CHAPTER NINE
UNFORTUNATELY, THERE IS VIRTUALLY no Intelligent Disobedience training in human school systems. We will examine the contribution this omission makes to the significant problem of misplaced obedience. First, let’s witness the dramatic and shocking results of failing to instill Intelligent Disobedience in our sons and daughters. I must warn you, what follows is disturbing.1
In 2004, an eighteen-year-old girl named Louise Ogborn went to work for a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant in Mount Washington, Kentucky. Mount Washington is small-town America, which we like to think of as representing the best of traditional American values. She was a “good child,” with no history of trouble in school or with the law. On April 9th, her eighteen years of being well behaved and compliant rebounded on her in a way that left her emotionally scarred for years.
That evening, the assistant manager on duty at the McDonald’s, Donna Jean Summers, fifty-one years old, got a disturbing telephone call from “Officer Scott.” Officer Scott told her that a customer had accused a female employee of stealing her purse. The description he gave matched that of Louise Ogborn.
Scott instructed Summers that Louise needed to be searched. He offered two choices: Louise could be arrested and taken to police headquarters and searched there, or Donna could search her at the restaurant under his directions. Scott told her that corporate had approved the action. It seemed better to Summers, perhaps more humane, to conduct the search on the premises. Following Scott’s directions, she took Louise to a store room in the back of the restaurant, locked the door, and had Louise remove each item of her clothing so it could be shaken for hidden stolen goods and then put in a bag. Louise obeyed and was soon naked, distraught, and crying.
What then proceeds defies imagination. Summers followed Scott’s detailed orders for an hour. He said he would get to the restaurant as soon as he could to collect the items of clothing. Summers had to get back to work. It was dinner time, and the restaurant was busy. Scott said Louise needed to be detained a little longer and asked if Summers had a husband who could continue to watch her? She called her boyfriend, “Wes” Nix Jr., and told him to come in to help with “a situation.” He did as asked, and for the next two hours followed Scott’s increasingly sadistic telephone instructions. These began with having Louise do jumping jacks while unclothed to “see if anything fell out.” They proceeded to overt acts of sexual abuse at the instructions of the “police officer” caller. Louise tearfully pleaded to be let go but continued to comply with the humiliating orders. When Summers came in periodically to check on the situation, Nix was instructed by Scott to have Louise cover herself with a small apron.
The ordeal continued until Scott told Summers to bring in another man to replace Nix. She called in Thomas Simms, a fifty-eight-year-old maintenance man who did odd jobs for the restaurant. Scott told Simms to have Louise drop the apron and describe her. Simms, a ninth-grade dropout, refused because “it didn’t seem right.” It was only then, some four hours later, that Summers also realized something was not right and called her manager who knew nothing about the matter. Apparently mortified by her gullibility, Summers let the traumatized Louise Ogborn dress and leave the storage room.
Of course, Scott was not a police officer. He had mastered the authoritative tone and language of police officers and did enough research on the locality to produce a thin patina of credibility. There are so many things wrong with this story (many more than I have included here, not wishing to spread the true but sensational account further) that it is hard to accept its veracity. There are several reasons why we must tell the story.
The first is that the entire ordeal was recorded on the security camera in the storage room. The details are not reconstructed. The entire gruesome ordeal is on record. This is the “black box” of an airplane crash, with video added.
The second reason is that nearly seventy other establishments in more than thirty states, mostly fast-food restaurants (including seventeen other McDonald’s restaurants), were successfully targeted by the same caller. Investigators found that many other restaurant managers he contacted refused to obey, as we would suspect based on the lower compliance rate Milgram found when the authority was remote and phoning in his instructions. That still leaves seventy restaurants in which employees obeyed this faceless voice on the phone claiming to be a police officer. Unlike in the Milgram experiments, his ability to extract compliance didn’t even depend on a uniform as a symbol of authority. The acts the targeted managers obediently performed on fellow employees were varied, but of the same humiliating and outrageous nature and mostly in small-town America.
