My school has a judicial committee comprised entirely of students (and advised by a staff member). The judicial committee is charged with enforcing the rules of the school. It acts upon reports submitted by both staff and students, which allows students to settle their differences without the interference of a staff member (outside of the advisor, who doesn’t get a vote). The rules of the school, in their turn, have been determined by a congress comprised of both staff and students, with each member of the school receiving an equal vote, regardless of age, grade, or employment status.
In theory, this sounds great, but I fear that somewhere along the line, the adults in this relationship made a mistake.
I am a radical democratist: I put my faith in other people. I believe that all people have it within them to act faithfully and good, and that what people need more than almost anything else is to be heard. People who have a voice are people who want a choice, and putting people together in a room and asking them to be faithful and good is the best way to lay all of the available choices on the table.
When implementing our ideal judicial system at the school, us adults made (and continue to make) a mistake. While we allow the students to adjudicate issues related to minor annoyances, we shield them from the most serious issues facing our community. When there is a serious infraction against the community in our school, we don’t ask our students to deal with it themselves (advised by a staff member, of course); instead, we take it upon ourselves, imagining the students to be too delicate to handle any of our community’s “real” problems.
A case in point. At least once or twice a year, we have to evacuate a building because a student’s behavior threatens to turn violent. When this happens, the offending student’s consequences are determined by a team of staff members, and the students are asked to just go on their merry way.
Except of course, they don’t. They internalize the notion that their school is a place where violence can always happen, and that when it does, it will be dealt with by someone else, and that despite their own concerns and interests, no one will ever consider their ideas or opinions on the matter.
If that isn’t horrible training for life in a democratic society, then I don’t know what is.
Imagine a school where even the biggest issues are brought to the students to deal with, not in terms of a shame circle or anything like that, but in terms of [restorative justice](https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/restorative-justice-overview/), which asks offenders to repair their harm to the victim and to the community. Schools should not hide a whole level of learning and wisdom from their students, one that forces them to face their community’s real situations and to work them through together.
A challenge to this approach comes from the concept of privacy. At what point does an individual’s privacy outweigh the loss of the community’s ability to represent itself in all things? Consider a case where a student reports an unwanted sexual advance made by another student in the form of a digital photo sent via text (e.g., the unrequested sending of a “dick pic”). In this example, the recipient of the photo does not feel comfortable addressing the problem alone, and so seeks out a teacher for help.
Should the teacher encourage the recipient to “write up” the offender, forcing the latter to face (at the very least) a small panel of their peers? Or should the teacher take it upon themself to address the problem (in whatever way that might be), thereby saving both the recipient and the offender from having to talk about the issue in front of their peers?
If the latter, doesn’t the teacher 1) encourage the spread of rumors, and 2) invite the students to deal out justice on their own terms, with no guidance from the wisdom of our entire species’ history of justice systems (as understood by the school’s Congress)?
There is a question of legal privacy as well, but do accused students have the right to prevent their peers from determining the right course of action? What if every student attending the school (and every guardian representing them) signed off on a policy saying that all who are accused should expect to face a jury of their peers?
In the case of the “dick pic,” both the offender and the recipient would have to face a small panel composed of three students selected at random from a congress of their peers (serving on the panel is akin to jury duty). The recipient would state their case; the accused would declare themselves guilty or not guilty, and the panel would take it from there (again, in terms of restorative justice).
The mistake we continue to make is that, for all of the real issues, we restrict the judicial panel to a team of staff members and all of the students know it…just as they know how to tell us what we want to hear. How much more powerful would it be if every offender had to face their victims, recognize their offenses, and work to restore justice to the community?
We’re sometimes too afraid of our students, too afraid of young people in general, not trusting them to act faithfully and good. But if we don’t teach them to face their problems head on, in all of their complex reality, then what kind of adults are we teaching them to be?
Future generations are going to be here long after us adults are gone. If we want to continue our species’ long journey out of the wild anarchy of nature, we better make sure our kids know how to act faithfully in the name of justice, and to do so regardless of the complexity of the issue. Not every adult (and not every student) in my school will agree with me, but I think it’s a debate worth having.
