Having spent half of my life as an educator, I have served thousands of students and worked with diverse groups of fellow educators. Some experiences have created beautiful, lifelong memories for me. Others, not so much. There have been some students who have made me question my choice to remain in the profession, as well as those who have helped confirm that I was where I was supposed to be. There have also been some fellow educators who have caused me to question where their loyalties lie…with the children who depend on them to improve their quality of life, or the institutions and administrators, who dictate with something less than sincerity, the ins and outs of their educational process. I know, I know…trust the process, right? What about those processes that serve to diminish the hopes of and limit the possibilities of the very population we are supposedly committed to serving?
I have watched programs and procedures come and go. I have known of educators taking their own lives because they lost the job to which they had dedicated their all. I have seen students fall from the most promising academics and creative artists to lost souls that wander aimlessly through life without hope of ever recovering, all because of the fleeting and experimental processes by which they were governed. New ideas, flung at school districts on a whim by business men and women seeking to turn the educational process into a factory, have become the go to processes. Is this okay?
Problem behaviors in children such as physical aggression, disobeying rules, cheating, stealing, and destruction of property are considered externalizing because they are directed toward a child’s external environment. Studies show that the occurrence of externalizing behaviors is higher among children who live in poverty, especially from pre-school to fifth grade. The study, which focused on children between the ages of 2 and 11 years old states, “The longer children lived in poverty, the more likely they were to exhibit more externalizing behaviors over the course of the measurement periods” (Henninger and Luze, 2012). If this is true, then it is imperative that we understand how to combat the issues with which our children are constantly faced. This is especially true of students who live in marginalized communities, as well as the educators who deal with them every day.
There is no arguing that children who exhibit externalizing behaviors in an educational setting on a consistent basis must be handled with care. The problem is, how do we show we care and instill the values and morals that we know are most important for our youth without discipline? To a great degree, we have fallen short of achieving this, and we only have ourselves to blame. Sure, we can find ways to make technology, poor parenting by an increasingly younger demographic, and societal influences the villains, but what is missing from the equation is the wisdom of presenting those we know to be affected most deeply with consequences for their behavior. Corporal punishment worked when it worked, and it is likely not the answer here, but just the threat of missing a day of fun at the end of a six weeks will not deter students from acting on deep seated issues that affect their every waking moment.
In my most recent experience, I have found that those of us in the educational setting who have the power to foster the kind of change our children need are the very ones who could care less about behavior. Their area of concentration is on the data that says their institutions are not effectively educating students. The remedy? Remove those problems from their range of responsibility before their test scores can damage the institution’s shiny surface. We continue to force unnecessary strategies and unsuccessful methods upon the people who are on the front lines of the educational fight every day. We constantly add to their work load, rather than employ methods that actually work to encourage our students to see the usefulness of what they feel forced to sit through.
The truth is, some of our youth have no choice but to endure a more difficult and dreary existence than those faced by children who had to spend most of the year in a field, planting or harvesting one hundred years ago. Conceding that they now enjoy freedoms that were not available to them then, that could be the problem. On a micro level, we have more control over that than we care to admit. “It’s not my problem” has become the cop out with which many educators have become most comfortable. I beg to differ. It is becoming increasingly more our problem than ever before.
While I cannot argue with the idea that change is the one constant in life, should we allow the worst kinds of change to decrease the choice and chance of our youth for the sake of increasing our status or for the sake of monetary gain? Should we simply disregard the needs of our children, including the need for responsible supervision and loving, consistent discipline?
The task before us is not one that is easily tackled. We are faced with a frightening balancing act…one that might only be manageable by returning to what worked in the past. If we allow the youth of our society to persist in behaviors that land them in situations that threaten to decrease their chance at a productive future, then we are not doing our job. Failing to offer necessary and appropriate consequences for misbehaving in the educational setting is what failing our youth looks like.
