Overview:
The erosion of traditional authority in society has profoundly impacted classroom dynamics, leaving teachers struggling to manage student behavior.
“I’d like you to go back to your seat,” I said after the third reminder for off-task behavior. “What!? Why?” she exclaimed, apparently totally stymied as to why I’d ask her to do such a thing. “Because a few minutes ago I told you that if you keep socializing, I would move you back to your own seat and, unfortunately, you are still socializing.” She rolled her eyes, picked up her pages, and walked back to her desk. She kicked her chair before she sat down in it. Two seconds later, she raised her hand and asked if she could go to the bathroom.
When I first began teaching in 2005, I labored under the assumption that children were much the same as they were when I was in middle school. In many ways, they were creative, playful, determined, silly, etc. But in another way, they were very different: students did not adhere to my expectations for appropriate school rules. They spoke when they wanted to, they stood up and left the room if they felt like it, they made messes and did not clean up after themselves, and they argued with me, the teacher, regularly.
A Look at the Past
At first, I was dumbfounded. School, to me, had been a sacred place. I still remember the smell of the books, the teacher’s shoes, the yearly fill-in-the-bubble tests, the self-directed kickball game at recess, and the slant of the sun through the window in the giant library. At school, you follow the rules, not because you’re afraid, but because it’s SCHOOL! The thought never occurred to me to argue with my teachers. Talking without raising my hand would’ve been a blasphemy. In third grade, I literally wet my pants waiting for my teacher to finish talking to a classmate because I didn’t want to interrupt her to ask to use the bathroom. I knew there were some students at my school who did not share the same feelings about the hallowed halls of Schrah Elementary, but these were all outliers. My days were predictable, and I understood my place.
As a new teacher myself, I thought maybe this challenging behavior was singular to my classroom because I was inexperienced, but then I saw it in other classrooms at my school as well, with established teachers. Then I thought maybe it was singular to my school, which is an extraordinarily liberal school in an extraordinarily liberal town in an extraordinarily liberal state. I railed against it for a while, learned some new skills, adapted, and learned to live with it. But then I started to talk to other teachers in other cities and in other states and I realized that this was not an experience unique to my classroom or my school or my state.
The Battle Between Freedom and Authority
In the first sentences of her 1954 essay “What is Authority?” Hannah Arendt boldly states that “authority has vanished from the modern world.” Arendt describes authority as a system of tradition, a scaffolding of understanding on how to behave, passed down through generations. True authority doesn’t use coercion, violence, or persuasion; it is simply an accepted hierarchy deemed right and legitimate. At the opposite end of the spectrum is liberalism, egalitarianism, and freedom to do as you wish.
According to Arendt, authority was already gone by the time I was in middle school, but it appears that we have much further to fall. The last gasps of authority were still working well enough for me in the 1980s as a white, middle-class student whose parents were also teachers. I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool Arendt fan, but her description of the dance between liberalism and conservatism that hastened the disappearance of authority rings poignantly, even seventy years later. She explains that liberals are fighting against the loss of freedom and conservatives are fighting against the loss of authority, and both say if the other wins, the end result will be totalitarianism. In Arendt’s words,
No doubt, both can produce excellent documentation for their findings. Who would deny the serious threats to freedom from all sides since the beginning of the century, and the rise of all kinds of tyranny, at least since the end of the First World War? Who can deny, on the other hand, that disappearance of practically all traditionally established authorities has been one of the most spectacular characteristics of the modern world?… If we look upon the conflicting statements of conservatives and liberals with impartial eyes, we can easily see that the truth is equally distributed between them and that we are in fact confronted with a simultaneous recession of both freedom and authority in the modern world. …One can even say that the numerous oscillations in public opinion…have resulted only in further undermining both, confusing the issues, blurring the distinctive lines between authority and freedom, and eventually destroying the political meaning of both.
The Evolution of the Relationship Between Children and Adults
A little research showed that in the United States, the lay of the land had been shifting for decades, even centuries, prior to my elementary school years, as the battle between freedom and authority gained in pitch and intensity. Increased industrialization in the US drew workers from smaller farming communities, breaking up social ties deeply rooted in prior generations. Family dynamics and gender roles changed as we moved from a traditional agricultural model to a job-based economy. Labor disputes and rebellion empowered the disenfranchised working class and broke down the idea that management alone called the shots.
Doctor Spock’s book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care was a best seller in 1946. Spock encouraged parents to be more flexible, to see their children’s needs and attend to them, a view that was both anathema and elixir to prevailing wisdom.