Once again we are left wondering, How does this grossly misplaced obedience to authority occur and what do we do about it?
Let’s begin with the assistant manager, Donna Jean Summers. Her case is problematic. Was she a victim or a perpetrator? This is the classic question concerning obedience, addressed at Nuremberg, WorldCom, and elsewhere. Because she became a defendant in a case of “unlawful imprisonment” to determine her culpability, her testimony and interviews became guarded and self-protective, and thus do not shed reliable light on her frame of mind. It has been reported that she had already received a reprimand on an unrelated matter from management. This may have reinforced a disposition to cooperate with a “management-approved investigation.” But we are speculating here.
What we do know is that we saw her on the video at points in the strip search consoling Louise Ogborn. Like the subjects in the Milgram experiments, complying with these orders was not something she enjoyed doing. This was a case of blind compliance to perceived authority despite the hurt she was causing. By this standard, which must be the standard we use, she is an agent of the perpetrator and thus complicit in the shocking wrongdoing.
We also know that at one point, before Nix was brought in, a twenty-seven-year-old male employee named Jason Bradlee was instructed to help Summers follow the caller’s instructions. We see Bradlee say, “This is BS” and refuse to follow the instructions. This is interesting for a number of reasons. First, like the soldier at Abu Ghraib who refused to obey the order to apply enhanced interrogation techniques, Bradlee kept himself from perpetrating the acts, but he did not stop them. He walked out of the storage room but did not notify the police. Despite his Intelligent Disobedience, authority and social context may have further constrained his ethical decision making. It is one thing to disobey an outrageous order, another for a young minority male to blow the whistle on an older white female supervisor.
The second reason Bradlee’s refusal to follow Scott’s orders is instructive is that the refusal to comply by another human being was insufficient to overcome Summers’s thrall to perceived authority. Perhaps this was because Bradlee was young and black in rural Kentucky or perhaps she was like many in Milgram’s experiments who kept administering shocks after one other person refused to continue with the experiment and stopped only when a second person joined in the resistance.
In the wake of these dismaying events, litigation and counter-litigation followed among the parties. Some people see Summers as victim, others as perpetrator; in reality she was both. Against the prosecutor’s recommendation for a harsher sentence, she received one year probation for unlawful imprisonment, a lenient outcome but nevertheless an indelible stain on her professional record. She, in turn, sued McDonald’s for failing to notify her of the instances of the multiple fraudulent police calls to other McDonald’s restaurants. She was awarded several hundred thousand dollars compensation for the ordeal. The clear victim, Louise Ogborn, was awarded several million dollars. We will return to Louise shortly.
Summers’s forty-two-year-old boyfriend, “Wes” Nix Jr., initially fit into the role of obeying authority that we saw in the Milgram experiments. Over the two hours in which he executed Scott’s orders, however, his behavior transformed into that documented in the famous behavioral experiment conducted by Dr. Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University, which became known as the Stanford Prison Experiment and is described in the foreword to this book by Dr. Zimbardo. To refresh, in these experiments subjects were divided into two groups—guards and prisoners. Over the course of six days, the behavior of the guards became sadistic and physically abusive, requiring the experiment to be stopped for ethical reasons.
Unfortunately, Nix’s deterioration into sadistic guard behavior occurred in hours rather than days, and there was no experimenter to stop the behavior. Scott ordered increased abuse of the naked Ogborn, including harsh spankings and oral sex. He was criminally prosecuted and received a five-year sentence. If he were the only one to have followed “Scott’s” perverse orders to this degree, we would be tempted to dismiss his actions as a perverse anomaly. That is what we usually do in cases of destructive obedience. It is more comfortable to think of outrageous obedience as an aberration. Yet, according to a 2004 article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, strip searches were conducted at virtually all of the seventy documented locations. At least thirteen other people who executed them were charged with crimes, and seven were convicted as of the writing of that article. Unfortunately, this was not the depraved action of an isolated deviant individual; it is one more example of a social phenomenon of misplaced obedience.
