Rewards and punishments are effective ways of controlling an individual to produce a desired behaviour. Rewards are a form of positive reinforcement as the individual is given something to encourage them to repeat the same behaviour through conditioning. Negative reinforcement involves the removal of something undesirable (i.e. homework) to encourage the repetition of a behaviour (i.e. working harder in class). Similarly, positive punishment occurs when an individual receives an undesirable stimulus to prevent misbehaviour from being repeated and negative punishment is something desirable being removed from the individual for the same purpose.

Teachers are given guidelines about which standardised rewards and punishments to inflict; however, a teacher’s unstandardised reactions may be more damaging to children than the punishment itself. For example, being humiliated in front of one’s entire class may be more of a punishment than the detention. In this instance, the child is punished twice for something that they did once: “each transgression is made to feel like a multiple offence” (Illich, 1970, p. 32). In March 2021, a 12 year old mixed-raced boy was left ‘petrified’ in Bristol after a teacher wrongly accused him of stealing a cookie and, with no evidence, called the police who interviewed him without the presence of a lawyer or parent. The police threatened him with a criminal record; afterwards, the boy reported that his “heart was beating really fast. [He] felt scared, and [he had] never felt like that before”. His mother took legal action and, when interviewed, questioned whether this incident would happen to a middle-class white pupil (Thomas, 2021).

Bullying

Farina (2016) highlights how traditional views of bullying are limited because “we often tend to see it as something rooted in individual deficits” (p. 79), for example, being overweight, and because “they focus only on students, not on adults as well” (p. 80). Furthermore, children imitate people around them and “victims of childhood abuse are at increased risk of being abusers themselves” (p. 80). Farina (2016) also suggests that, considering how much time children and adolescents spend at school, it is a fair assumption that teachers and staff’s behaviour may influence that of the pupils (p. 81). A teacher’s punishments, therefore, may be imitated by pupils.

Studies show that strict security and unfair or harsh rules can increase pupils’ risk of being involved in bullying (Farina, 2016) and damage “students’ perceptions of fairness” (Kupchik & Farina, 2014, p. 151). On the other hand, schools where students frequently disrupt class and teachers rarely punish them showed high levels of bullying (Farina, 2016, p. 84). “This highlights a crucial point that tends to be overlooked in discussions about school safety. When it comes to setting rules, punishing students and maintaining security, the issue shouldn’t be seen as all-or-nothing” (p. 84). Farina (2016) claims that there is substantial evidence to show that behaviours that resemble bullying are common and harmful by school staff (p. 86) and rules are disproportionately used to single out pupils of colour and those who are labelled as “bad” which can make rules confusing to students (p. 85). This study shows that rule enforcement and “authoritarian discipline may directly teach students aggressive behaviour” (Kupchik & Farina, 2014, p. 150) as part of their education. Discipline within schools may teach students that bullying is a way of expressing or coping with stress or conflict (Kupchik, 2010).

Excessive punishments can cause long-term or life-long repercussions such as school dropout, lack of qualifications, arrest and incarceration (Kupchik & Farina, 2014), commonly referred to as the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’. This disproportionately affects ethnic minority students and low-income students (Okilwa et al., 2017, p. 2) as discovered by studies such as Wallace et al. (2008). Whilst fair rules and assertiveness are vital for the safety of pupils (Arum, 2003), punishments such as suspension and involvement of police “seek to exclude [pupils], while failing to address underlying reasons for misbehaviour” (Kupchik & Farina, 2014, p. 148). Furthermore, Kupchik (2010) finds that rules are often prioritised over pupils’ needs.

The right to punish

In order for an individual to be justly punished, fist they must commit an act that is considered bad or evil. Evil, José and Tella (2006) claim, can only be “overridden by a good counteracting the evil, not by the infliction of another evil” (p. 9). Therefore, punishment reduces the punisher to the level of the offender and they become equal in terms of ill-intent: “it was as if the punishment was thought to be equal, if not to exceed, in savagery the crime itself […] to make the executioner resemble a criminal” (Foucault, 1991, p. 9). By nature, the deliberate infliction of pain, whether it be negative or positive punishment, cannot be a good thing. To punish is to be in a position of power. Collective punishment (i.e. punishing an entire class) is dangerous because to “knowingly inflict a punishment upon someone who does not deserve it, then we speak of victimisation in the strictest sense of the term” (José & Tella, 2006, p. 11). To “deserve” punishment is subjective but it can assumed that, when the evilness of the punishment outweighs the evilness of the alleged misbehaviour, it is an abuse of power.

Foucault suggests that exams and assessments are “a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish” (1991, p.184). These punishments may include (but are not limited by):

• A poor grade,
• Verbal abuse/shouting,
• Humiliation in front of family or peers,
• Loss of leisure time/detention,
• Exclusion from further and higher education,
• Lack of qualifications that limits one’s opportunities in life,
• (Up until 1986 in UK state schools) beatings and torture,
• Compulsory medicalisation,
• Negative label,
• Community work (i.e. litter picking).

“Disciplinary punishment has the function of reducing gaps. It must therefore be essentially corrective.” (Foucault, 1991, p.179); however, the school system “does not close gaps, it widens them” (Gove, 2010, p. 6-7). Academic competition between pupils, schools and countries prioritises what a child can do for the school, rather than what the school can do for them.

Timetabling

The workshop, the school […] were subject to a whole micro-penalty of time (latenesses, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body (‘incorrect’ attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency). At the same time, by way of punishment, a whole series of subtle procedures was used, from light physical punishment to minor deprivations and petty humiliations. (Foucault, 1991, p.178)

The average school pupil will complete six lessons in a day, each lasting 50 minutes, with a 20 minute breaktime and a 30-60 minute lunch time. Both of these breaks are subject to removal at the teacher’s discretion. Foucault (1991) argues that “time measured and paid must also be a time without impurities or defects; a time of good quality, throughout which the body is constantly applied to its exercise.” (Foucault, 1991, p. 151), a reference to the origins of panopticism (which was designed for paid and free labour). Institutionalised labour surveillance has high expectations of its subjects but children are not paid. High quality, uninterrupted labour is expected of them during lessons; falling short of this expectation can result in detention. Children can be punished for straying from a task that they are completing for free and against their will. The timetable is a method that facilitates forced labour or corporal control and was adopted by the prison during the institution’s infancy: “it served to economise the time of life, to accumulate it in a useful form and to exercise power over men through the mediation of time arranged in this way” (Foucault, 1991, p. 162). Every minute and every hour of the timetable has an expectation or a demand and a potential punishment if it is not fulfilled. Furthermore, the timetable separates playtime and worktime, making the pupil yearn for play during work and fear work during play. Separating the two, Schumacher (1973) suggests, destroys “the joy of work and the bliss of leisure”.