The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War protests in the ‘60s both dealt serious blows to the accepted hierarchies of the time. These movements spurred youth counterculture and anti-establishment sentiments that dethroned multiple norms that had been previously widely accepted as central to our communities including religion, nationalism, and the social construct of race and gender.
A Nation at Risk report, released by the Secretary of Education in 1983, warned that US schools were failing and spurred significant reform by the Federal Government, including the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and No Child Left Behind. These top-down increases in standardized testing and accountability amplified the mistrust of both educators and administration. Later on, these initiatives would be given a steroid injection with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, which incentivized states to raise standards, align policy, and increase assessments.
The advancing field of psychology shifted teaching away from rote memorization and punishment toward emotional intelligence and active learning in the eighties and nineties, and further understanding of brain development and trauma informed teaching at the turn of the century moved education even further into the social and emotional realm, which has, in some cases, led to more distrust of the institution of school. The last half of the twentieth century saw a significant decline in parents’ deference to the expertise of educators and schools in general, evidenced by a recent Gallop poll showing that parental trust in schools is at an all-time low.
An Unexpected Crisis
As educators, we have interactive front-row seats to observe the results of this oscillation on our students. Seventy years ago, Hannah Arendt described the problem perfectly.
The most significant symptom of the crisis, indicating its depth and seriousness, is that it has spread to…such areas as child-rearing and education, where authority in the widest sense has always been accepted as a natural necessity, obviously required as much by…the helplessness of the child.
She goes on to say that if this most basic level of authority between adults and children is no longer apparent, it’s safe to say that “all the old time-honored metaphors and models for authoritarian relations” can safely be called moot. “Practically as well as theoretically, we are no longer in a position to know what authority really is.”
The fight between liberal (individual rights, equity, and governmental protection of these rights) and conservative (faith in custom and tradition with less oversight) values is spectacularly vivid in the United States today. The disenfranchised classes are no longer willing to be controlled, the hierarchy has been broken down, and those who liked the old system want it back. But there is a deeper problem that’s been percolating in the mix and is coming to the top. With the macrocosmic death of authority on a larger political scale has come the microcosmic death of authority in schools, which has yielded a concerning result: children are a disenfranchised class, and they are no longer willing to be controlled by teachers.
Can Children Be Equal to Adults?
I was talking to a colleague recently about why our students continue to run in the hallways. We’ve explained to them why it’s a rule, explained why it’s dangerous, and a few of them have even sustained minor injuries, and yet they still need to be reminded daily to walk. When we make them go back or take five in the office, some of them seem surprised or annoyed that we’ve given them a consequence.
Perhaps what I would have called decreasing impulse control in our students is actually a symptom of the disappearance of authority. After decades of fracturing hierarchies, parental mistrust of institutionalized education trickling down at the dinner table, and an onslaught of information offered through social media, children don’t inherently believe that the system or the adults to whom they’ve been entrusted have the correct answers.
In my experience, most of our children want to do the right thing; some of them are just breaking the rules before they even notice. They don’t have the community-supported, legitimized-by-time, ingrained sense of what they can do, which might boil down to just a sliver of a hesitation between impulse and action, a millisecond of reflection on whether or not what they’re doing is a good idea. And when they get caught breaking a rule, not only do they not stop the behavior, they sometimes blame the person who caught them.
William Lyman Camp describes the issue in his book, Understanding the Adult-Child Relationship.
In earlier times, one could get cooperation and submission through punishment. Today, pressure from without is ineffective. When a parent punishes a child, that punishment has been patterned through 8,000 years of civilization. When parents punish children, often the only children who respond to the punishment are the ones who don’t need it. So when one wants to influence by punishment, he or she must continually punish, and even then, the results will only last for a short time. And what is worse, when one punishes a child, this child’s sense of equality disappears. He feels that if you have the right to punish him, then he has the same right to punish you, too.
Freedom is Great, If Your Brain is Developed
To be clear, my position is not advocating for a reduction of freedom. I’m a mad fan of justice, inclusivity, challenging tradition, and ending oppression. With greater freedom comes the potential for higher expertise, creativity, health, sense of agency, empowerment, justice, and engagement. Shifts in the cultural attitude toward freedom can create higher personal fulfillment. Still, it also requires individuals to do more work in defining their own values, self-reflection to decide if their behaviors are matching those values, and figuring out how to shift if they do not. This work takes time, space, motivation, intellectual capacity, and financial means. Children don’t have reliable access to any of these.