What of “Officer Scott”? It took a long time to put together the pieces of these widely distributed events. Some restaurants didn’t report the events out of fear of the negative publicity, and some police departments couldn’t figure out under what category to file the reports when they were made. They weren’t even sure if the caller had committed an actionable crime. What would the crime be? Calling store managers over the phone and ordering them, but not coercing them, to perform bizarre actions, which they then complied with? The most tangible offense was impersonating a police officer, though he did so with no false uniform, badge, or other identification.
Eventually, through coordinated detective work among state law enforcement agencies, calling cards used for several of these deplorable events were traced back to a thirty-eight-year-old man, David R. Stewart, who purchased them in Florida, where he lived. Stewart claimed innocence, but police found incriminating evidence including, for example, a card with a call placed to a restaurant in Idaho Falls on the day its manager had complied with fraudulent “police orders.” Stewart was employed as a security officer with Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison company. When identified as the suspect, he was a guard on the swing shift of the Bay Correctional Facility.
If Stewart was indeed the perpetrator, he was an extreme example of the Stanford Prison experiment. Given the phone-based communications, however, it was difficult to categorize the crime and make it stick. The violations he was charged with are reported to have carried half the potential prison time of the charges levied against Nix. Unlike Nix, he was acquitted in trial for lack of evidence and served no jail time. The difference between Nix’s fate and Stewart’s provides us with one more cautionary tale about obeying when one should refuse.
This brings us to the undisputed victim of the case, Louise Ogborn. Her humiliation and great distress are clearly visible on security tapes. Why did Louise become the victim? Without in any way shifting blame from the perpetrators to Louise, we need to examine her own acts of obedience and how culture colludes to make many of us prone to inappropriate obedience.
Why Did You Follow the Instructions?
In a televised interview after the event, Louise Ogborn was asked why she followed the instructions Summers, and then Nix, relayed to her from “Officer Scott”? Her response is almost heartbreaking. Those who care most about her are the reason she gives for obeying her tormentors.
“My parents taught me when an adult tells you to do something, you don’t argue. If someone swipes you on the hand you listen.”
This is the unrecognized conundrum faced by all parents: teach your children to obey their elders; teach it with the gravitas of “honor your father and mother”; teach them to be polite, respectful, and obedient. This is good, loving advice in a world in which adults are stewards of learned wisdom and protectors of the social order.
But sometimes adults are priests who prey on boys, or coaches who violate them, or relatives who take sexual liberties, or teachers who duct-tape them to a chair, or supervisors who tell them to strip in a backroom of a fast-food restaurant.
“My parents taught me when an adult tells you to do something, you don’t argue.”
You don’t argue. You silence your voice. You do not have the right to speak up assertively in noncompliance.
“If someone swipes you on the hand you listen.”
Louise’s family goes further than many; if the command is reinforced physically you pay extra attention, you are extra-obedient.
Surely, they did not envision their injunction against speaking back being applied in a nightmare like Louise’s. Parents routinely warn their children against the dangers of following strangers; they hardly ever warn against refusing instructions from pillars of the family or the community.
Louise was eighteen years old, nearly finished with high school. She was no longer a child. Surely, these teachings should have long since been put into context. Clearly, they were not.
In testimony Louise said,
“I was scared because they were a higher authority than me.”
Fear of a higher authority as we have seen is not limited to children or teenagers. It is as ubiquitous as it is dangerous. But how does this occur, and what purpose does it serve?
Evolutionary genetics postulates that obedience to authority became a survival trait of our species.2 With the capacity to mobilize tens of thousands of individuals in coordinated activity, our species was able to accomplish feats never approached by small bands of humans. Massive armies could be raised and deployed, giving groups military protection or advantage. The dark side of this coin was that millions of people could be mobilized in support of megalomaniacs who lead their people to destruction. As humanity came through the horrors of two world wars, researchers like Milgram and Zimbardo tried to plumb the behavioral nature accounting for mass obedience to destructive uses of authority. They documented that the behaviors emerged not just in a small sliver of humanity, but in the majority of human beings when placed in circumstances that support these behaviors.
