Behaviour management is not enough

Schools need to teach a moral framework, not simply prevent disruptive behaviour

Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing about education from a Christian perspective. In my previous post on this subject I looked at how Christianity shapes how we (should) teach science:

At the end of that post, I said that I was planning to explore the same thing in different subjects. What I’d like to do here is consider that question, but from a slightly different angle: at school, children learn more than simply the topics they are taught. Children and young people learn a lot of critical life skills at school: how to relate to others, how to deal with success and failure, how to deal with unfair treatment, and so on. School, in a sense, teaches children and young people patterns of behaviour which they will carry on into adulthood. School plays an important role in the formation of young people’s moral framework. For a growing number of young people, tragically it’s the only moral framework they might get. (More on that later.)

What I’d like to do is examine how schools are doing in terms of teaching children a moral framework, and then analyse that through a Biblical lens and see what changes could / should be made.

Behaviour management

Over the last few years I’ve had experience of various different schools - from being a school governor, talking to teachers, and hearing my wife’s experience of working in different schools as a teaching assistant. Something which is important to understand about schools is that they are pretty much all practising something called behaviour management.

This is how one website defines it:

Behaviour management refers to the strategies and techniques employed by educators … to promote positive behaviour and discipline within the classroom. It's a multifaceted approach that encompasses not only the correction of undesirable behaviour but also the cultivation of a supportive and engaging learning environment where all pupils are able to thrive.

Behaviour management is not so much about promoting a positive moral framework, but rather minimising “undesirable” behaviour while promoting a “supportive learning environment”.

Different schools have different strategies for this, and there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. My experience has been that some schools and strategies manage this more effectively than others. My daughters’ school manages fairly well, although it is not perfect. The school my wife worked at least year managed… not so well. There, it was not unknown — common, even, in some classes — for staff to be sworn at. Children would throw furniture around and generally be unmanageable, and there was often very little comeback. This particular school is one of those that has a reputation for being in a ‘rough’ area; however, I can say categorically that the problems at the school are to do with the ethos rather than the pupils per se.

Note: I do appreciate that it can be difficult for schools to discipline effectively — they often have their hands tied with regulations and Ofsted. For example, I believe that it is difficult to simply exclude children for behavioural issues. So I do not wish to lay all the blame at the feet of individual schools — there are systemic problems here which need to be addressed as well.

However, whether schools do it well or do it badly, the aim seems to be a very pragmatic one: maximise the kind of positive behaviour which is conducive to the school working efficiently, and minimise disruptive behaviour. That’s the message which children are learning: there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ ways to behave; there are simply ways of behaving which are more or less suitable and conducive to a good learning environment. As such, schools are not teaching a positive moral vision for life, they are merely trying to make the process of schooling as effective and trouble-free as possible.

Has it been like this for a long time?

Although I don’t know how long the phrase ‘behaviour management’ has been around, things are not so different now to how they were when I was at school. Back then, I don’t recall being given a positive vision of how we should live. Bad behaviour was punished - I remember one or two in my year group being excluded from time to time, for example. We got detentions if we were misbehaved. And I think there was a greater sense that certain things were intrinsically right and wrong. But, generally speaking, there was no real teaching about how to live a good and moral life - it was simply assumed that we were being taught that at home.

In my class at secondary school there were a small minority of young people who had particular behavioural issues. The ones I remember having the worst behaviour were often the ones who came from broken homes. It’s obviously difficult to remember going back 30 years, but I seem to recall that the majority of my classmates came from intact families, and the ones who didn’t would often stand out in terms of behaviour.

At this point, it didn’t make so much difference whether schools were teaching a positive moral vision for life - not in terms of the operation of the school, at least. Most schools ran without too many problems. I remember the 1990s, where most of my schooling took place, as being a generally good decade. However, roll the clock forward 20-30 years, and all of a sudden you realise the problems this has created: I believe we have a generation of people - my generation, the “millenials”, who have a very different set of values to Christian values. The fact that we mostly came from intact families and a stable society — a society which still held more closely to Christian values — masked the problem that was being created. The problems didn’t manifest during school years, they are beginning to occur now because that generation has grown up.

And, now the landscape has changed, it is clear that behaviour management is totally insufficient. One of the boys at my wife’s old school had a mother who had a drugs problem — she was high a lot of the time — and she had a different boyfriend round every night. Compared to the problems my classmates had when I was at school, this is on a different level! This child was one of the worst behaved, which is not surprising, and the behaviour management strategy adopted by the school was totally insufficient and ineffective.

Children in that situation need genuine love — they’re certainly not getting any at home. One thing this entails is to be given clear boundaries and to understand that their actions have consequences. They need to be taught right from wrong. But, on a more general level, they need to be taught what love is — the basics of how to treat other people with kindness and respect.

And this is the problem with behaviour management in schools: if you only teach children what good behaviour is when it comes to the smooth running of the classroom, some of them might listen (depending on how effective your strategy is). But it won’t teach them how to be good, considerate, kind adults. It won’t teach them not to be selfish; it won’t teach them the need for self-sacrifice and so on. You’ll be totally selling them short.

