Fusce congue odio at orci malesuada sodales. Phasellus posuere scelerisque dolor, eget dapibus tellus aliquet at. Nunc et mollis mi. Morbi ultricies blandit risus, feugiat volutpat justo elementum eget. Vivamus nec nisi diam. Nullam vehicula enim sollicitudin purus rutrum a ultricies tortor dictum. Aenean metus ante, vulputate eget luctus id, mattis at nulla. Maecenas pulvinar, nulla sit amet mollis sollicitudin, lectus sem vehicula magna, id gravida nunc arcu ac magna. Sed sit amet quam non quam ullamcorper pretium eu nec lorem. Quisque semper hendrerit nisl eget malesuada. Integer euismod, dui ac elementum facilisis, enim dolor hendrerit eros, non placerat turpis est vitae metus. Quisque dictum, urna at luctus vestibulum, leo eros porta velit, a facilisis nunc libero non ligula. Integer dignissim felis eget dui imperdiet tempus ac non lorem. Cras in urna mattis diam lobortis aliquet tempus quis libero. Aliquam erat volutpat. Vestibulum lectus urna, adipiscing at interdum vitae, suscipit nec mauris. Integer pharetra elementum lectus id ultrices. Vivamus fermentum dolor at augue iaculis euismod.

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It’s my feeling that if anything can solve these most basic classroom control issues, it will have to incorporate nonviolence. From an outsider’s perspective, we can see that Mr. Kaplowitz’s “classroom-management handbooks” recommended only consequences for “bad behavior” – and he makes no mention of preventative measures. Kids respond to reactionary discipline with either indignation (“That’s not fair!”) or rebellion. The question of the year, though, is what to do instead.

Gandhi’s radical solution was to take punishment on himself.  Presupposing that the students have some respect for you (and they will almost certainly have more than they let on: it’s natural for kids to want to respect adults), they will see your pain when they have let you down, and that internal pain will correct them more than anything you could impose from outside.

If you think about it, not just TFA but our whole education system is doomed from the start, because it’s trying to be corporate rather than personal in, for example, acting as if people cannot trust each other but must rely on sanctions and ‘accountability.’  Gandhi went to extremes trusting others, most notably his opponent in South Africa, General Smuts, often to the despair of his own followers, and yet in the end it all worked powerfully in Gandhi’s favor.

Mr. Kaplowitz also describes how broken the D.C. legal system is in terms of handling student violence:

When I asked other teachers to come help me stop a fight, they shook their heads and reminded me that D.C. Public Schools banned teachers from laying hands on students for any reason, even to protect other children. When a fight brewed, I was faced with a Catch-22. I could call the office and wait ten minutes for the security guard to arrive, by which point blood could have been shed and students injured. Or I could intervene physically, in violation of school policy.

Believe me, you have to be made of iron, or something other than flesh and blood, to stand by passively while some enraged child is trying to inflict real harm on another eight-year-old. I couldn’t do it. And each time I let normal human instinct get the best of me and broke up a fight, one of the combatants would go home and fabricate a story about how I had hurt him or her. The parent, already suspicious of me, would report this accusation to Ms. Savoy [the principal at Emery], who would in turn call in a private investigative firm employed by D.C. Public Schools. Investigators would come to Emery and interview me, as well as several students whom the security guard thought might tell the truth about the alleged incident of corporal punishment.

I had previously heard of three other teachers at Emery that year who were being investigated for corporal punishment. When I talked to them—they were all experienced male teachers—they heatedly protested their innocence and bitterly complained about Ms. Savoy’s handling of the situation. Now that I had joined the club, I began to understand their fears and frustrations.

The nonviolent teacher has a responsibility to use his or her body, if necessary, to prevent students from hurting one another. To do otherwise was in violation of Mr. Kaplowitz’s core principles, as he describes — and again, even Gandhi said that if ‘a madman with a sword’ is terrorizing a village the person who ‘dispatches’ that unfortunate one will have done a service to all concerned.

And if all else fails, we must deal with the law as Gandhi did: because sticking to his principles was against the law, he broke the law but not his principles – and challenged the British government to impose on him “the strictest punishment possible”.

…But I’m only a young idealist, much as Mr. Kaplowitz was when he began TFA. I will probably one day have to scrap most of what I’ve said here for more effective strategies. But I’m sure of this: if Nonviolence is needed anywhere, it is needed here – and if it can help anywhere, then I’m sure it can help here.

I’ve been caught up in this sort of competition before, and when I am I have never felt so divorced from the world.  I would separate the world into three categories:  those ‘better’ than me, those ‘worse’ than me, and the singleton set containing only me.  That is an extremely lonely place.  There is no room here for generosity, no room for ‘firmness’ with my ‘superiors’, nor for ‘patience’ with my ‘inferiors’.  Other people, I felt, should be either envied or envious. This is where competition leads.

And this is exactly where our culture is pushing us, from every direction.  It is the task of students and teachers, then, to help each other swim upstream like the salmon towards activities that emphasize “truth, firmness, patience, and other virtues”.

My high school calculus teacher, Laikun Wong, used what is now one of my favorite classroom strategies to this end – letting students teach the class, or teach each other.  This clearly works better with older students, but it emphasizes the idea that knowledge is worth nothing unless you can (and do) share it with others – not to show off, but to help your peers understand it as well as you do.

If you know any other cool classroom (or other) strategies to fight the competition disease, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!