If you ask someone to name a piece of psychological research, the chances are they will pick Stanley Milgram’s infamous study of obedience to authority, commonly known as “the electric shock experiment”.

Driven by a desire to understand the horrors of the Holocaust, Milgram wanted to explore how easy it would be to convince good people to do bad things. He created an elaborate set-up in which a naive participant in the experiment believed they were giving electric shocks to another volunteer. The shocks were fake and the volunteer was a stooge - although, of course, Milgram’s subjects didn’t know this.

The results were that a staggering two-thirds of subjects were coerced into giving the maximum, and supposedly fatal, shock of 450 volts.

How, then, can the lessons of Milgram’s research from more than 50 years ago help us to understand many of the behavioural issues we face in schools today?

Unfree agents

Milgram’s explanation for why a group of ordinary individuals were relatively easily convinced to hurt a total stranger relied on what he called agentic shift - the notion that once people give up a sense of personal responsibility to an authority figure, morality and good sense follow swiftly behind.

Part of the nature of school is that we often force our students to make this agentic shift by handing over responsibility for their actions to authority figures: their teachers and the school system itself. It’s an inevitable outcome of a system that makes following rules and obeying the commands of others such a central plank of its existence.

As an example of how totally students submit to this regime, when introducing these ideas to my psychology classes, I would ask a student to stand up and walk to the front of the class. As soon as they had done so, I would tell them to return to their seat, the demonstration of blind obedience complete. Not once in over 20 years has a student even questioned the instruction, let alone refused.

Of course, students don’t always comply with the rules but, for the most part, that’s exactly what they are doing, often contrary to their wishes. So, when they do snap and decide to take a stand, it can feel like a lot of resentment comes pouring out all at once.

As Milgram observed, there can be deeply troubling outcomes when we convince someone that they’re not responsible for their own actions. Putting upwards of 1,000 adolescents into this position day in, day out, all confined in the same building, is clearly a situation worth reassessing.

If we want young people to make smart, thoughtful choices about their behaviour, we need to start from a point where they believe they have a certain amount of choice and agency. Mostly, our schools strip that away from day one.

Now, schools must have rules and apply sanctions for non-compliance - I’m not arguing for a laissez-faire free-for-all. But maybe what Milgram can teach us is that we should attempt to get everyone on board with the rules to begin with, so that students don’t feel as though they’re simply complying with someone else’s ideas of how things should be run.

A yearly opportunity for all students to suggest changes to school rules would be easy to implement. Individually, we should endeavour to steer clear of any explanations to students about why they should follow the rules of the “because I’m the teacher and I say so” type. This can only take away any sense of meaningful compliance when, surely, what we want is for students to follow the rules because they recognise the benefits, not just because those are the rules.

Does this happen? Not often. In addition, there’s a tendency in most schools to introduce ever more rules and a greater range of sanctions for defiance. It may sound radical, but when redesigning school policies, it could end up being far more effective to see how many rules can be removed rather than added. There are few more uncomfortable and potentially damaging conversations a teacher can have with a student than trying to justify a rule that doesn’t make sense.

Endorsing dissent

Schools are complex institutions where unequal power relationships are, to a certain extent, inevitable and necessary. Perhaps what we can learn from Milgram is that attempting to subjugate students without due regard for their right to dissent - or to at least question the rules - creates a situation that leaves everybody feeling frustrated.

Not convinced? If you want evidence that what we’re doing at the moment may not be working, look no further than the fact that, in virtually every school, the same minority of students end up in detention or on report time after time. If we want our students to turn out like the 30 per cent of Milgram’s subjects who resisted the white-coated authority figure’s demands to electrocute an innocent stranger, maybe we should start to get them more involved in the decision-making process today.

Callum Jacobs is a psychology and sociology teacher

This article originally appeared in the 14 June 2019 issue under the headline “Do we want to raise children who just follow orders?”