The epidemic of disrespect

One of the major themes of the NEA website is discipline, or "classroom management." Apparently, simply maintaining order is becoming increasingly difficult for teachers:

There's the feeling among educators that things are worse now than they've ever been, and they aren't wrong, says Jim Garbarino, a Cornell University professor and author of "Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment."

Garbarino points, in part, to an "erosion of adult authority" in today's society that makes it more and more difficult for teachers and other educators to do their job. Although research on the declining behavior of students is scarce, Garbarino says one survey found 82 percent of adults agree kids are less respectful.

There's a possibility that there is no actual trend where kids are getting less respectful. Sometimes our society holds a consensus opinion which is, in fact, a myth. Remember the crime wave of the 1980's, the one that made every politician from dog-catcher to president declare how "tough on crime" they were? The one that led to mandatory minimum sentencing and the Willie Horton campaign commercial? Yeah, well, it never happened. Utter media fabrication, that was. Violent crime declined over the course of the 1980's. Property crime went down fairly dramatically. Yet I'm sure 82 percent of adults would have agreed that crime was on the rise, had they been similarly surveyed.

But let's assume kids really are getting less obedient ("respectful" is usually just code for "obedient," as I'm sure it is for the NEA).

When most of the parenting books focus on discipline, taking control, and asserting your position as household dictator, how on earth can we have an erosion of adult authority? Nowadays, there is a positive terror of "permissive" parenting, with adults (especially those without children) speaking scathingly of badly behaved "brats" they seem to run into everywhere they go. I can't tell you how tired I am of reading the old saw "parenting is not a democracy." The culture is positively obsessed with adult authority. This is the era of the TV show Supernanny:

Hailed by the New York Times as "fascinating" and "required viewing;" praised by Oprah Winfrey, David Letterman and Kelly Ripa; acclaimed by such publications as Newsweek, Hollywood Reporter and The New Yorker; and lauded by parents and nannies across America, Supernanny is a hit.... Supernanny is now an international phenomenon; it airs in 47 countries.... Her book, Supernanny: How to Get the Best from Your Children, spent 17 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, hitting No. 1 for much of that time.

Supernanny's top ten list of parenting rules:

1. Praise and Rewards
2. Consistency
3. Routine
4. Boundaries
5. Discipline
6. Warnings
7. Explanations
8. Restraint
9. Responsibility
10. Relaxation

This is our culture: parenting is about attaining obedience from one's children. There is nothing in the above list that suggests any concern about empathy, social responsibility, creativity, imagination, enjoyment, or learning. Any "erosion of adult authority" is entirely mystifying when the primary concern of many adults, when dealing with children, is to insure their position of authority.

Back to the NEA article:

"Teachers probably have to do more to establish their individual authority because they don't have a cultural foundation to build upon," Garbarino says.

Some blame parents—in fact, 82 percent of teachers in the Public Agenda poll say parents simply don't teach their kids discipline. Many kids come to school with little regard for rules. "They're used to getting their own way," says Sheila Cornelison, an algebra teacher in northern Alabama, who trains colleagues in Alabama Education Association-sponsored I Can Do It! Workshops—seminars offered by some state Associations to help teachers with classroom management.

I very much doubt that your typical American parent lets their kid rule the roost. Something is going wrong in our relationships with children, but that eternal straw man, the "spoiled child" that results from permissive parenting, is not the problem. If you've been reading earlier posts, you probably know what I think it is: behaviorism (Supernanny's #1 parenting technique). Far from having a new, permissive culture which grants children too much autonomy, we have kids who are scheduled 24/7, are rarely if ever given unsupervised time, and are, in many cases, incessantly manipulated with time outs, star charts, cookies, spankings, and all manner of carrots and sticks. This leads to poor behavior and lack of respect for adults for several reasons:

• Bribing and threatening kids does not show them any respect. It means treating the child as if they cannot be reasoned with or appealed to, as if they cannot understand the world around them, as if they are animals. Ergo, they don't respect us either.
• Behaviorism stresses the power structure between parent and child, which gets in the way of mutual affection and can inspire resistance for resistance's sake (everyone wants a measure of freedom). De-emphasizing the power structure through discussion and negotiation will actually make for a more "manageable" child.
• Children whose parents regularly explain the purpose behind their requests, which is what you have to do if you aren't using rewards and punishments, learn to trust that adults have good reasons for their demands. Even when a reason is not provided, the child is more likely to assume a reason exists, and to do what they're asked. In short, trust has been established.
• The "contrast effect" creates a backlash of even worse behavior once the Skinnerian system is no longer in effect, meaning that a child who is highly controlled in the home will exhibit worse behavior at school. Teachers may use certificates, tokens, and endless tchotchke to purchase decent behavior, but can they really compete with the personalized system of manipulation used by some parents? Not likely. For the child whose behavior is economically driven, there is little reason to be well behaved for a teacher.
• Paying a child for positive behavior indicates you have low expectations or even a low opinion of them. Children will internalize these low expectations over time, and therefore act less responsibly.
  

It is frustrating to say the least that teachers want parents to take kids more in hand, which, in our society, usually means setting up more rules and enforcing them with an even stronger economy of rewards and consequences. And yet that system is in fact the root of the problem (along with, in my opinion, overscheduling and lack of unsupervised time).

One last point is that teachers cannot possibly detect all infractions or always be accurate in determining which child caused a given problem. They only have 2 eyes and they may have 30 kids in their room. This means that rewards and punishments cannot possibly be given out fairly in all cases. The same NEA article includes this:

Unfortunately, [Cornelison] and others say, gone are the "good old days," when teachers could rely on parents to catch their backs. Now, one out of two teachers report having been accused by parents themselves of unfair discipline.

Well, naturally. This is the inevitable consequence of having one person attempting to administer a complicated economic system of detentions, certificates, extra homework, tokens, and so on, for 20 to 30 kids. Kids get paper money that they didn't earn, and other kids get held in at recess (incarcerated, so to speak) for crimes they didn't commit. And what does that do to morale?

Unfortunately, rewards and punishments are, to most Americans, what the water is to the fish. Such methods are thought to be natural and right and go unquestioned. The worse the behavior gets, the more Skinnerisms we pile on. I don't know where this will end, but we're not on a good path.