This image portrays a child’s view of the world (and perhaps that of some parents) not a teachers’ view.
Research suggests that older children are much more likely to accept rules if the purpose of the rule is seen as reasonable. Research also suggests that younger children are more likely to see rules as things connecting proscribed behaviours with punishments. Older children have an understanding that rules make communities safe and functional. Younger children are still forming this understanding and are in awe, and sometimes fear, of the dominant adults in the room.
So children in kindergarten will see rules as something handed down from on high. Tiffany Barnikis gives two good examples of this:
‘if you are being silly you have to go to the white chair and you have to think about what you have done’.
‘if you are not listening you have to go in time out … it’s where you have to go off the carpet and sit in a chair and do nothing’.
There is no understanding of what specifically constitutes silly, or why that particular silliness merited a punishment. While the threat of that punishment may discourage the behaviour, it teaches the child nothing about why it needs to be discouraged.
Perhaps we should have an additional picture showing a kindly teacher holding a book of rules for contrast. It’s almost as if teachers of younger children are obliged to be judge and jury in this way when caring for children at the beginning of their learning journey towards citizenship, responsibility, and the harmonious exercise of personal freedom in a rules-based society.
While some teenagers may passively and unquestioningly conform to received rules without question, many others choose to accept some rules and oppose others. As Robert Thornberg says:
“The perception of reasonable meaning behind a rule seems to be – not surprisingly – significant to students’ acceptance of the rule.”
Speak politely, listen to others, and don’t tease are all social rules which are generally understand and supported by children.
Ask before leaving your chair, walk on the left wide of the corridor, and put your reading book back are activity rules which may be conducive to the public good, but to the individual can seem petty and unnecessary.
So with older children it’s increasingly important to teach them the rule’s ‘reasonable meaning’. The problem arises when that meaning is in doubt. Etiquette rules for instance. What actual harm does it do if a child picks their nose or dyes their hair purple?
Safety rules often place a strain on the obedience of the average child because the risk to the individual is often small. The rule is there to protect the school from the cumulative risk that sooner or later someone might be injured.
Why not try explaining cumulative risk to children in the context of your school rules? It’s an ideal focus for understanding Probability.
From the start we should be teaching children the meaning of the rules we apply to them, and trying to help the child see rules as something which applies to adults as much as to children.
But there’s two more things we can draw from this image.
- When our reasonable approach doesn’t work, we may revert to the ‘my way or the highway approach’, ‘because I said so’. That’s OK up to a point – the child might simply not get it yet and time is precious. But that way risks a build-up of resentment and little has been learned. It may also sow the seeds of confrontation because there is nowhere to go if the child opts for trying the highway and things escalate.
- Some children take much longer to learn self-control and understand social rules - for developmental or family reasons. Some children enter their teens still seeing rules as something 'handed down' by adults, and are more likely to shrug off the rules as they shrug off the adults in their search for 'independence'. Many children with special needs or emotional problems are very reactive to coercive approaches.
With these children getting on ‘the right side of the rules’, with the child and family, is essential.
Those who have most difficulty with social compliance are the ones who most need the teacher on their side, helping them understand and adapt to rules which enable harmonious collective activity.