Yet, even in the field of genetics, genes are not the only factor recognized for contributing to behavior. Environmental factors play a role in determining which genes are expressed and which remain dormant. What are the environmental factors that kept obedience to authority active in Louise in the face of the outrageous abuse of authority? In addition to her family, who else impressed on her that obeying adults was a cardinal rule? What environmental factors reinforced this conditioning as she got older? What kept these childhood rules so firmly in place when she should have been making her transition to adulthood?
It is critical we examine this if we are ever going to get to the root of the problem. We will always be remediating this at the professional level of soldier, flight crew, accountant, nurse if we do not create a conscious pathway for young people to complete their education with the ability to make reasoned moral distinctions and the capacity to stand by them. If you are a working adult who is reading this for its application to your organization, remember that I am also writing to you as a current or future parent, or the concerned relative of young people. We must understand how we develop those who will be future political and corporate citizens in whom much trust is placed.
In every society and age, the relevant environmental factors vary. In traditional societies, the socialization may be achieved through the whole tribe or village tutoring the young in the norms of tribal life. In an agricultural society, the dominant shaping may occur in the months working side by side with elders in the fields during planting and harvest. In militaristic societies, training youth in the arts of the warrior may begin early and be a consistent feature of child rearing. In virtually every society, though, the environmental factors that reinforce obedience are there. Until we identify and understand those factors in our own culture, we cannot successfully introduce balancing factors that dramatically change the percentages of destructive obedience that Milgram documented.
Three environmental factors mentioned in relation to Louise Ogborn were church, Girl Scouts, and school. The teachings of church and Scouts undoubtedly reinforced natural tendencies to obey authority. But together they represent a small fraction of the time Louise spent in that ubiquitous institution of our contemporary society—school. With the exception of the small home-school movement, our children spend the largest part of their waking lives outside the home, in public, private, or parochial schools, from the time they are four or five years old, or even younger, until they are at least Louise’s age. What is it about school, where students are supposed to learn to think and form their own perspectives, that reinforces unquestioning obedience to authority?
Compliance and Classroom Management
Mount Washington, Kentucky, is in Bullitt County. On page 5 of the Bullitt County Public Schools Code of Student Behavior and Discipline, 2011–2102 it states:
Among student responsibilities: To obey the rules and regulations of the Board of Education and/or school administrators and to question them only for explanation not in an argumentative context.
To exercise courtesy and reason at all times, to accept just punishment, to avoid unreasonable appeals, and to refrain from making false accusations.
It is reasonable to assume that this language or language similar to it existed in the 2003 version of the code as well. We cannot know for sure that Louise Ogborn was required to read the code or, if she did read it, that it directly affected her thinking or behavior. But it does give us insight into the culture of the Bullitt County school system, with its emphasis on student obedience, disapproval of students arguing with authority, expectation of accepting punishment deemed just by authority, and implicitly warning that accusations against authority may raise questions of false witness. It is not my intention to single out Bullitt County, but rather to use it as representative of the broad education system. One of the recent alumni from Teach for America who read this story, found Bullitt County’s policies not unusual and reported the exercise of authority to be harsher in other regions with which he was familiar.
In the context of the Ogborn case, it is surprising to me that this language was not rewritten by 2010 to be more sensitive in response to the event. But we cannot be entirely unsympathetic to the Bullitt County Board of Education for setting a stern tone regarding student behavior. As every teacher or close friend or family member of a teacher knows, managing students’ behavior in a classroom is the difference between making that chosen career satisfying and escaping from it as soon as possible. A former teacher who left the field to become a caterer explained her reason succinctly: “Green beans don’t talk back.” Consider the desperation that must have preceded the decision of the teacher we met earlier to duct-tape her misbehaving student to his chair!
