My mother’s tales of the Catholic schools she attended in 1960s Glasgow horrified and fascinated me as a child. The strap was a quarter-inch thick with two ends, one of solid leather and the other with cats’ tails. Beginning in grade one, students talking in class or arriving late were told by the nun in charge to hold out their hands, palm up, and were struck publicly multiple times. Misbehaving in my Canadian schools meant being slapped with detention, not a leather strap. Every school requires a disciplinary system. Whether students engage fully with their schoolwork, get by on minimum effort or, worse, disrupt or harm others impacts their success and the school’s reputation. In Shanghai, rule breakers often receive public shaming sessions in which their teacher towers over and screams at the student - head down, silent, with fists balled—while their friends watch, a scene I’ve witnessed many times working at public schools there. A broad assortment of disciplinary strategies may be found at schools globally, from those demanding military-like conformity enforced by threat of punishment to those in which students set their own rules and teachers negotiate with, rather than censure, offenders. Although both extremes can be effective, disciplinary systems in which students agree with the expectations and play an active role in consequences are superior to rigid systems in which punishments are passively received because the former requires fewer resources to maintain and promotes greater learning.
Michaela Community School, London. Courtesy of The BBC: bbc.com/news/uk-england-38796801
Teachers and students are natural adversaries. Kids want to play while instructors want them to sit quietly and work; therefore an external system of control must be applied to prevent students following their organic instincts. This widely-held opinion is in evidence at many schools, most noticeably perhaps those following traditional, conservative education models. Students themselves may agree that “teacher” and “warden” are synonymous. As a logical consequence, rules are written and punishments prescribed. Some schools, such as Michaela Community School in London, opt to control the minutest detail. Dubbed “Britain’s strictest school” (Carr), Michaela values conformity and following without question. There is total silence in the hallways, stopwatch timing when taking out books, and a heavy emphasis on rote learning and memorization (Carr). New students, most from low-income families, are even put through a seven-day boot camp before they are permitted to attend (Pells). It works. Ofsted, the government’s Office for Standards in Education, rated Michaela’s quality of education as “outstanding” in 2017 (Carr). Another school that has hit upon a winning strategy could not be more different: Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. There, all rules and decisions are made democratically at weekly School Meetings, where every student, from four years old to eighteen, along with each teacher, gets one vote (Chertoff). The students have chosen many rules for themselves, most centred around safety and preserving students’ freedom to pursue their individual academic interests. They may study whatever they want for as long as they want and by whatever method best suits them. There are no tests, and all that is required to receive your accredited high-school diploma is to convince a panel of adult staff from other Sudbury-model schools that you have adequately prepared yourself for responsible adult life (Gray). If “kids just want to play” rings true, one would expect that students of Sudbury Valley would allocate little productive time and be academically ill-equipped upon graduation. That seventy-five percent of Sudbury Valley’s graduates go on to qualify for university entrance (Chertoff) calls this premise seriously into question.
Sudbury Valley School, Massachusetts. Courtesy of sudburyvalley.org
Despite their differences, both the Michaela and Sudbury approaches have one goal: to convince students that being pro-social and learning are in their best interests. In other words, to have them consent to be educated. My own experience as a school teacher confirms the importance of student consent in education. Most classrooms have a few students who do not initially consent to learn. Perhaps they don’t value the content or believe it is too difficult for them to be successful at; they may have a problem with the teacher. Regardless, I have consistently observed that students who want to learn not only learn more but also behave better. The effect is so pronounced that, starting a new course, it is usually advantageous to spend as much time necessary to establish consent before proceeding to the course work. The time spent to convince students to work with you rather than against you is doubled later in time not spent dealing with poor-effort work and maintaining order. But how should consent be obtained? Two methods are available: external and internal. Defining strict rules, policing infractions, and punishing students who do not comply is external discipline; students have no say in what is expected of them and no agency when being punished. They simply do what they’re told or passively receive consequences. Internal discipline, by comparison, imposes only rules that students would naturally choose for themselves, such as those that keep them safe and preserve individual rights, and leaves room for student input. Students choose to follow the rules, not because they’ve been coerced, but because they believe the rules have value. Should they choose to break a rule, they are challenged to defend their point of view. The class may even debate the issue. Here the advantage of internal discipline becomes clear: the time spent in implementation is also time spent learning. Students practice questioning the status quo, arguing a point of view, considering different angles, and making meaningful changes either to the system or to themselves. Time spent enforcing external discipline, whether scolding, supervising detention, or delivering corporal punishment, is comparatively wasteful. Further, external discipline requires teachers’ constant attention in upholding the rules.
