Are Educators on a Power Trip When They Have Expectations for Students?

Are educators on some sort of power trip trying to control students?

Over on Education Twitter, which for me at least is very British, like there's a lot of British discussion of education on Twitter compared to in the US, and one of the big things I'm seeing from parents and from therapists and psychologists and people who are not educators but who, you know, are interested in students and education is this claim that Teachers are too controlling.

Educators are too controlling.

There's some sort of power trip.

Dress codes are too strict.

Consequences are too severe.

And especially with regard to neurodiverse students.

There's this concern that having any kind of rule or any kind of consistency or any kind of enforcement of rules is just bad for students who are neurodiverse in some way.

And I think on its surface, even if that was true, I don't think that would impact students that way.

I think we have to recognize that there are benefits for all students, including neurodiverse students, to order and to rules and to predictability and things like that.

And of course, we can always make exceptions for a student if the student needs an exception.

But what's funny is that in a lot of cases, these arguments are being had about like hypothetical non-existent students.

Like one big controversy this past week had over a million views was a school had posters up in the hallway talking about the expectations for behavior.

And the reaction to a principal's post about these posters that had no students in it, just a hallway with some posters, was just brutal.

Like a thousand plus comments, like 1.7 million views at this point, mostly focused on how terrible it is to have specific expectations for students and how it's so cruel to students to have expectations.

And I think there's room for a ideal point of strictness, and I think in British society especially, there seems to be some attachment to strictness and then some pushback to that strictness that doesn't really make sense to me as an American.

You know, like, if you grew up in the same school system as Roald Dahl and, you know, the author of the Matilda book and many other books that feature that element of strictness almost in kind of a comical way, like, I don't know, maybe that makes more sense to you if you're British, but to me as an American, it's it seems like people are opposed to strictness for the sake of being opposed to it, just as other people are for strictness just for the sake of being strict in a way, again, that doesn't really make sense to me as an American.

But this idea that we're kind of villainizing educators because they want things to be done a certain way, and they see the value in that strictness, like, that doesn't seem like a good faith way to have that argument, right?

Like, I understand maybe there is a point where you get too strict, but I don't really think that anybody is motivated by the desire to control.

I don't think any educator is motivated by the opportunity to have a power trip.

I think these are legitimate discussions to have as far as how strict is too strict and how strict is good enough to have order and to promote learning.

But I think this idea that educators are just in it for the power trip is just ridiculous.

Let me know what you think.