Student suspensions: Attack the cause or symptom?

Straitjacketed prescriptions to discipline a tough student often misses the target. Rather than suspend them, a holistic approach that convinces the students too must be thought of

You don’t agree with something, or someone, you push it away. You move it outside your field of vision or activity, to a space where you no longer have to deal with it. In effect, you excise it from the institutional body.

If the thing has a life beyond itself, it finds ways to regenerate, to take up residence in new quarters, gradually making its presence felt once more, requiring, once again, an excision.

Forgive the dramatic metaphor, but let's sit with it for a moment and think about how this might play out in our schools and colleges.

Disciplinary processes in educational institutions take a variety of routes, with the intention to achieve specific outcomes. Generally, the idea is to correct the process or address the instance that has been identified as aberrant. And almost always, this resides in the body of an individual who represents the source or manifestation of the aberration. From there it's a simple equation. Remove the body and erase the aberration.

Most of the time, of course, the act is not serious enough to warrant complete removal. There are a range of interim measures that can be applied, from a simple scolding given in private to a more public dressing down intended to humiliate and produce remorse leading to compliance with the system's rules, to more material consequences such as penalties that could be both financial and academic.

So, when a student breaks the rules of a classroom, he or she might attract mild to severe censure from the teacher, maybe asked to sit outside the class, be taken to the principal, asked to submit an apology or pay a fine, or the parents may be called in. And most of the time, the indiscipline the act which offended the rules, processes or the culture of the institution and its members is contained in this manner.

Despite the lofty, liberatory aims of education, we cannot get away from the fact that most of the institutions that we have built to provide education are run within a strict system of rules and procedures ( some might even say, oppressive), and going against these can have serious consequences.

But let's come to the most extreme form of discipline practised by our educational institutions ( now that we have at least on paper outlawed corporal punishment), which is expulsion, and its close relative, suspension. There's an eerie parallel between a society that overemphasizes incarceration as a mode of enforcing norms and an education system that resorts to suspension as the preferred mode of disciplining.

The more enlightened institutions take this step only in very rare cases, but if one looks at the situation in higher education over the past decade or so, we find several instances of suspension for reasons that may be read as largely political. These include protesting against institutional strictures seen as unfair, or voicing political opinions of various hues, or exercising the right to free expression on social and cultural issues.

There have also been cases of violence between student factions, and, in very rare instances, violence directed at faculty and staff, and often these attract measures that go beyond the powers of the institution.

I am not including in this gamut personally motivated attacks on individuals which are a different issue entirely. The students involved are usually referred to an internal disciplinary committee, or the proctorial board, which decides on the nature of punishment.

What does suspension achieve? The logic is that the removal of the disruptive element- the student- will allow the system to settle back into its old equilibrium, while also forcing the student to reflect and reassess his or her actions. Rarely is there a dialogue on what led to the disruption in the first place, or how it might be used as a learning point for all the stakeholders involved.

It's been observed by sociologists of education world over that rarely does suspension achieve its aims. A recent article in the Australian edition of The Conversation cited research showing that high school suspensions in Western countries often backfire, setting the student up as a martyr or a hero who has stood up to the establishment.

It's important to recognize that the roots of what we consider indiscipline vary across contexts and the remedy too perhaps needs to take that into account. In primary and secondary schools, disruptive behaviour most often has socio- cultural and psychological causes, and addressing such behaviour must take a nuanced approach that pays attention to such factors.

At the college and university- level, disruptions tend to stem from sociopolitical causes, and in recent times, as Dr Arun Kumar of JNU’s Centre for Economic Studies and Planning notes, indiscipline often is given as an excuse to impose controls on an institution and justify interventions by the political powers- that- be.

In these contexts, a simple excision of what is labelled as the rotten element cannot solve a problem that might go deeper, a problem for which the individual's behaviour is only a symptom. The suspension of a disruptive student might still the rumble for a while, but it could also place an aura around the person and bring others to rally around the cause or issue represented by him or her.

There's no arguing with the fact that institutions of learning must be spaces where teaching and learning can happen without disruption, where students and teachers feel safe, included, and stimulated. There's no arguing with the fact that disruptions of any kind must be addressed, so that the primary work of the institution

can continue. But it's important to understand the causes of the disruption, to ask whether and why the rules beg to be broken by some, and then consider the best ways to deal with it.

Sometimes, radical surgery isn’t the best option. Holistic medicine could do a better job.