Comment by munificent
Comment by munificent 4 days ago
> Do you really want to force good students to have to be in the same classroom as the kind of students who get expelled from public schools?
Where precisely do you think "the kind of kids who get expelled from public schools" should be? I mean that literally, concretely.
Do we send them home where they are statistically much more likely to be abused and not have access to reliable nutrition? Imprison them? Ship them to some sort of Lord of the Flies island?
Do I want disruptive kids in the same room as my kids? Not really. Is it the least bad place I can think of to put them? Unfortunately, yes.
This is a deeply hard problem. Sure, if you only care about well-behaved kids it's easy: kick out the bad eggs and forget they ever existed. But if you consider that those bad kids are actual people who will still participate in your society, you need some solution for how to help them.
>Where precisely do you think "the kind of kids who get expelled from public schools" should be? I mean that literally, concretely.
That's really the make-or-break question. IIRC, it was kids who constantly got into fights. Kids caught with knives, drugs, or firecrackers; kids in gangs, etc. It was kids who constantly disrupted the classroom, even after being assigned to after school detention multiple times. It was kids who disrespected teachers (cussing them out, threatening them, attacking them, etc). It was kids that got pregnant. It was even kids that cheated because it was taken more seriously back then.
The levels were: write sentences on the board after class, get sent to the principal's office with a parent call, get after school detention, get after school detention a whole lot, get expelled. Sometimes like in the case of knives, it would go straight to expulsion.
Today, teachers will send kids to the principal's office to get them out of the classroom and they just get sent back to continue disruption. Back then, teachers were expected to teach and the administration dealt with unruly kids. Disciplining kids who are bad is hard on the heart, but in the long term, not disciplining them is way worse for them. There's no discipline today in schools (other than getting arrested, which really should be avoided at all costs). There hasn't been discipline in schools for a generation. It shows not only in schools but in society as a whole.