One of the friends I have made in my twenty-year journey through the subject of leading and following is Marty Krovetz. Marty is a thoughtful, well-spoken man whose career took him to a position of high school principal for fourteen years. He has authored or coauthored three books on education including Collaborative Teacher Leadership: How Teachers Can Foster Equitable Schools (2006, with Gilberto Arriaza) and Powerful Partnerships: A Handbook for Principals Mentoring Assistant Principals (2008, with Gary Bloom). In both of these books, Marty devotes a chapter to following courageously. In the handbook, this meant giving ardent support to one’s principal while being equally willing to “speak truth to power” if the principal’s blind spots were hurting the school’s capacity to fulfill its mission. I reached out to Marty to thank him for incorporating my work in his own important work.
Over the years Marty and I have had several valuable conversations. A few years ago we ran a pilot project together to introduce the concepts of courageous followership to middle school students. The students had identified that their school and its heavily immigrant population were significantly under-resourced in technology relative to other schools in their district that were primarily serving the majority population. Under the guidance of their teachers, the students organized themselves into groups, each with a specific responsibility for mounting a campaign to remedy this disparity. They had their share of successes and setbacks as is natural in activist campaigns, and displayed a fine appreciation for the principles of courageous followership.
Given our history together, I turned to Marty for any experience he could share with me on how Intelligent Disobedience was taught in schools. He could not identify any experiences or resources to share with me. I rephrased my question and asked him for widely used templates for obtaining obedience in classroom management. Marty directed me to two resources.
The first is a book and program developed by Dr. Frederic H. Jones called Tools for Teaching. Jones’s books, videos, and DVDs have won awards from a number of well-regarded education and publishing bodies. Endorsements come from around the United States, including from Joe Burke, an assistant school superintendent in Jefferson County, which borders Bullitt County, where Louise Ogborn went to school.
“Tools for Teaching will be vital to the culture of our high schools for years to come. More than a classroom management system, these tools have strengthened every other instructional initiative we have implemented.”
The second is a book and program developed by Lee Canter called Lee Canter’s Classroom Management for Academic Success. According to the information on the back cover of the book, Lee Canter and his staff have trained more than 1.5 million teachers. The book can be supplemented with a number of other resources entitled Assertive Discipline, Assertive Discipline Workbook (K–6), Assertive Discipline Workbook (7–12), and accompanying Assertive Discipline videos for each age group.
Both Jones’s and Cantor’s books are large format, coming in at just under or over three hundred pages. Marty preferred Jones’s methods to Canter’s. As I read through each, I paid attention to why that would be so. It became clear that Jones’s book starts with a series of very practical strategies that enhance classroom learning, which he sees as setting the foundation for good classroom management. Canter’s book dives right into classroom management and more or less ignores learning strategies, presumably because this is just one of some forty books on education that he has written.
Nevertheless, when the picture was complete, there was not as much daylight between Jones’s classroom management strategies and Canter’s as I had gotten the impression there would be from Marty’s description. Both were recipes for managing student behavior down to the last iota of movement and speech. I am going to ask you, the reader, to join me in a “deep dive” into this subject because doing so is necessary for revealing the intensity of obedience training that is not otherwise obvious to us. If you are a classroom teacher, you may be very familiar with this material, in which case I am going to ask you to revisit it from the perspective of its meta-effect on obedience conditioning.
Before I go into details of these instruction manuals, and the implications of these and others like them about teaching obedience too well, let me express sympathy for what they are each trying to accomplish. Let’s use another imagination exercise to get some emotional reality of what classroom teachers are up against every day.
Imagine yourself as a twenty-five-year-old teacher. You became a teacher with the idea of helping young people develop their capacity for a well-lived life. Perhaps you are part of Teach for America. Perhaps you are in an inner-city school with many young children from single parent or foster homes, or teenagers who have had to learn to fend for themselves in difficult neighborhoods. Perhaps you are teaching in a suburban or rural school in which students ride the bus each way for a half hour or more and come home when their parent or parents are still at work.
