Don't treat children like they are insane. Part 2
It's never kind to believe one is not responsible for one's actions
The story so far
In Part 1, I began by referring back to some old blog posts from 20181. In those blog posts, I argued that schools are not psychiatric hospitals and children are not insane. While some extreme cases might exist, most children can control their behaviour and should be encouraged to make the right choices. This had proved controversial.
As well as referring back to these older posts, I also considered the argument that it is kinder to treat children as if they are not responsible for their actions. According to this argument, if they are treated as if they are not responsible for their actions, they will be punished less. This is neither practical nor compassionate. I referenced C. S. Lewis's essay on criminal justice, The Humanitarian Theory of Justice. This essay argues that punishing offenders is necessary for justice, and that treating crimes therapeutically removes the concept of deserved punishment.
More on Lewis’s Humanitarian Theory Of Justice
C.S. Lewis points out that severe punishments can be (and have been) criticised for being more than the recipient deserves. However, if punishment serves a purpose other than desert2, it cannot be criticised on those grounds.
The Humanitarian theory, then, removes sentences from the hands of jurists whom the public conscience is entitled to criticise and places them in the hands of technical experts whose special sciences do not even employ such categories as rights or justice. It might be argued that since this transference results from an abandonment of the old idea of punishment, and, therefore, of all vindictive motives, it will be safe to leave our criminals in such hands. I will not pause to comment on the simple-minded view of fallen human nature which such a belief implies. Let us rather remember that the ‘cure’ of criminals is to be compulsory; and let us then watch how the theory actually works in the mind of the Humanitarian…
…On his remedial view of punishment the offender should, of course, be detained until he was cured. And of course the official straighteners are the only people who can say when that is. The first result of the Humanitarian theory is, therefore, to substitute for a definite sentence (reflecting to some extent the community’s moral judgment on the degree of ill-desert involved) an indefinite sentence terminable only by the word of those experts—and they are not experts in moral theology nor even in the Law of Nature—who inflict it. Which of us, if he stood in the dock, would not prefer to be tried by the old system?
It may be said that by the continued use of the word punishment and the use of the verb ‘inflict’ I am misrepresenting Humanitarians. They are not punishing, not inflicting, only healing. But do not let us be deceived by a name. To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of ‘normality’ hatched in a Viennese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors have succeeded or I have grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success—who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared—shame, exile, bondage, and years eaten by the locust—is obvious.
“Humanitarian” punishments for children
I think the same argument applies to children. A restorative conversation can be a worse punishment than a detention. Having to discuss your feelings with an adult can be a terrible intrusion. Being judged to be in need of rehabilitation or repentance can be more humiliating than being judged to have broken the rules. One of the worst sanctions I have ever heard of a school using is from an extremely progressive free school. According to a newspaper article:3
While some schools enforce discipline through “silent corridors” and detentions for the wrong haircut, [this school] has a weekly “community meeting” where students can challenge or apologise for bad behaviour.
A video promoting the school explains:
[P]rinciples of trust, integrity and compassion are reinforced at the end of every week with a whole school community meeting. It's a space for both staff and students to appreciate each other; to make a stand for change, or to apologise.
A boy in a hoodie is then shown telling what appears to be the entire school population: “I’d like to apologise for being late”. I suspect that, as a child, I would have preferred a week in isolation to this particular sanction. And that’s without the added humiliation of the school sharing this apology on YouTube.
The educational philosopher R.S. Peters had one particular insight into the negative consequences of believing children are not responsible for their actions:
a necessary condition of people being responsible is that they should believe that they are4
If a child who misbehaves is not punished and is told that they are not responsible for their actions, why would they ever try to control themselves in the future? It’s not even a matter of no longer needing to avoid a punishment, why would you even try to resist a temptation to do wrong if you have been told that you have no power to resist anyway? Our belief that we can choose to do the right thing, is necessary for choosing to do the right thing.
All of which brings me to the article that prompted me to write about this subject. This is from last year in the US state of Maryland:
A school promised not to send kids to the ER for misbehavior – but hospital trips only increased
Three times a week, on average, a police car pulls up to a school in Wicomico County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A student is brought out, handcuffed and placed inside for transport to a hospital emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation.
Over the past eight years, the process has been used at least 750 times on students. Some are as young as 5 years old.
The state law that allows for these removals, known as petitions for emergency evaluation, is meant to be limited to people with severe mental illness, who are endangering their own lives or safety or someone else’s. It’s the first step toward getting someone involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital…
Schools in Wicomico County agreed not to misuse emergency petitions as part of a 2017 settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice. But while the number of suspensions and expulsions declined, mandated trips to the emergency room ticked up.
This horrific story of children being bundled off to the hospital for psychiatric intervention is what Lewis warned against. If anything, it’s worse, because it’s being applied to unruly children rather than adult criminals. This seems like a far worse punishment than would normally be seen in schools. Detentions, suspensions and exclusions seem far kinder than being handcuffed, imprisoned and forcibly subjected to unwanted medical procedures. However, it is a result of the humanitarian impulse to treat badly behaved, or out-of-control, children as if they needed psychiatric help, rather than boundaries and sanctions. Assuming these children are not responsible for their actions will, in most cases, have been less compassionate than the supposedly cruel alternative of punishing them.
desert (noun): the quality or fact of meriting reward or punishment.
I will not name the school or link to my source (although I will acknowledge this came from The Times). I looked at the same article in a very recent post for paid subscribers. This is a complete coincidence, as I started writing this post weeks ago.
From Authority, Responsibility and Power by R.S. Peters (Associate Link).