“It just seems unfair,” six-year-old Zachary reflects in response to his suspension from first grade elementary school . Having recently joined the Cub Scouts , he had eagerly taken his newly acquired camping tool to school to show his classmates at lunchtime how it functioned as a fork, a spoon, and… a knife. A knife. Zachary had been oblivious, as any six-year-old might be expected to be, that his trinity of handy eating utensils would attract 45 days in the district’s reform school. But his school adhered to a strict zero-tolerance policy to weapons, and, “regardless of possessor’s intent,” knives were forbidden. While this case1 may have sparked some controversy, Zachary is by no means an anomalous consequence of this disciplinary regime. In fact, he is one of approximately 7 million schoolchildren2 in the USA who are suspended or expelled from school each year; many of whom are the corollaries of sophisticated technological surveillance, and a sustained commitment to policies, such as zero tolerance, filtered down from the criminal justice system. Zachary is just one example of the very real and adverse consequences of some emergent approaches to school discipline that are becoming more widespread in schools globally. As discussions in the following chapters illustrate, students who are excluded, temporarily or permanently, are at increased risk of school failure, dropping out, and future justice system involvement.
International in scope, this Handbook documents the shifting landscape of school security, surveillance, discipline, and punishment that is marked by these changes, and the impact that this is having on students, teachers, and education around the world. Given that schools are where students become socialised into social roles and expectations as citizens, and where they first encounter formal state authority, these developments are very important indeed. Schools across the world are implementing sophisticated surveillance technologies such as surveillance cameras , digital fingerprinting , location tracking (including radio frequency identification (RFID ) and GPS), suspicionless drug and alcohol testing , online monitoring , and others. They have become sites of rigid security maintenance as well, best illustrated by the spread of police officers stationed in public schools throughout the USA. These officers are typically expected to arrest law violators, while also mentoring students and delivering law-related education (e.g., anti-drug use courses). The presence of law enforcement officers remains very popular, despite a growing body of literature showing that the introduction of police into schools can bring about negative consequences to students. Like harsh punishments , these mechanisms are promoted as ways to protect students while holding misbehaving students accountable.
School Discipline: Cultural Heterogeneity and Policy Transfer
While recognising the importance of cultural heterogeneity, there have been some notable trends transnationally in attitudes and approaches to school discipline and punishment , with a tangible shift towards more punitive measures apparent over the past decade. In recent political analyses, it has been argued that policy transfer—both geographical and institutional—has compelled an international dispersal of comparable policies and practice, including in the education sphere. Specifically, some scholars have claimed that policy typically originates in the USA and then flows to other countries. As Jones and Newburn (2006: 1) attest, “the United States has been either the direct source of, or at least inspiration for, a number of the policy developments in Britain over the past 20 years.” Using established conduits already etched by trade, politics, and media, the policies and ideas exported from the USA are also, arguably, filtering through to inspire educational policy and practice (Taylor 2018a). Wacquant (2001) has noted a “worldwide diffusion” of “made-in-the-USA” ideologies and policies that generate appeal and provide a stamp of legitimacy to educational policy regarding discipline and security. However, far from homogenising, new and diverse strategies of behaviour management are materialising. In broad-brush terms, typically North European countries are beginning to adopt a predominantly restorative approach to discipline (see, e.g., Chapter 7, this volume, for an overview of the Finnish approach), whereas, as exampled above, in the USA, school discipline is largely based on punitive punishments . In the UK and Australia the approach incorporates aspects of authoritarian punishment and restoration , although this is hugely varied by the schools’ characteristics (e.g., public/private, socioeconomic background, and the demographics of students) as discussed by Deakin and Kupchik, this volume. In addition to geographical policy transfer, there is also institutional policy transfer taking place. This relates to the uptake of policies and practices originally associated with the criminal justice system and the military, being applied in the education sectors. This Handbook responds to these substantial shifts in approaches to school discipline and punishment , providing a holistic overview of different trends in different geographical regions, and the flows between them.
Historical Background and Contemporary Trends
It has long been recognised that the modern school is an important site of sociocultural filtration, representing a key institution that socialises young people to adhere to expected norms and values. As the French sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote in 1922, education “is above all the means by which society perpetually recreates the conditions of its very existence” (1922/1956: 123). In the 1970s, scholars began to (re)examine the relationship between school discipline and the industrial workplace, claiming that education was the means by which structures of society were reproduced (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977/2000; Willis 1977). In his seminal text, Paul Willis identified the modern school as the institution where the working class were prepared for their employment in the factory. Essentially they were “learning to labour.” Since then, post-industrialism in an era of advanced capitalism has seen some significant changes to working practices, and mirroring these substantial changes in socio-political and economic outlooks, the functions of schooling have also been transformed. This body of work clearly illustrates the importance of schooling in shaping not only the lives of youth, but also families, communities, industry, and other social institutions as well.
This Handbook brings together leading scholars working across the multidisciplinary fields of education, sociology, criminology, psychology, and critical security studies to identify, explicate, and problematise the new developments that have reshaped schools. There are multiple themes threaded throughout this Handbook that interrelate to explain the emergence of new regimes of school-based security and discipline, from a fear of crime (whether perceived or real) to the increasing connectivity between education and the criminal justice system, from neoliberalising school policy to the militarisation of the curriculum . These thematics are examined throughout this Handbook with contributing authors highlighting and reflecting on nuanced and variant parts of the jigsaw. By harnessing the scholarly reflections in one collection, we hope that the full, historically informed, picture of contemporary developments in school discipline, surveillance, and punishment emerges. Outcomes are often longitudinal and structural and so the importance lies in linking policies and practices that may have been implemented several years, even decades, ago with outcomes that may only become apparent much later in the guise of suspensions , expulsions , climates of mistrust, criminalisation of youth, and so on. For example, Kupchik and Catlaw (2015) have illustrated long-term consequences of school behaviour management to citizenship practices , finding that students who are suspended from school (and thereby excluded from a supposedly democratic institution) are less likely to vote and volunteer in their communities years later, as adults. Similarly, a cross-national analysis of the disproportionate surveillance of young people (Ruck et al. 2008), of which schools are major contributors, found that the current generation are growing up with a profound mistrust of the state, and “cynical views about a broad-based ‘common good’,” thus undermining an already fractured belief in democratic participation amongst young people.
As will become apparent throughout this volume, there are multiple and varied reasons for shifting patterns of school discipline and control. One in particular is a “culture of fear” (Furedi 2009), underp...