School punishment is a divisive topic. On one side stand the tough minded: to them, it seems obvious that communal life must be governed by rules. And rules, if they are to function as rules at all, must be backed by punishment. On the other side stand the tender hearted: to them, it seems that inflicting hardship on children for breaking rules they had no part in drawing up is a form of tyranny.

The tough minded, focused on the need for order and propriety, are ready to impose penalties for the most trivial of infractions. The tender-hearted, focused on the dignity and sensitivity of children, find themselves reluctant to punish even the most egregious offences.

The prospects of bridging this divide are made bleaker by its alignment with a still deeper schism in our thinking about education: that between traditionalists and progressives. The tough-minded stance on punishment sits easily with a pedagogical preference for teacher-centred instruction, subject knowledge, competition and compulsion; the tender-hearted stance with a preference for child-centred instruction, experiential learning, cooperation and choice. For as long as the war between traditionalists and progressives rages on, there may seem little hope of our coming to a shared view on school punishment.

Hopeless or not, we should at least try. Precisely because school punishment involves inflicting hardship on children, it matters a great deal that we have a good - and shared - understanding of whether, why and when it is justified. It matters that schools can explain their punishment policies to pupils and parents in ways that make sense to them, and it matters that pupils in different lessons, schools and local authorities are punished in similar ways for similar kinds of misconduct.

We would do well to set aside our preconceptions about whether schools today punish children too much or too little, too severely or too lightly, for too many infractions or too few, and try to get a little clarity on what justifies punishment in the first place.

Two preliminary points. First, punishment is often unhelpfully defined as the authorised infliction of pain or harm on wrongdoers in return for their wrongdoing. In what follows, I take it as read that schools are never justified in inflicting pain or harm on children. Corporal punishment is off the table, as are all punitive measures that might cause children injury or set back their interests. Punishment is properly understood as the authorised infliction of hardship on wrongdoers in return for their wrongdoing, and only painless and non-harmful forms of hardship are permissible in schools.

Second, we cannot avoid the difficult ethical questions raised by punishment merely by declining to use the word. The curious but currently fashionable practice of using such euphemisms as “consequences” and “interventions” to describe punitive measures in schools probably doesn’t herald the terminal decline into Orwellian Newspeak its detractors fear, but it does threaten to disguise the justificatory burden borne by anyone taking such measures. Whatever names we give to the hardships we inflict on children when they do wrong, we should keep in mind that we are, in fact, punishing them.

What warrants punishment?

Now to our central problem. Recall the animating thought of the tough-minded stance: communal life must be governed by rules, and rules, if they are to function as rules at all, must be backed by punishment. The first part of this thought is right: any sort of coordinated human interaction or activity - anything we might be tempted to call communal life - depends on our recognising and following rules. There are rules of language, of civility, of morality, of law; we follow rules whenever we play a game, drive a car, cook a meal or buy a book. Some rules are explicitly articulated, others largely unspoken; some are highly specific, others quite general; some admit of few or no exceptions, others are mere rules of thumb. Rules often serve as constraints on our freedom, for our own safety or the safety of others. But, just as often, they are the enabling conditions of our cooperative projects and endeavours.

It is the second part of the thought that should give us pause. There is an initial temptation to say that rules cannot do their work unless there is a mechanism of enforcement: unless there are parties authorised to punish violations. But a moment’s reflection reveals that rather a lot of the rules we follow are unenforced. Many of us, for example, are assiduous in our compliance with the rules governing correct use of the apostrophe, but greengrocers continue to violate it with impunity - and, when pressed, even those most appalled by these shopfront atrocities are willing to concede that punishment would be a disproportionate response. Again, there is widespread allegiance to the rule of etiquette that requires chewing with one’s mouth closed, but no one seriously thinks that those who break it should be punished.

There are some kinds of rule for which mechanisms of enforcement are unnecessary because failure to comply with them is straightforwardly self-defeating. Consider the playground game of tag with its constitutive rule that, when you are tagged, you become “it”. When a tagged child refuses to become “it”, the game grinds to a halt. By violating the game’s constitutive rule, the child frustrates her own desire to play. There is no need to punish her infraction: better to let it dawn on her that whatever reason she has for playing the game is also a reason to play by the rules.

