Education vs
Behavior Control
School Uniforms and What is Really Important
I just wrote an article about "academic success". In it I wrote "
I graduated with "high honors" in high school, university and graduate school. This really only meant that my grades were high. If I had been able to pay someone to take my tests, and had gotten away with it, I would still be considered "academically successful" by most people who look no more deeply than grades or clothes.
I am thinking now of the many schools I have visited where a uniform is mandatory. If you are not wearing the required shoes, socks or ribbon in your hair, you will not even be allowed to enter the school.
This is not education. This is behavior control. Education would be allowing the students to come in, then discussing their clothes, if clothes are such an important issue for the school authorities. Discussing means listening to the students, not just telling them what they can and can't wear. Discussing also means talking about the reasons some people favor uniforms and some oppose. Discussing means allowing everyone a voice. Democracy means allowing every one a vote. Including students. As we know, though, the vast majority of schools, though, are no where near democracies. This is another issue. It is an important one but right now I just want to focus on education vs behavior control, and what is important.
I suspect it is almost self-evident that requiring students to wear a uniform and depriving them of an education, or at least a piece of paper called a degree or diploma, is behavior control rather than education, so I want to now say a few words about what is really important.
I have come to the conclusion that most school directors literally do not know what is important. They believe, for example, that the color of one's shoes is important. It is so important that they will deny a person a chance to receive both education and diploma if they wear brown shoes rather than the required black.
Many school directors will also deprive a young person of education and diploma if they do not arrive on time to school, or do not participate in the mandatory school pledges or prayers each morning. Such school directors believe that punctuality and, more fundamentally, obedience, are more important than learning. If a student were able to pass the tests, yet has missed more than the allowable number of days of school, their test results would be of less importance to the school director than their attendance.
So what is really taking place in schools? Is it education? Or is it behavior control?
S. Hein
Dec 6, 2007
Istanbul
More thoughts
I recently spoke to an American who told me in his high school if they missed just three days of a class, they would automatically fail that subject. He also told me that if you were more than 15 minutes late, it counted as an absence. This by the way is more oppressive than even South American schools I am familiar with in which either two or three late arrivals is counted as one absence.
An intelligent student might question such math. He or she might say "Wait a minute, if I am 5 minutes late two or three times, how does that equal one full day of school?" If there are six hours of a school day, for example, how could it be that 10 or fifteen minutes is equal to 360? If a student were to use this kind of logic, what are the chances they would get an answer which satisfied them? Or we might say an "intelligent answer"? We allegedly value intelligence in society, but do we value it enough to give high school students intelligent answers? Or do we just expect them to accept our answers because we have power over them?
See also this link about the lateness policy in a school district in Wisconsin.