A School Is Basically a Set of Rules Intended to Result in Learning

What is it that actually constitutes a school?

What makes a school a school?

Is it the people?

Is it the building?

Well, I came across a new possibility today that it's actually rules, or framed a little bit more negatively, it's what a school bans.

It's what a school does not allow.

Jared Cooney Horvath, in his new book, The Digital Delusion, which is about the failures of ed tech and the harms of technology in education, says that school is by design one giant ban.

It exists precisely because children aren't yet mentally or emotionally equipped to navigate the quote unquote real world on their own.

And in this chapter, he's arguing that schools should not be afraid to ban phones.

He says, despite overwhelming evidence of mental, physical, and cognitive harm, many schools remain reluctant to impose a full bell to bell ban on smartphones.

This hesitation is often framed as a matter of principle.

Banning is seen as authoritarian and shielding kids from the real world is viewed as counterproductive.

You know, the idea that students have to learn to manage smartphones, so we should allow them in schools, we shouldn't ban them.

He says that is wrongheaded because everything about school has to do with determining what behaviors are allowed And not allowed, you know, banning is a lot of how we accomplish things in schools.

And I think it has to be that way.

If you think about what constitutes a school environment, it's a place where learning focused behaviors are required.

It's a place where violence is not allowed.

It's a place where certain topics are taught and other topics are not taught.

where drugs and weapons are not allowed.

All of those rules are really what separate a school environment from a non-school environment.

And they're the reason that kids learn a lot in a school environment and tend to not learn a lot when they're not in that environment.

And as we've seen alternatives pop up, right?

We saw virtual schooling.

Well, that didn't really work.

We've seen different attempts to deliver education online.

We've seen different attempts to reform discipline and grading and say, well, okay, you can come to school, but you don't have to do the things that we made you do in the past.

We don't give you a zero if you don't do your work, or you don't actually get a consequence if you are violent or tear up your classroom.

We've taken away some of those rules.

We've experimented with the rules.

And I don't think there's, in principle, anything wrong with experimenting with rules because we do need to get them right.

If we want to get schools right, we have to get the rules right because the rules are what constitute the school.

But I think a lot of the problems we've seen in recent years have come from not really thinking about the consequences of changing fundamental rules of the school, like how grading works, how discipline works, how special education works.

We've got all these places where we've been experimenting with the big pillars that uphold the school, and then we act surprised when things come crashing down, when behavior escalates, when students stop doing their work.

If we take away the rule that you have to come to school, Well, students stop coming to school and they stop learning as a result.

So I think we've got to respect the fact that rules do a lot of the heavy lifting, and that's not a bad thing.

We should not be ashamed of the fact that we have rules in school.

Let me know what you think.