Education Theory

Many educators think the key to education is to lend students a hand. I believe  it is to take hands away.

Behavioral discipline is the key principle of classroom management, and one of the chief complaints among teachers (especially new teachers) is that they are unable to govern students. The remedy is to assign consequences that are strong enough to stop a behavior.

As a blanket philosophical statement, I believe that children are born as blank slates. In the educational literature, this is known as concept of Tabula Rasa. In other words, children are born unencumbered by the social norms of the adult world; indeed, it is ultimately the customs of adulthood that influence children towards conformity.

My solution to classroom discipline is very simple: you must create a consequence that is strong enough to stop bad behaviors such as talking or laughing. Teachers can influence students to become absolutely lifeless in the classroom in order to promote good learning.

I propose that for every misbehavior, we simply chop off a student’s finger. In theory, this should happen once. However, it could happen up to 10 times. Using this method also avoids the creation of criminals by eliminating the misfortune of ‘successive approximation’:

Now you might be asking: what do we do for students who misbehave more than ten times? My opinion is that you pull out their teeth. You may have heard of the mother tongue method. I call this the teacher-tooth method.

When you run out of things to chop off, the next logical step is detention. But here's the reason detention is a bad idea: it's a waste of the student's time... They could be learning. I'm a reasonable person, and detention sounds unreasonable to me.

Ultimately, no student wants to waste his or her time when they can be learning.

I hope some serious societal reflection and change come from this article.