Imagine the thirty or so different personalities in your classroom—some from homes in which discipline was stern, others from homes in which frazzled parents never enforced the threats they were constantly making to curb unwanted behavior. Some of the students in your classroom have learned to dominate others to get along in the world, some have learned to retreat into their shells and not talk very much, some are quick mentally and get easily bored, others are just as easily confused and lost by the assignments you give them.
In the earlier grades, you may have the students for all or much of the day in your classroom. Older students will more likely be with you for only a fifty-minute period, or an hour and a half if on the block system. In either case you must ensure that these thirty students with widely different emotional needs, behavioral tendencies, and learning styles move from one work period to another with minimum disruption and make maximum use of the time spent on each subject to learn it and develop some mastery around it. Each time you pause to help a struggling student, talking and laughter breaks out in another part of the room that you are not giving attention. Perhaps wads of paper or chewing gum begin flying around the other end of the room.
After frequent requests for cooperation, you begin to lose it and get into power struggles with those acting up most vocally. As your nerves fray, you finally do lose it. Unable to cope any longer, you order an offending student to the principal’s office. Even if he dutifully goes, he is back in your classroom the next day, often acting up again. If this continues, he is singled out, given time outs, detentions, calls to his parent or guardian, and repeat trips to the office. Either this student learns to obey the authority of his teachers and principal or he is headed for suspension or transfer. Meanwhile, the 80 or 90 percent of your class who has better impulse control is absorbing a lesson of what happens to individuals who speak or act in defiance of the teacher’s authority: don’t talk back if you want to make it in the system.
We can all imagine this situation and empathize with the teachers who must do the best they can in these difficult environments. If they didn’t address disruptive behavior, or find and address its underlying antecedents, they would be doing a disservice to the rest of the class. Teachers are increasingly held accountable to demonstrate through standardized testing that their students have learned the prescribed curriculum for that topic. But to effectively teach their students, they need to be able to get and keep their focused attention. This is why classroom management techniques are given such priority.
But what are these techniques?
As I have said, Jones grounds classroom management in an instructional system that appears to have great merit in equipping teachers to effectively help all thirty students in the class follow the lesson, at the same time building their confidence and skills. While doing so, he is simultaneously training teachers to maximize obedience to their every instruction, which is the part of his system I am focusing on. He begins with the arrangement of desks so that there are aisles and blocks of seats that permit the teacher to place herself next to any student with the minimal amount of steps possible. He has found that there is a “zone” of several feet in which students will more readily obey the teacher’s instructions. We can immediately note that this fulfills one of Milgram’s observations that physical proximity of the authority figure dramatically increases the rate of compliance.
He next takes meticulous pains to train teachers in the poise and bearing so that “no means no” and “arguing is not an option.” The maxim he uses is that “Any discipline management technique that is working should self-eliminate.” In other words, it should be so effective that the student internalizes it so completely that just being in the presence of the authority figure, or in the space “owned” by the authority figure even if that authority is physically absent, will trigger obedience to the authority’s rules.
To achieve this, Jones trains teachers in the art of “meaning business.” This means creating a presence so commanding and sending signals that are so clear that students do not dream of talking back or disobeying instructions. After constructively training teachers to control their own stress reactions to provocative student behavior, he develops their self-awareness of body language to a degree rivaling that of dancers, actors, and world class athletes.
Take this example. A teacher is bent over a student’s desk for a few seconds to help the student with a lesson. A student across the room begins talking to another student in violation of the classroom rule to focus on one’s own work and not talk to other students during individual work assignments. Jones acknowledges that the teacher will be torn between completing the instruction and reinforcing classroom discipline. He is unequivocal. Reinforcing discipline must always come first or the teacher will lose control of the entire class.
Therefore, Jones instructs teachers how to reinforce discipline by displaying they “mean business” in the most economical and effective way possible. He exhorts the teachers he is training to “See and then act—don’t think.” If they think, the values conflict between instruction and discipline will undermine the priority of classroom management.
