The Problem with School Discipline: Lashing the Innocent

A while ago I was thinking about the discipline and behavioural problems of mainstream schools, including the one I went to, where the kids loved to act prickish. And I’m not excluding myself, in fact that was one of the highlights of my school experience.

It got me thinking, why is there such a presence of piss-take attitude with a lurking shadow of strict regime and threats of punishment in most schools? (or at least the one I experienced). As I remember it the control of the school was totally fear driven, rather than a helpful mentor to show you around, the head teacher held the status of a man who ate naughty children for dinner.

Anyway, I concluded that children misbehave because they are bored; they are forced to sit in a dull classroom studying dull subjects, or at least in a dull manner. Hence they feel the need to entertain themselves, which we then punish them for. This is quite an absurdity to me, it’s like not taking your dog for a walk all day and then punishing it for laying a turd on your carpet. Not only this but the method of punishment is also rather strange to me; as a reaction to classroom confinement children express outbursts of restlessness, our reaction to this is to place them in yet further confinement, i.e. detention. This is like trying to cure obesity with a diet of big macs, surely it can only further the problem.

I struggle to see the logic of such actions and threats, how do we expect people to react when we place them into such a rigid structure of forced learning. If anything this shows that we’re not robots, surely we should be celebrating the fact that we’re human beings and we require more than a classroom environment to quench our thirst for life.