Chesterton's Fence: Don't Get Rid of Something If You Don't Know Why It's There
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder applies Chesterton's Fence — the principle that you shouldn't remove something until you understand why it exists — to education policy reform.
Key Takeaways
- Understand before you dismantle - Chesterton's Fence warns against removing policies, practices, or structures without understanding their purpose
- Education reform often skips this step - Schools frequently eliminate established practices without understanding what problems they were solving
- Caution isn't the same as resistance to change - Asking 'why does this exist?' before removing it is responsible leadership, not obstruction
Transcript
How have so many schools gotten rid of consequences without really anticipating what would go wrong?
I came across a concept today that helped me understand what's going on here, and it's called Chesterton's Fence.
G.K.
Chesterton was a British philosopher who lived like 100 years ago, and Chesterton's Fence is this idea that if you come across a fence in a field and you don't know why it's there, you could say to yourself, well, I don't know why this is here.
Let's get rid of it.
But that would be a mistake.
If you don't know why it's there, you definitely should not get rid of it until you figure out why it's there.
That fence might be keeping in a bowl.
That fence might be there to protect you in some way.
If you don't understand why it's there, you don't have enough information to know that you should get rid of it.
And I think that's exactly what happened with consequences.
A lot of educators looked at consequences and listened to therapists and other people who are not educators.
who didn't like consequences or who pointed out some of the downsides of consequences and said, yeah, we don't like consequences either.
We should just get rid of them.
I don't know why we even have these.
We should get rid of them.
And again, if you don't know why you have something, you definitely should not get rid of it.
Like look in the box before you throw it out.
And I think the wisdom in that is that you have to understand the job something is doing before you get rid of it, right?
Like if we think consequences are unnecessary, what job are they doing?
And can something else do that job just as well?
And the main replacement seems to be in schools, seems to be rewards or maybe like reteaching or some sort of SEL approach.
Like people have these different ideas for what can substitute for consequences.
and yet we know that they don't work like we know that they actually do not play that same function that consequences play so as a result we got rid of them in lots and lots of schools and now we're seeing the consequences so let me know what you think of this idea of chesterton's fence that if you see something and you don't know what it's for that's not a reason to get rid of it that is a reason to find out what it does before you take any action let me know what you think