As a new teacher, I experimented with both approaches. Using the external method, I regularly spent fifteen or more percent of class time reinforcing discipline and meting out punishments; using the internal method, I rarely spent any time, and if I did need to, it was easily integrated into the lesson rather than disruptive of it. Michaela Community School was obliged to hire a full time Detention Director (Carr). Sudbury Valley, on the other hand, is able to get by on a small cadre of mostly part-time staff (Gray). Further, Michaela receives $9500 Canadian (statista.com) for each of its eight-hundred -forty students (mcsbrent.co.uk), whereas Sudbury receives much less in total each year at $13,200 (sudburyvalley.org) for each of only one-hundred-sixty students (privateschoolreview.com). Michaela is a seven-storey, brick building, on a cement pad, immediately next to a railway siding (Dathan). Sudbury maintains a large country house, a barn, ten acres of fields and forests, and a pond (Gray) on 26% of Michaela’s yearly budget. While it is true that Michaela is a public school in an underprivileged neighbourhood and Sudbury is a private school in the countryside, Sudbury has a lower budget than most public schools in the same state (Gray), and enrolls a disproportionately large number of students who have been expelled from other schools due to bad behaviour (Chertoff). Possibly internal discipline is more efficient that external, but it certainly doesn’t appear to be any less so.
Schools employing internal-discipline models have succeeded in producing academically competitive graduates using similar, if not smaller, amounts of resources as schools that depend on external discipline. Further, internal discipline seeks to teach students self control and how to make productive choices rather than imposing it upon them as passive recipients. Most significantly, perhaps, schools like Sudbury Valley see students as people with a desire and ability to learn, with a natural sense of right and wrong, and an aptitude for thoughtfully considering the value of freedoms and restrictions. Crediting children with and fostering these virtues prepares them to contribute to a society of equals in which everyone’s voice matters. The Michaela approach assumes that students are one tattoo away from becoming delinquents and drop outs. It trains them not to listen to themselves, but to accept the will of their “higher-ups” without question. Threats may be used, or fear, or shame, but either way the message is clear: do what you are told or suffer; yours is not to question. Michaela’s students are underprivileged children, many are ethnic minorities. Is democracy not for them, too?
Works Cited
“Admissions.” Sudbury Valley School, 2019, www.sudburyvalley.org/svs-me.
Carr, Flora. “A Day in the Life at Michaela, Britain's Strictest School.” Time, Time, 20 Apr. 2018, time.com/5232857/michaela-britains-strictest-school/.
Chertoff, Emily. “No Teachers, No Class, No Homework; Would You Send Your Kids Here?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 13 Dec. 2012, www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/no-teachers-no-class-no-homework-would-you-send-your-kids-here/265354/.
Dathan, Matt. “New Free School in Wembley Hit with Asbestos Claims.” The Kilburn Times, Kilburn Times, 1 June 2013, www.kilburntimes.co.uk/news/new-free-school-in-wembley-hit-with-asbestos-claims-1-2218493.
Gray, Peter. “Children Educate Themselves IV: Lessons from Sudbury Valley.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 13 Aug. 2008, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/200808/children-educate-themselves-iv-lessons-sudbury-valley.
Michaela Community School, 2019, www.mcsbrent.co.uk/page/2/.
Pells, Rachael. “Britain's Most Controversial School Forcing Children into 'Boot Camp' to Train Them to Walk Faster.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 22 June 2017, www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/michaela-school-boot-camp-train-children-walk-faster-katherine-birbalsingh-a7803196.html.
“Regional Education Spending per Pupil England (UK) | 2018.” Statista, Dec. 2018, www.statista.com/statistics/381745/education-expenditure-per-pupil-england-region-uk/.
“Sudbury Valley School Profile (2018-19)” PrivateSchoolReview, 12 Dec. 2018, www.privateschoolreview.com/sudbury-valley-school-profile.
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