A Biblical view of teaching morality

I’ve said before that God cares much more about who we are as people — our character — than what we do — our skills and gifts. You can be a kind and generous scaffolder, or a mean and proud brain surgeon. So, teaching in a Christian way must prioritise teaching children and young people what it means to live according to Christian morals.

But how do we instil Christian values and morality into children and young people? To answer that question fully would require a book — and I hope to return to this topic soon — but for now, I’d like to focus on two aspects of Christian morality: the Law and the Gospel.

The Law

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate much more over the last few years is God’s wisdom in giving us the law (that is, the law as summed up in the Ten Commandments. If you want to know why the Ten Commandments sum up the law, check out my book Confused by Grace). The law is just what we need because it helps us to understand and reflect on God’s intentions for us, without needing to define every single thing we could do wrong.

I also believe God demonstrated his wisdom in giving the Israelites the law before giving them the gospel. There is, in a sense, a reason why we need to have the law first before we get to the gospel. The law helps us to understand our own sinfulness in a way that nothing else can.

Paul explains the purpose of the law in his letter to the Galatians:

Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.

Galatians 3:23-25

That word ‘guardian’ is very significant, especially for what we are talking about here. Look at what it means:

a pedagogue, childtender, schoolmaster a person, usually a slave or freedman, to whom the care of the boys of a family was committed, whose duty it was to attend them at their play, lead them to and from the public school, and exercise a constant superintendence over their conduct and safety (via STEP)

Paul is saying that God intended the Law to teach us in the same way that a schoolmaster teaches children. Let’s leave aside what else Paul is saying about the law at this point: the important point for us is that this affirms that the law is something helpful when it comes to teaching children.

Anyone who has experience of younger children knows that you can’t simply trust children to get on with it! Children need boundaries. You need to be specific with what children can and can’t do. For example, toddlers need to be taught that hitting another child because they’re playing with their favourite toy isn’t the right thing to do! Younger children need the law for them to start to discern right and wrong. The law is a black-and-white guide.

It seems to me that this is, to some extent, what behaviour management is about: discouraging behaviours which will be disruptive to a class and to the educational environment. However, behaviour management is a poor substitute: it is very pragmatic in nature, wanting to guide behaviour to be less disruptive. It doesn’t see bad behaviour as something wrong which needs to be punished. The law, by contrast,says that there is a transcendent right and wrong, and that to transgress is a serious matter.

Ultimately it’s a question of authority. The law and its moral vision comes with the authority of God. It declares that some things truly are right and wrong, and that those who transgress deserve to be punished. Far from being unreasonable to expect children to live up to this standard, this is the only way to adequately treat people made in the image of God: to allow them the dignity of moral responsibility.

This reminds me of C.S. Lewis’ essay The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment about pragmatism when it comes to punishment. If you take away the ‘deserved’ nature of punishment, you can end up in some very bad places. Please do read the essay if you want more.

However, as Paul says in that passage from Galatians, the Law may be where we start to learn right and wrong, but it is not where we finish. For Christians, we must see these things through the lens of the Gospel.

The Gospel

What the gospel demonstrates is that the law is not sufficient in order for us to be truly righteous people. The law shows us what is right and wrong, but we need the power of the Holy Spirit to change us from the inside in order to do what is right. This is the purpose of Matthew 5 - the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount - where Jesus says:

For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:20

The Pharisees and teachers of the law thought that they had obedience to the law sorted, they thought that they were so obedient to the law that they didn’t need Jesus. Jesus proved them wrong. Jesus shows that what is really required of us is inner transformation, to take our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.

I believe this is also important to teach children and young people, because the Christian message is not a message of self-righteousness but rather of self-abasement and humility. I think that it’s possible to discern a difference between my own generation and an older generation who were much more familiar with Christian teaching, and in particular the words of the Book of Common Prayer. I can’t believe that saying the words of confession from Morning Prayer could have no effect:

Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done, And there is no health in us: But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders; Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults, Restore thou them that are penitent, According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord: And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

Can you imagine if that was simply a part of school life? If every class started with the BCP confession every morning, I think it would do a whole lot more than ‘behaviour management’ ever could!

The confession acknowledges that we need to daily repent of our sins and turn to the Lord for forgiveness; and we need to seek the help of the Holy Spirit to lead righteous lives. This is the bread and butter of Christian living - not living by the law, but living by grace.

Something to aim for

To teach children and young people true Christian virtue and morality, we need to do more than teach them the law — as important as that is. We need to show them that obedience the law alone is not enough, we need Jesus as well. I believe that there was a time in this country where the law of the Lord was honoured in a way that it is not now, and I believe there was also a time in this country where children and young people were taught of their need of Jesus.

My hope and prayer is that those days will be recovered — not that we should seek to go back to the past, but rather, think about how those lessons from the past could be applied in the twenty-first century.

What I am planning to write about next is to think about the place of Scripture in how these things can be taught.

If you appreciate Sacred Musings, you can help me out in a few ways: 1. Becoming a subscriber - free or paid; 2. Sharing Sacred Musings on social media or with anyone you think might like it; 3. If you’d like to contribute to help keep this running but becoming a paid subscriber is not the right option for you right now, you can give one-off via PayPal. Thank you so much!