Imagine you are an employee at a busy office.  You spend your day working hard to meet your deadlines and keep your clients happy. It being the middle of football season, Brad and Janet are off in the corner arguing over a potential trade in their fantasy football league. Your boss comes in and finding Brad and Janet not working informs the office that no one is leaving until Brad and Janet get all their work completed. How would you respond?

If you are like me you would be furious. No sane employer would punish innocent employees for the behaviour of their peers. Yet this type of practice is common in the elementary classroom. One or two students misbehave and the entire class is punished. Students can’t line up quietly? Let’s have the entire class practice lining up. Some kids won’t settle down? Let’s keep the class in at the start of recess. This type of collective punishment is common in the elementary classroom and teaches all the wrong lessons.

Now let me put this out there, I am not an elementary school teacher, but as many of my readers know I am the husband of a teacher and I have had a ring-side seat of the education system for the last 15+ years. I also taught university courses in Chemistry and have seen all sorts of approaches to disciplining students. 

More importantly, I am the parent of three school-aged kids and have seen (and heard) what my kids say about this topic. My children (through no particular skill of mine) are rule-followers. They aren’t the kids responsible for the punishments, but they are the ones who have consistently suffered simply because they share a classroom with children who misbehave. 

I have heard arguments to the effect that collective punishment is used to encourage the “good” kids to exert peer pressure on their less-well-behaved peers. To my mind, this argument runs counter to everything we try to teach ours kids as they grow up.

I can’t count how many times we have been told to teach our kids not to succumb to peer pressure. We tell them to “think for yourself!” We say “if he jumped off a bridge would you?” So after all that time and effort spent convincing kids to be their own person and not to succumb to peer pressure, their school then turns around and suggests that students should use peer pressure to influence the behaviour of their peers. Talk about mixed-messaging.

As a pragmatist, I also wonder if some of the kids might look at the problem from a purely pragmatic perspective. I imagine them asking themselves “if I’m going to get punished anyways why should I behave?” Why would you bother to do as you are told if you know you are going to be punished anyways? The teacher is literally telling the “good” kids that their good behaviour doesn’t count for anything. I’m pretty sure this is not the sort of lesson our teachers are trying to send. 

Frustratingly, the practice can also can encourage certain kids to misbehave. We all have to recognize that there are students who are attention seekers. They don’t care if it is good attention or bad attention; they just want attention. Collective punishment feeds into their desires to be noticed. Collective punishment can sets back their development because when they misbehave everyone notices. It feeds their negative needs. 

Finally there is the thing that really gets to me as a parent of those “good” kids. Punishing children who aren’t misbehaving takes kids who want to go to school and turns them into kids who resent their classrooms and want to be anywhere else but school. It makes the well-behaved kids wonder why they should bother and it ruins their love of school. 

Now I know the other common argument I have heard is that teachers use collective punishment because they have few other options. If the entire class is going on a field trip then you can’t simply abandon the ill-behaved kids, you need to do something. The problem is that the easy thing (collective punishment) is not always the right thing.

When I was a kid the immediate and easy response was corporal punishment. Misbehave and get a whack on the head or worse. We now know that corporal punishment not only doesn’t work, but it teaches all the wrong lessons. Well collective punishment needs to follow corporal punishment into the dustbin of academic history. Any punishment you wouldn’t expect your employer to exert on you, should not be used on your children.

Author’s Note

An important note about this post. As I mentioned above, my wife is a teacher and I want to make it clear that she has had no input into this post. In our household we have a strict demarcation. When it comes to the school, my wife is a teacher and I am the parent. This allows her to maintain a professional relationship with her peers while I am the person who is there to advocate for our kids.