We cannot expect children to be able to follow their own authority because they don’t have enough experiential data or a fully developed prefrontal cortex. Without a developed prefrontal cortex, students can know and understand the rules but still choose to break them regularly because they’re relying on their amygdala to make decisions instead. The amygdala controls instinct and emotion rather than logic, reason, and regulation. In the absence of the prefrontal cortex and a hierarchical structure of authority, children need a new system of tradition, one that allows them to rest and to feel secure in expectations. Without it, they might struggle with stability, discipline, right and wrong, overwhelm, impulse control, decision making, executive function, and long-term thinking. Adding in trauma, learning disabilities, neurodiversity, and intersectionality makes it even more difficult.
Of course, there’s always been the old “kids these days” gap, but this change is different, as evidenced by an increasing rate of suicide in children (up 62% since 2007), an increase in students requesting 504 accommodations, and increasing rates of depression and anxiety in teenagers. The Institute of Education Science School Pulse Panel said that eight out of ten public schools reported “stunted behavioral and socioemotional development in their students” in the years following the COVID shutdown. Lest we jump to the conclusion that the prognosis is completely grim, we also see evidence of increasing IQ test scores and, though they spend less time outside, they have access to many more ways to express themselves creatively, something I see them doing every day at school.
I often empathize with my students and the high pressures they face..I rush them through their day, whisking them from math to lunch, to gym, to music. As soon as they get settled in one place, I tell them to clean up and move on to the next. They all have to learn the same subjects, even though they all have wildly different skill sets. They’re trying to learn how to make friends and we’re trying to get them to remember how to divide fractions. They’re contending with online influencers, addictive video games, drugs that are easier to get, and TikTok trends galore. It’s no wonder they feel stressed out by us! As soon as one of us shows up, they can be sure we’re about to tell them what to do, with perfect assuredness that they will do it, despite the fact that they are busier than ever.
Creating Something New
We cannot (nor would I want to) go back in time. Our task as educators is to see what is, draw conclusions, and make new plans. We moved away from autocracy in a cultural and social evolution. Our students gained personal freedom (some more than others) but lost authority and tradition in the process. Some traditions are better left behind: gender oppression, racial oppression, and authoritarian punishment and reward. But some have left us struggling: loss of a shared sense of identity, a mooring in shared expectations for behavior (I’m referring here to behaviors like running in the halls, not expectations for racial or gender groups), and deeply connected community. We can’t rely on parents to fix the problem; they are having problems of their own in this shifting climate. So what are our options?
When I started researching this challenge a year ago, I came up with these questions:
- How do we create a balance between structure and freedom?
- How do we create external authority while not becoming rigid and authoritarian?
- How do we help children do what is right because they understand that it’s important, rather than because they fear punishment?
- How do we create a system of shared values rather than imposed values?
- How do we give students room to make mistakes and process them afterward so that they can develop their internal values?
- How do we create systems that feel fair to students AND teachers?
- How do we foster creativity and mental well-being when our system still prioritizes academics and competition?
The answers to these questions are not easy and won’t be solved in one fell swoop. In my opinion, the most obvious place to start is admitting to ourselves that things have changed and that they’re not going back to the way they were. If teachers are still trying to use old methods as a foundation for student compliance (relying on the belief/structure that children should just do as they are told because it’s a systemic cultural expectation), they will likely feel frustrated and overwhelmed, which can only make the problems worse.
Once we’ve accepted this, we can start working on new structures to give our students relief. Some solutions I’ve found to help are things like adding in more community building exercises (even super simple activities like taking fifteen minutes a week to decorate post it notes to place around school are great), teaching (and modeling) skills like emotional regulation and healthy boundary setting, and making anonymous surveys for the students to fill out with questions like “What is something that makes you feel slightly uncomfortable but you’d like to get better at?” and sharing the results. Even small changes can add up to empowering students and harnessing that power for good.
Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation says “You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.” The path forward will be one of self awareness and reflection, examination of biases, deep listening, compassion, accountability, and lots of practice. I can hardly wait to see what we can come up with, together.
Roz Romatz is a principal and middle school math, science, and humanities teacher in Eugene, Oregon. She grew up in Saginaw, Michigan and graduated from Central Michigan University, with a double major in earth science and religion. She went on to earn a certificate from the Eugene Waldorf Teacher Education Program and took a job at a k-8 Waldorf inspired charter school. She spends her free time writing, reading, hunting for mushrooms, cooking, and camping.