Per Jones:
“When you set limits in the classroom, you are establishing behavioral boundaries for the students. You know from developmental psychology that children establish reality by testing boundaries. If the boundaries never change, testing extinguishes as the child accepts the limit as being part of his or her reality.”
To reinforce the boundaries, Jones trains the teacher who is bent over a student’s desk to immediately turn her attention to the noncompliant behavior on the other side of the room. The teacher shouldn’t just turn any old way, but rather turn in a “regal fashion” that exudes “meaning business.” There is an exact way to execute a slow regal turn, which Jones breaks into the component steps. They include:
“Excuse me” to the student you were giving instructional guidance.
Then take a full one second for each of the following steps:
One. Stay down and breathe gently.
Two. Straighten up halfway as you look toward the disruptive students.
Three. Finish straightening up while looking at the disruptive students.
Four. Slowly rotate your shoulders and waist toward the disruptive students.
Five. Point one foot toward the disruptive students as your hips come around.
Six. Bring your other foot around to complete the turn as you square up to the disruptive students.
Each of these steps is elaborated on for the power of their nonverbal language and is practiced in teacher training sessions. They are complemented by instructions on eye contact, hand placement, jaw position, and smile suppression. The image given to the teachers is that of the dour Queen Victoria coldly stating “We are not amused.”
Surely, this is enough to send shivers down the spines of most children contemplating disobeying the classroom authority! It most closely resembles a rattlesnake unwinding for a strike!
The training Jones does is then imbedded in a carefully constructed system of rewards and penalties that further discourage any tendency to noncompliance with class rules and assignments.
Lee Canter’s Classroom Management for Academic Success is even more focused on systems of rewards and penalties. Early in his book, Canter has a section on teaching behavior and borrows from Jones.
“Behaviors taught should include expectations regarding verbal behavior, movement, and participation. More than 90 percent of disruptive behavior is related to inappropriate student talking and movement and lack of student participation in the activity before them (Jones 2000). Therefore, you need to specify the particular verbal behavior, level of movement, and participation you expect from students.”3
I have no doubt whatsoever that Canter was or would be just as horrified as we are at the ordeal Louise Ogborn was put through. Nevertheless, I find the emphasis on controlling movement and speech eerily reminiscent of the deeply ingrained rule sets Louise was following when complying with the orders she was given.
Canter emphasizes the need for explicit directions. One example he gives:
Vague Directions
“I need everyone to pay attention.”
Explicit Directions
“I need everyone’s attention. That means your eyes are on me, there is nothing in your hands but your pencil, and no one is talking.”4
If corrections officers are taught to be as exact in the instructions they give to inmates, and why wouldn’t they be, then David Stewart (“Officer Scott”) had his job made easier by teachers who had conditioned Louise Ogborn in exact compliance to explicit directions. Each time we go through airport security, we experience how exactly law enforcement authority is trained to issue explicit directions. Depending on the generation of technology in use, you may hear:
“Sir, remove everything from your pockets, remove your belt, remove your shoes, take the laptop out of its case.”
“Ma’am you are not to touch anything while I check your bag.”
All this is done apparently for a good cause, but is always dependent on our obedience and simultaneously reinforces our conditioning to obey.
Like Jones’s book, Canter also provides many useful techniques to assist teachers in performing their jobs. I am not focusing on those because they are outside of our purpose of exploring the subjects of obedience and Intelligent Disobedience. I am focusing on how training a million and a half teachers in classroom management may have the unanticipated meta-effect of creating a climate of obedience that potentiates authority running amok.
Both classroom management systems include “back-up plans” or in Canter’s terminology “consequences from a discipline hierarchy.” For middle/secondary school he offers a sample plan.
First disruption: |
Warning |
Second disruption: |
Stay 1 minute after class |
Third disruption: |
Stay 2 minutes after class |
Fourth disruption: |
Call to parents |
Fifth disruption: |
Send to vice principal’s office |
Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this system, but it has the meta-effect of instilling a respect for/fear of increasing consequences for noncompliant behavior. Louise Ogborn “knew” if she did not comply that the consequences would escalate; in this case to being arrested and taken to jail.
