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Emboldening our teachers to rein in unruly students
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“You’re here to serve me. Without my parents’ money, you would have no living to make!” This is what an eighth-grader recently said to his English teacher, who is a friend of mine.
Dismayed, my friend, once again, gave the mischievous boy a good lecture and phoned his parents. This is not her first time — and won’t be her last, she reckons — to be verbally assaulted by her students.
“What else can I do? Crack him on the knuckles with a ruler like the old times?” My friend sighed. “My hands are tied.”
Admittedly, teenagers can be a bit of a handful, and we’ve all been through that. But my friend does sense that students today don’t have as much reverence for their teachers as we once had for ours.
However, with the perceived decline of teachers’ authority and the lack of tools to discipline unruly students, classroom management becomes tough, and instilling order and morality will be unfathomably difficult.
My friend is not alone in struggling with the disciplinary dilemma at school. And there’s been a series of moves that have brought this matter further to our attention. Recently, according to China Youth Daily, a primary school in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, held a hearing, the first of its kind in the country, to openly discuss how to restore teachers’ right to discipline. It was attended by teachers, students, parents, psychologists and attorneys.
“We know there’ll be backlashes. We may even become the target of public criticism,” said Li Weiping, principal of the school. “But what we are doing benefits the children and contributes to the society.”
Corporal punishment
Part of the resistance is perhaps due to people’s misconception. Many tend to view “discipline” and “corporal punishment” as the same, and the latter terrifies them.
Corporal punishment has long been sternly prohibited under Chinese laws and regulations. And none of the disciplinary approaches proposed by the primary school in Changzhou, such as doing extra cleaning, having certain privileges removed, reading aloud, a brief exclusion from class and being accompanied by parents in class, would harm students physically.
“Discipline is a mandatory way to make the students realize their own mistakes when positive reinforcements like encouraging and complimenting fail,” Li noted.
Parents could also hamper schools’ efforts to get tough on bad behaviors. In recent years, children are too often pampered or overprotected by their parents. As a result, school discipline is somewhat compromised or even considered as a primitive method of education.
In 2017, according to Thepaper.cn, a teacher in Changde, Hunan Province, was stormed by furious parents after scolding their children for smoking at school.
Incidents like this occur every once in a while. Parental overprotection may insulate children from physical abuse, but it also diminishes teachers’ confidence in disciplinary encounters. They balk at the prospect of facing angry parents or lawsuits should they remove a disruptive child from the classroom.
Many agree that children need to develop a sense of order and limits. Schools have the responsibility to set these limits and guide children to stay within them.
According to Li Jie, teacher at Beijing 101 Middle School, schools usually use encouragement to instill order, and discipline is used only sparingly.
However, it’s also necessary to hold students to account, so that they can reflect on their behaviors and improve, Li noted.
In many countries, teachers’ right to discipline students is clearly stipulated in the law. In Britain’s Education and Inspections Act 2006, it states that teachers can impose disciplinary penalties like detention and confiscation, and they can use force to stop brawls to keep others from getting hurt.
But teachers’ disciplinary rights are yet to be set down in China’s laws and regulations. Significantly, eduation authorities need to fill this legal lacuna by drawing the line, specifying on what conditions, with what measures and to what extent teachers can exercise discipline and the consequences if they abuse it. In this way, students, teachers and parents can all have reference.
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