do something more important, which is develop people, develop our students into the kinds of people who come prepared for whatever they need to do that day. And if that means bringing a pencil to class, they need to bring a pencil to the class.
And that is something that I'm willing to be strict about. But if I'm going to be strict about something small, here's the real issue. I have to not be petty about the underlying aspect, right?
Two bottles of water is a petty difference from one bottle of water. It really does not matter. Water is not that expensive. A school has a multi-million dollar budget. And yes, I totally get they might not have been prepared to give every student two or three bottles of water,
but the way to emphasize what needs to happen here is to focus on the behavior and be excessively generous about the underlying thing, like the water. Let me know what you think.