Collective punishment for the innocent based on non-crimes committed by others - a high speed technique on a short road to illegitimacy

Excellent piece, YOU WILL UNDERGO RACIAL SENSITIVITY TRAINING by Gail Heriot. Excellent, as most her pieces are.

When I was a child, teachers used to punish the whole class when they couldn’t identify an actual wrongdoer. It didn’t make us resolve to do better. Instead, it greatly annoyed us.

The initiating event is a couple of University of Tennessee students behaving like the Virginia Democratic political leadership, wearing blackface on a social media site. Obviously, while in bad taste, there is nothing illegal ab
out this. But the University of Tennessee's response is to punish everyone by making them spend time going through racial sensitivity training. A doubly bone-headed approach given that such training has no demonstrated positive impact. It is basically a ritualistic purification ceremony with no constructive benefit.

The perversity and idiocy of this approach is developed in Collective punishment at the University of Tennessee By Hans Bader.

It may be a manufactured retroactive assessment on my part, but my general sense is that while collective punishment occurred when I was a child, it was somewhat different. I do not offer the observation as evidentiary - it is an accumulation of experiences across highly heterogeneous schooling systems in Venezuela, Libya, Nigeria, England, Sweden and the US.

What I recollect is that collective punishment was used rarely and under two different scenarios. First was the bargain scenario. Someone does something that needs to be punished. The adults offer a deal to the children - "You have until X for the guilty party to come to the office and confess or you will all be punished." It was an ugly and unjust bargain but there it was. Of course the dynamic was to create communal pressure among the children to themselves force the guilty party forward or, more simply, to rat him or her out. In general, the children knew who had broken the rules. They also agreed that the broken rule was worthwhile to everyone. They agreed that the guilty party was indeed doing something wrong. The children also viewed the administration as legitimate. We understood why they wanted to enforce the rule, even if we did not like how it was being enforced.

The second, and much more rare, scenario was when the administration deemed the entirety of the student body to have been complicit in the rule-breaking. In this rare circumstance, the core issue was less that the rule had been broken, but that there was disagreement between the administration and the students as to the legitimacy rule of the rule in the first place. An instance of Irish Democracy or jury annulment.

In any event, the use of collective punishment was rare, selective, and deliberate.

In contrast to what I saw when my kids were coming along. Much more frequent use of the technique, much more casual use, and usually for more cosmetic reasons.

The difference between time periods, I think, is that it used to be seen as a legitimate, if reviled, technique to accomplish goals broadly agreed to by both the student body and the administration. Now it is used much more casually and it is used for reasons seen as illegitimate. The administration is undermining its own authority by seeming to be cowardly, lazy, fearful.

Why? I think another difference from the past has been a fracturing of the social contract and a loss of confidence, even fear, on the part of adults. One reason collective punishment was used less in the past was that teachers were more confident about the legitimacy of their own actions and authority. Tommy in the back of the room pulls Annie's hair and makes her shriek. The teacher didn't see it but knows Tommy, can see all the students watching Tommy. On the balance of probabilities, teacher sends Tommy to the headmaster for punishment. End of story.

Nowadays, with helicopter parents, group sensitivities, overindulgence of process protections at the most refined micro level, teachers can no longer take the risk of making judgments based on an individual child. The child will protest, the privileged parents will threaten and complain, advocacy groups will be deployed, the administration will back down. Far easier to punish everyone rather than punish the individual wrong-doer.

And thus we slide away from consent of the governed, rule of law, equality before the law and away from freedom. By the very institutions, schools (though secondary to families themselves), most involved in setting the expectations of children as to what is right and wrong. Our schools are teaching children that justice is lazy, cowardly, and arbitrary.