School Rules - doing the right thing and having the right rules

It's first week of term and lovely to see so many familiar student faces back on Campus, clearly delighted to be catching up with friends, and celebrating the adventures and achievements over the long vacation.  And it's also great to see some hundred and twenty students new to the College, who are understandably less assured, trying to find their way around, and make new connections.  So it's understandable that we are fielding a lot of questions around how we do things; our expectations and so on - what are the rules about X?

Getting to know the lay of the land is an important
 part of joining any organisation

This has been a surprisingly difficult question to answer!  Of course any group of people needs some set of agreements if it is to function, but we tend to resist detailed rules where we can.  Some other schools takes very different approaches; I came across an article over the Summer, where a school took a very narrow view on haircuts, and those who broke the rules were sent home or put in isolation.

These haircuts seem to be considered unsuitable by a UK 
school.  Tastes aside, this raises some deeper questions 

Leave aside the issue of appropriate response (is a dodgy haircut reason for isolating a pupil?  Really?)  Also leave aside the difficulty in specifying exactly what is acceptable and what is not (exactly how short and what styles are OK?).  A much more profound issue is all about how much authority schools feel is right to impose.  Of course, students need guidance in many things; but also, when they leave school we want them to be independent, responsible adults, not adults who just follow rules.  So we need to wean students off an environment of rules as they get older.

The deeper issue is, therefore, one of authority, and as such is located in a much broader social context.  Go back 100 years and teachers could largely do what they wanted - including all sorts of things that would land them in jail today.  It's good that we have moved on; and writer Matthew Crawford comments that what initially started of as a general left-wing anti-authority movement in the 60s has now seamlessly merged with individualist right-wing aspirations; post WWII the left seemed to adopt a project of unmasking and discrediting the various forms of cultural authority. In retrospect this seems to have prepared the way for a new right no less committed to the ideal of the unencumbered self (for the right, the ideal actor in a free market) whose freedom could be realised only in a public space cleared of distorting influences through deregulation.  So we seem to have arrived at a political consensus that schools are no longer sources of unquestioned authority, operating largely as they wish; and that has to be a change for the better.  The haircut example I gave above would not have raised any eyebrows a few decades back.  It rightly does now (and these days not all students have eyebrows anyway).

I am not arguing for anarchy; of course we need some agreement on behaviours, and at the extremes, breaches of these might call a place in the school into question.   So what should we be regulating, bearing in mind that we have a wide range of cultures, a range of tastes, and much greater emphasis these days on the individual side of the individual <----> group axis?

The best answer, it seems to me, is to operate according to three principles:

• Default to trust; and trust student to interpret guidance about values, not rules about behaviours.
• As students get older, pass them as much autonomy as possible.
• Recognising that students making mistakes is natural and part of growing up, have structures in place to open learning conversations, not inflict punishments when students make mistakes.

A good mantra, I think is If it's not illegal, immoral, anti-social, or getting in the way of learning, then it's probably OK.  It recognises the purpose of what we are trying to do  - educate principled thinkers, not regulate hair length; it can be summarised in a sentence; and it can be the start of a dialogue with students.

So when I am asked about our rules, the mantra above is what I have been saying; and then I ask what this means for the situation at hand.  As a result, I think the students are learning a lot.  That has to be a good thing.


References

• Crawford, M (2016) The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Horton, H (2018) Pupils threatened with isolation if they sport 'meet me at McDonald's' haircut: Daily Telegraph Online Feb 2018