How Much Suffering Should We Aim for in School Discipline?

Let's talk about school discipline and suffering.

I think the logic of the school to prison pipeline idea, which as I said in my other video, I don't think there's really evidence for any kind of school to prison pipeline, but the logic is there that if we have excessive consequences for minor behaviors, that could really alienate students and put them on a worse trajectory than they're already on.

And as educators, we're in the opposite business, right?

We're in the business of putting students on a better path, improving their trajectory in life.

So doing anything that would alienate students from school and make them disengage and make them worse off, obviously we don't wanna be doing that.

And I think the rhetoric around the school to prison pipeline is centered on kind of a misunderstanding of what is even happening with school discipline.

I think we're going in the extreme opposite direction of doing that.

So like, I don't think we should have excessive consequences, But I think we're swinging the pendulum too far.

And here's what I mean by that.

Suffering should not be part of school discipline, right?

We should not cause students to suffer.

It's not appropriate to use corporal punishment.

You know, if you see like the movie Little Women and see the kids get like physically beaten for bringing oranges to school, things like that, like obviously that needs to have no part in school discipline.

But the right amount of suffering is zero, not negative.

And this is really critical.

If we say we're okay with negative suffering, what does that actually mean?

Well, it means that we're not able to have healthy boundaries in place.

And it means that if we have a student who is misbehaving, let's say they're throwing furniture, they're punching people, they're biting people.

I saw a post the other day that said the teacher's hand got broken.

The suffering there is not zero.

What's happening there is the suffering is negative in the sense that it's not the student who is suffering, it's other people.

If we do not commit to holding the level of suffering at zero through consequences, then what's going to happen is simply school is going to fall apart.

We are going to have people getting injured.

We are going to have unsafe classrooms.

We're going to have dramatically less learning.

We're going to have turnover.

We're going to have spillover violence.

And those things are precisely what's happening right now.

So we really have to push back against this idea that we can just drop the level of suffering, not just to zero, but to negative levels and say, if you are causing suffering to other people...

That's okay because we're so uncomfortable with putting any kind of boundary in place that we're going to allow you to actually harm other people.

We don't need to go that far.

We must not go that far.

We need to stop the pendulum swing and say, yes, zero tolerance was excessive.

Yes, corporal punishment was not okay, but we're not going to swing it so far in the other direction that we allow a small number of students to just kind of terrorize and injure everyone else.

Let me know what you think about this.