As someone who is both a former student with authority issues and a former high school teacher, this story leaves me with a whole bunch of feelings. You would think that teachers have the maturity to be more or less immune to the impressions of teenagers, but it's actually quite a challenge to maintain face [1] as the instructional leader of dozens of humans. In my experience in Teach For America, it was a fashionable meme that it's the adults that make education hard, not the children. But I think that's not quite honest. While adults are ultimately responsible for everything that's wrong with education, on a day to day basis, you're put in very delicate and stressful situations with children, who are impulsive, emotional, and myopic. It's really, really hard to deal with adolescents at scale.
Yet, in this case, like so many others, it's very clear that at some point, some of the adults decided that it was appropriate to wage total war on the child who offended them. They allowed their hurt feelings to suspend their sense of empathy and proportionality. Even worse, as the role models for the school, they set a standard of absolutism and intolerance. I can identify with them, while also seeing how badly they failed to take the high road.
It's interesting how this same dynamic has played out in criminal justice as well. We struggle with the ability to treat the incarcerated in a humane manner, to hold police accountable for their excesses, to provide security without domestic militarization, and to fully rehabilitate and reintegrate ex-cons into society.
I guess it's probably an inherent tension in human society, when there is a boundary of authority. I just hope we can learn and progress.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%2...
Yet, in this case, like so many others, it's very clear that at some point, some of the adults decided that it was appropriate to wage total war on the child who offended them. They allowed their hurt feelings to suspend their sense of empathy and proportionality. Even worse, as the role models for the school, they set a standard of absolutism and intolerance. I can identify with them, while also seeing how badly they failed to take the high road.
It's interesting how this same dynamic has played out in criminal justice as well. We struggle with the ability to treat the incarcerated in a humane manner, to hold police accountable for their excesses, to provide security without domestic militarization, and to fully rehabilitate and reintegrate ex-cons into society.
I guess it's probably an inherent tension in human society, when there is a boundary of authority. I just hope we can learn and progress.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%2...