School Punishments

Something I was thinking about was the ways they punished kids for misbehaving in school.

Up through grade school the punishments were pretty simple: if you were kind of bad, like refusing to share your crayons, you go sit in the corner for a while and think things over. If you were really bad, like you said the "A" word or "H" word, you get sent to the PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE (oooooooohhh). If you were really, really bad, like you said the "S" word or "F" word, they might go as far as calling your parents.

Starting in high school, the most common form of punishment was the almighty "detention". Late to class? Stay after school for half-hour detention. Caught roaming the halls without a hall pass? Maybe come in for SATURDAY detention (ooooooooohhhh). Basically, they're saying that you're supposed to spend 8 hours in school a day, whether you like it or not. If you waste any of it, you're making it up by staying longer than normal.

Which is fine. But what happens if you keep getting in trouble, show up to class drunk, or get into fights in gym class? Then, they SUSPEND you. They tell you to stay away from their building until they decide to let you come back. If that doesn't work, then they send you away forever by EXPULSION.

Now, I know that sometimes when school administrators do that, it's a matter of protecting the other kids from you. But I think the main point of suspending or expelling you is to get your attention and make you realize that going to school is a privilege.

Thing is, the same people who are punishing you by preventing you from going to school, just spent the last few years punishing you by forcing you to stay at school for detention. Is it just me or does that not really make sense?

Maybe it's something like the Simpsons episode where Homer gets sent to the "H" word, and they punish him for eating the forbidden donut. You might expect that the punishment to fit the crime would be to withhold donuts from him for eternity. But this was the "Ironic Punishment Division", where they decided to force-feed him donuts instead.

I don't want to get into a whole long discussion about the social ramifications of taking a problem child, someone who probably needs the education system the most, and casting him off instead. I just thought I'd comment about how school punishments seem to go from one side (detention) to maybe the exact opposite (suspension/expulsion).

By the time you get to college, I think you only get punished by the school itself if you break the "honor code" (which basically just means cheating, if I'm not mistaken). Other than that, as long as you can make the grades and don't get in trouble with the law, they probably leave you alone for the most part.

I've never tried it, and I don't recommend it, but I imagine you could be a Ku Klux Klan leader on weekends, impregnate dozens of women, and kick abandoned puppies off bridges for fun - as long as you show up to the exams and pass, you're all good.

Although if you live in the dorms, you might get some punishments for certain things. Lob a baseball at someone's window and break it? Pay for the repairs and apologize. Exceed the Internet bandwidth limit? They shut off your IP and make you call up and beg for them to turn it back on. Caught with alcohol in your room? Here's a CD-ROM, put it in your computer and take the Alcohol 101 course.

Then there's my favorite, the "bulletin board" punishments. Say you throw trash out your window, the RA or RD might make you create a bulletin board to tell people not to throw trash out your window. Or if you get caught on the roof, they might make you create a board to tell people not to go on the roof.

Of course, I was always a perfect angel in all my years of going to school, so none of this is firsthand experience. Except the bandwidth thing.