Guilt Doesn't Lead to Good Policies
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why policies driven by guilt rather than evidence end up hurting the students they're meant to help.
Key Takeaways
- Guilt-driven policies lower expectations - When educators feel guilty about student struggles, they often respond by reducing standards rather than increasing support
- High expectations are compassionate - Believing students can achieve and holding them to it is more helpful than lowering the bar
- Education can improve lives but can't fix everything - Schools should focus on what they can control — excellent teaching and clear expectations
Transcript
I think we can teach every child.
We can make every child's life better through education.
But what we can't do is fix everyone, right?
We cannot transform the basic conditions of every student's life in the way that we would want to.
And that's very frustrating to us as educators because we want to have high expectations.
We want to have high ambitions for our own work that we will be able to impact every child in the way that we really want to.
But we have to also recognize the limitations on that, right?
Like if we want to really ultimately accomplish some of the things that we really wish for our students, we're going to have to look outside of schools themselves and at society, right?
There are things in our society like poverty, like inequality, that really are underneath all of the inequalities that show up in schools, right?
And we've discovered over the past 10 years or so that you can't really fix upstream societal inequalities in school, right?
Like if students come into school with very unequal preparation, with very unequal home lives, we can do some things to offset that.
We can do some educational things to make a big difference for students, but we can't fundamentally fix problems that are societal and rooted in inequality.
Like we have to actually fix those at the societal level And when it comes to what we actually do in schools, I think we have to not fixate too much on our guilt.
And here's what I mean by that.
When we fixate on our guilt, we try to do things to make up for all the things we can't fix that make us feel better.
that are actually worse for our students.
One of those is around behavior.
There's a big cluster of things that we tend to do when we feel sorry for students.
We genuinely feel bad for our students who struggle with their behavior.
If we try to shield them from the consequences of that behavior, if we try to act like it's not that big a deal, when it is a big deal, when it's ruining their learning, when it's ruining other people's learning, when it's getting people actually hurt and sent to the hospital, because we feel guilty about how difficult those students' lives are, we tend to not follow through on some things that like obviously we should do, right?
Like you should not continue a situation where a child is hurting other children or hurting the adults that they work with.
And we've got to recognize that we can't fix everyone, right?
Sometimes we have to have a boundary and say, we are going to do everything we can educationally for you, but we can't fix whatever is going on in your life that is causing you to act this way.
Like we have to recognize the limits.
Like we have to have high expectations for ourselves.
We have to have high expectations for our students, but we have to recognize that that is not going to allow us to fix everything the way we want it to.
So I just think we have to do what we can.
We have to look for what works and not allow guilt to drive us into policies like we're seeing now with grading, with discipline and things like that, that aren't actually going to make things better.
Let me know what you think.