It was, incidentally, with cases like this in mind that progressive educators first began toying with the idea that we might do away with school punishment and instead let children learn from the consequences of their misconduct. The picture works well enough for the class of rules whose violation is self-defeating. But it soon breaks down with rules whose violation is advantageous to the violator. That’s how schools have ended up in the odd position of using the term “consequences” to describe measures that are self-evidently punitive.

At any rate, it is clear that not all rules must be backed by punishment. Rules are indeed ubiquitous in school life, but it doesn’t follow that punishment must be ubiquitous too. Perhaps a sizable proportion of school rules are analogous to the rules of correct punctuation, mealtime etiquette and playground games. If so, the inclination of the tough minded to put mechanisms of enforcement in place for school rules in general is badly misguided.

What is needed here is a principled way of distinguishing the kinds of rule for which punishment of violations is warranted from the kinds for which it is not. Happily, the legal philosopher HLA Hart has proposed just such a way. Hart observes that there is a subset of rules whose requirements we tend to characterise as obligations or duties. While the language of “ought”, “should”, “right” and “wrong” is at home in all rule talk (the greengrocer’s apostrophe is wrong; one ought to chew with one’s mouth closed), the language of “obligation” and “duty” is reserved for rules that carry a certain kind of weight. Hart calls these rules of obligation.

Rules of obligation have three defining features. They are backed by punishment or great social pressure; they are necessary for the survival of a social group or the success of its most foundational endeavours; and compliance with them is sometimes costly, inconvenient or contrary to self-interest. The second and third of these features explain why the first is necessary: it is because compliance with rules of obligation both matters very much and often conflicts with self-interest that it requires mechanisms of enforcement.

Finding the middle way

My proposal, then, is that we are justified in inflicting hardship on pupils for violating school rules when - and only when - the violated rules are rules of obligation. And there is no doubt that some school rules satisfy this condition. First, and most obviously, some school rules are moral rules, and moral rules are paradigmatically rules of obligation. Morality is the system of basic constraints on conduct necessary to avert conflict and sustain cooperation in human social groups. Schools prohibit violence, theft, bullying and cheating because the duty to refrain from these things is binding on all people in all social contexts. Moral wrongdoing is always properly punishable.

Secondly, and perhaps more controversially, I think the condition is satisfied by school rules necessary to facilitate the practice of education: prohibitions on interrupting or obstructing teachers as they teach, and prohibitions on distracting or disturbing pupils as they learn. In other contexts, interrupting speakers or distracting people who are busy is merely discourteous: the rules prohibiting such conduct are just rules of etiquette. But the great importance of education, combined with the strength of the temptation to disrupt it felt by large numbers of pupils, turn the prohibitions on interrupting and distracting into rules of obligation in the context of educational activity. Members of school communities have a duty not to behave in ways that prevent teachers from teaching or pupils from learning.

What also seems clear, however, is that many school rules, including some that pupils are routinely punished for breaking, do not satisfy the condition. In one of the schools I attended as a child, there was a rule that required all pupils to stand whenever the headteacher entered the room. I do not know how many schools still have this rule; it strikes me now as a quaint relic of a more deferential age. But wherever it is in force, the rule cannot reasonably be classified as anything other than a rule of civility. It specifies a way of showing courtesy to an authority figure, and those who violate it can be convicted of bad manners at most. Teachers may issue reminders about the rule, explain the reasons for it, urge pupils to obey it and berate them for disobeying it. But they may not treat a courtesy as a duty and apply sanctions to the discourteous.

The same goes for familiar rules about pupils’ dress. Take the rule, common in schools with a uniform policy or dress code, that shirts must be tucked in. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that smartness is desirable and that tucked-in shirts are smarter than untucked ones. These suppositions may be sufficient to warrant a rule of etiquette, along with the urging and berating required to uphold it. But they are quite insufficient to warrant a rule of obligation. The problem of untucked shirts is not nearly weighty enough to justify the authorised infliction of hardship on children.

If this is right, there is a middle way between the stances of the tough minded and the tender hearted. The tough minded are too cavalier in their readiness to punish infractions of every school rule; the tender hearted too timid in their reluctance to punish infractions of any. Punitive measures are justified when pupils fail to meet their obligations. For rule violations of other kinds, gentler methods of correction must be found.

Michael Hand is professor of philosophy of education at the University of Birmingham, a contributor to the Pedagogies of Punishment research project and author of A Theory of Moral Education (Routledge)

This article originally appeared in the 30 October 2020 issue under the headline “School rules: OK?”