How to Stack up Thinking on Freedom vs. Responsibility at School

I was thinking about the struggles we’ve been having at school for the past few weeks. My concern is about whether we were really “holding students accountable” for behavior. I think it all came down to freedom vs. responsibility in school and the question of which comes first in human development. Sort of like that question, which comes first the chicken or the egg?

This question is important in teaching. In the old days, if I may use such a trite phrase, the assumption was clear: responsibility was necessary before freedom. Teachers tried to develop responsibility in students so they might enjoy the freedom of adulthood.

These days responsibility takes a back seat to freedom. We see such things as students choosing whether to say the pledge or emphasis placed on student choice in assignments. Or lack of consequences for hitting or fighting.

This might be thought of as no more than a stylistic concern but as I read in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy, just because conditions are opposite doesn’t mean they’re equally weighted in human life or they equally cause one another. The example offered was praise and blame. They are opposites, but not equally common or equally damaging.And blame is far more common in humans and praise ever was:

The theory, I assert, in school teaching has long been that successfully accepting responsibility creates freedom. Therefore, the strictures and practices of school, many of which are not voluntarily chosen by children, are actually humane. In the long run, they will yield a harvest of freedom. We teach you how to take care of your school materials and then you have the freedom to use them whenever you want and don’t have to worry about broken pencils and not having an eraser. We hold you responsible for learning how to read and you enjoy the freedom to know all kinds of things. You become responsible with coursework and assignments and we give you a degree and you enjoy the freedom of pursuing further studies in many different disciplines.

But now in the modern theory students must have freedom in order to learn. We talk about “student management of learning” in terms of instruction and “making sad choices” in terms of discipline. If someone has hit another student. It’s not wrong it’s a choice.

I seem to remember Piaget saying that the child under seven couldn’t really reason this way … the five year old, he claimed, struggled with understanding other people’s feelings. Believe me, I’ve seen some five year olds who struggle with that this week. Notes I wrote to myself during my visit to a kinder class this morning: “When asked to take break and sit in back of class, student shouts, throws crayon, dumps blocks. Yipping. Ran away. Trying to flip the chairs. Refusal to stay in class, eloped. Called behavior specialist.” Consequence for all this? The behavior specialist talked to him. This is freedom: he does what he wants. Responsibility is nowhere in sight.

I’m not sure who came up with the modern attitude about behavior consequences, but if it was a good idea we should really see some improvement in behavioral outcomes by now. Yet we in schools have been working this angle for about 10 years (some would say 20 or 30) and I fail to see any improvement in academic scores or behavior. Overall, the teachers believe things are getting worse. The usual answer is that it’s the parent’s fault, or computer’s fault, or it’s because the culture is so anti-intellectual. But is it possible that we’re out of balance in the area of freedom vs. responsibility in school, and giving students freedom in order to develop responsibility is a dead end? As one of my friends once said Wagner’s music was? (Actual quote: “Wagner’s music is sublime but the problem is you can’t build on it. There’s nowhere to go from Tristan and Isolde.”

I’m beginning to wonder if we’re pursuing a dead letter with this whole student freedom initiative. I’m reminded of Garrison Keillor writing that “kids don’t need their parents to be friends they need the parents to be parents” and by the same token kids don’t need teachers to set them free this morning, they need teachers to hold them to account so they’ll be free their whole lives.

So that leads me back to my question of chicken and egg and freedom vs. responsibility in school. Responsibility comes first and if it’s handled appropriately freedom comes afterwards. I suppose you could just give people freedom and hope they develop responsibility through trial and error (flashback: one might say that’s how I was parented back in the California of the 70’s.) But I suspect this type of discipline philosophy is going to be a very slow process and antithetical to the entire idea of school.

This afternoon the young Kinder teachers were standing around at 4:00 p.m. talking about how hard it is to teach this particular year and wondering if their work as teachers even matters. “Oh it matters all right,” I said. “Instruction changes people don’t you have any doubt. That’s why we build schools.” Because in the midst of letting kids have a lot of freedom, the teachers are teaching. It’s just relatively slow with all the distractions.

They smiled. I feel sure that they were heartened. I feel less sure about the optimism the schools have been expressing for general freedom of 5, 6, and 7 year olds. But I don’t see any sign that there’s a directional change on the horizon. Sometimes it takes decades or even a century or two to turn around philosophical or pedagogical dead ends. If that’s the case there may be a lot of young people who, because they never learned to develop responsibility with much confidence, will be really short in the freedom department as adults. I intend to personally struggle against this in my own instructional project, but in the greater picture that is the writing on the wall.