Today it’s cell phones and backpacks. Depending upon your generation, it was chewing gum, the length of girls’ skirts, boys’ low-slung jeans and exposed boxers, high school boys with face hair, or checking that every child showered after PE class. There always has been a rule that school enforces upon children, an arbitrary rule with disciplinary repercussions. Why?
Pecking order of rules.
School rules fall into a pecking order. There are hard and fast rules and soft and contextual rules. At the top of the order are the generalized, little argument, good for everyone rules. They read like a Ten Commandments for students. Respect one another. No fighting. No weapons. No drugs. No stealing. No cheating. Stay seated while the bus is moving. These Commandments don’t need a lot of retelling to children and don’t get push back unless a child is caught breaking one of them. Even then, harsh consequences are understood because breaking one of these is a school sin.
In the middle of the order are rules that make sense if someone is watching. No running in the hallways. Don’t cut in line. No talking during tests. Do your own homework. These rules make sense even when they curb what children would like to do without a rule saying “don’t”. Lots of children break these rules with a “no harm, no foul” mentality. The usual consequences for infractions of these middle order rules are middle order punishments. “Go to the back of the line” and “Go back and let me see you walk without running”. Most children view these as “if you do the crime, spend the time” rules.
At the bottom of the pecking order are the arbitrary rules that are either irrational to children or are purposefully confrontational. Today, these include rules about cell phones, use of AI, social media, and gender-based rules. In yesteryear, these included rules about clothing, hair, language, and gum chewing. Children know a rule is arbitrary when the school rationalization boils down to “because we say so!”.
Need for school rules.
It is hard to conceive of a place where hundreds to a thousand or more children, or adults for that matter, gather without some overarching understanding of orderliness. Rules rule for orderliness. We believe that a lack of understood rules creates conditions as in Lord of the Flies or the “wild west”. To prevent school anarchy every state constitution assigns its department of education and local school boards the responsibility of propagating school rules.
“Should schools have rules? Obviously, yes. No one – I think – disputes the necessity of having rules that keep people safe and make life easier and more pleasant for everyone involved. So, a full setting out of acceptable behavior in a science lab or tech workshop is clearly important and sensible. Rules governing minimum expectations of how students should behave in classrooms and social spaces are also desirable, as are rules about how teachers should and should not interact with children.”
Rules, however, do not make conditions orderly. It is the people who enforce the rules who create order. Therein, lies one of the rubs of arbitrary school rules.
“Teachers are woefully, incredibly, amazingly undertrained on the behavioral issues,” Wells says. “Teacher training today looks a lot like it did in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. The typical teacher training tends to be about 80 percent content, on academics and curriculum, then 20 percent on the human factor. If you ask a teacher how many days they’ve had dominated by content, they just laugh. Their days are dominated by bad behavior.
Schools continue to prepare teachers for Beaver Cleaver and the 1950s. You talk to teachers, they’ll tell you they’ve got Beavis and Butthead. We’ve got a profound mismatch going on.
When a teacher feels he or she is losing control, Wells says the natural impulse is to start piling up arbitrary rules to regain some sort of order.”
In most teacher preparation programs, a teacher-to-be completes one course in child development and one course in classroom behavior management. These six credits are contrasted to the other 114 content, pedagogical, and student teaching credits in a typical 120 credit requirement for a BA in education.
Teachers are indeed woefully unprepared to deal with a class, a grade level, and a school of contemporary children. If teachers spent more time in the field study of child behaviors, the psychology of changing behaviors, and did clinical work in the negotiated management of children, we would see a great reduction in teacher stress and children’s confrontation with school authority. But the institution of teacher prep is not going to change.
Hence, arbitrary.
As educators, we get to being arbitrary quickly when confronted with child behaviors we can not easily change with Commandments or Makes Sense rules. The hardest confrontations today between teachers and children are cultural, generational, technology-based, and gender related. There are issues in each of these categories for which children today and adults of yesterday do not see eye to eye. In fact, they are flat out oppositional and each side digs in for battle with little provocation.
This is not new. Speech and dress and the right to protest rocks schools in the 60s and 70s. Smoking and marijuana created trench warfare in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Every issue was addressed with specific, “don’t you dare, kiddo” rules with punishments beginning with suspension and moving immediately to expulsion. Schools carved out the cancers of defiance with hard justice.
As soon as a cell phone carried the Internet, phones in schools became the line in the sand not to be crossed. Kids of all ages engaged in social media and texting holding their phones under their desk or table. Just like POWs in enemy prisons, kids improvised and learned to text each other blindly with their phones in their pockets. Genius, but against the rules.
Now it is AI. “More than 4 in 10 teens are likely to use AI to do their schoolwork instead of doing it themselves this coming school year, according to a new survey. But 670 percent of teens consider using AI for schoolwork as cheating, according to the nationally representative survey of 1,006 13- to 17-year-olds conducted by research firm Big Village in July for the nonprofit Junior Achievement.”
The bad news is that although they consider it cheating, 40% of teens are likely to use AI for school assignments and claim the work as their own. The good news is that many educators are using in-class targeted assessments instead of larger scale assignments and take-home tests. Schools also use AI to detect AI. The harsh news is that developers, mainly kids, develop programs to get around AI detection as fast as schools adopt detection.
The Big Duh!
We adults tend to forget that the purpose of school is to prepare children for life after school. We substitute the message that each grade prepares a child for the next and elementary for secondary school, and high school for college. It is not so. Public education prepares children for life after school and for a growing number of children, that means work not college. The rules we create should have some basis in the real world. Rules for our youngest should mirror child development in the homes of our community. Rules for our oldest should mirror the rules they will find after graduation.
Our School Commandment rules are sound and eternal in a school setting. Our middle order rules also are sound, and their purpose is close to eternal in school setting. They keep school from being the Wild West. It is our arbitrary rules that cause us to woe. We must find alternative ways to get around the swamps.
For example, due to school violence and school closings and changes in school activities, parents want their upper elementary through high school children to have immediate communication options with their parents and parents with their children. It is not the cell phone that is the problem but the smartphone. If schools are going to bar or bag smartphones, then provide every child with a simple cell phone with no Internet. When a crisis or emergency hits, a school’s Wi-Fi is overwhelmed. The cost of simple, no Internet cell phones is less than the time, energy, and hassling over student abuse of smartphones.
For example, the use of AI only grows. In the non-school world, collaboration is valued whereas in the school world we want a student’s original work. Make high stakes assessments paper and pencil and focus formative assignments on information gathering and synthesis and collaboration. AI lives in the non-school world so make school AI parallel.
For example, remember that our nation was and is a melting pot of world cultures. Learn from others as they learn from our culture, whatever that may be. Don’t put up walls; keep the spoon stirring in the melting pot. Be inclusive not exclusive.
And every adult in school needs to remember they are there only because kids are there!