- Position‹2 of 2
- Yes, after-school detention should be banned
- Argument
Teachers should act as educators, not disciplinarians for their students
Schools are overstepping in their attempts to keep kids in line; schools should only be disciplining students for things that occur in the classroom and the school day itself, rather than bleed out into a student’s everyday life.
The argument
Schools are built and designed as educational institutions. They do not act as juvenile detention centres, nor should they be a second home for students — and this argument treats that distinction as a limit on what a school may legitimately do, not merely as a description of what it usually does. If a student needs either of those things, a blanket "after-school detention" is not enough of a preventative tactic anyway: it responds to behaviour without addressing whatever produced it. Schools can only hope to educate their students as best as possible and encourage them to be productive and contributing members of society. The argument does not deny that discipline is necessary. Teachers do need to have some form of effective punishment on hand to ensure cooperation in class, since teaching is impossible without it. What it objects to is where that authority stops: extending punishment beyond the school day violates the boundaries of what an educational institution should look like, because it claims a portion of a student's own time rather than regulating the lesson the teacher is responsible for. Punishments should be classroom-specific and discussed between a student and teacher, rather than applied generally to a group of misbehaving children — a response addressed to the individual and the incident, rather than a sanction handed down collectively. The cost of getting this wrong falls on the students least able to absorb it. It is important to maintain boundaries between disciplinarians and educators, because if the roles blur, students — especially at-risk ones — may begin to confuse the two, coming to experience the person teaching them as the person punishing them. They may then resent their academic careers altogether, which impacts their future prospects long after the detention itself is forgotten.
Premises
Counter-arguments
It is unreasonable to expect teachers to be able to both teach and provide in-school detention. If misbehavior occurs within class, it must be dealt with after class to avoid further disruption. In addition, brainstorming new and effective forms of discipline, beyond detention, is another added pressure to put on teachers.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The premise sets up a distinction schools have never observed: compulsory education has always carried authority over conduct, and pastoral and disciplinary responsibility is part of what makes a classroom teachable — so "not a juvenile detention centre" rules out something nobody proposed. [Rejecting P2] The location of a sanction is doing all the work and cannot bear it: a detention held after the bell is not more punitive than one held during a lesson, and it is generally preferred precisely because it does not remove the student from teaching — while the argument's own alternative, a private conversation between student and teacher, is a form of discipline and so concedes the role it says teachers should not occupy.