Canter goes on to give explicit regimens on how to instruct students to behave in every aspect of classroom life from early education onward. Jones acknowledges the need for complete control of these common classroom activities as well, though provides more systemic guidelines. Here are some of the topics covered.
♦ Beginning-of-day routine
♦ End-of-day routine
♦ In-seat transitions (between activities)
♦ Out-of-seat transitions (between activities)
♦ Lining up to leave the classroom
♦ Entering the classroom after recess or lunch
♦ Distributing and collecting materials and papers
♦ Sharpening pencils
♦ Using materials on bookshelves or cabinets
♦ Leaving class to go to the bathroom
♦ Taking care of desks, table, and chairs
♦ Using the drinking fountain5
Undoubtedly, these topics are being updated as students increasingly have access to electronic communications. Each of these may make perfect sense individually. Collectively and cumulatively, it is only reasonable to assume there are meta-effects. In fact, both of these classroom management systems count on that. If the behavioral management is sufficiently consistent, it becomes internalized self-management. The rule sets disappear from consciousness and become the default behavior. If the intended result is orderly classrooms, this may be desirable. It is not desirable if the meta-result is nurses, copilots, security personnel, or McDonald’s hourly workers being obedient when they should not be.
If there are 180 school days in a year and students attend school for 13 years between kindergarten and high school, allowing for a few absences each year, students are in school approximately 2,300 days by the time they have completed high school. At a little over 6.5 hours a day in most schools, each of our children spend about 15,000 hours of their lives in some form of classroom management system before graduating high school. According to Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling book, Outliers: The Story of Success, it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to become masterful at an activity. Have we designed a system that makes too many of our citizens masterfully obedient by the time they leave their secondary education? Or masterfully (but not intelligently) disobedient if they have learned to rebel against this system?
This is not to say that our current system of education is the cause of obedience to authority or to the misuses of authority. As I have noted, every culture has its means of inculcating respect for authority. To some degree, I venture to say that the elaborate systems for classroom management offered by Jones, Canter, and others is a response to past systems no longer being in favor. Prior generations were comfortable with teachers using corporal punishment and humiliation to enforce discipline. In other cultures, secondary education is not universal while at the same time being essential for economic security; this combination carries sufficient economic and social incentives to make classroom management a nonissue. In segments of societies without access to formal schooling of any kind, the genetic disposition toward obedience is still expressed and reinforced through a variety of social and religious norms and sanctions.
This book, and this chapter in particular, focuses on the universal primary and secondary education system found in most economically developed nations as a prime shaper of obedience to formal authority. There is no doubt that obedience to mother, father, or other primary caregivers laid the early foundation for obedience to future authority figures. Surely, religious education and extra-curricular activities with other authority figures reinforce the lessons learned. But none span the years of young human development for so long and so intensely in the developed world as classroom education.
Louise Ogborn was a product of that system. So were, for that matter, Donna Jean Summers and “Wes” Nix Jr. So were the victims and perpetrators in the seventy other establishments allegedly successfully targeted by David Stewart.
I am sure there are educators who can make profound critiques of the philosophy of education itself and offer radically alternative models that reduce the emphasis on authority. I would undoubtedly applaud some of these models. Perhaps the blending of virtual and physical classrooms that is beginning to occur through creative uses of technology will de-emphasize classroom authority as a byproduct of the new media and methodologies. But the current reality is that most of our education through secondary school occurs in classrooms to which tens of millions of children report daily. Some of the questions the stories presented above require us to ask include:
1. What can be done to retain that which is valuable in classroom management techniques while reducing their tendency to create unthinking obedience?
2. How do we train new teachers to develop a healthy autonomy in their students while maintaining order?
3. How do we retrain experienced teachers who have successful classroom management skills to encourage independent thinking?
4. When students transition from the school system and become frontline workers who have minimum job and financial security, how do we train them to question orders that violate safety, legality, or common decency?
5. How do we train frontline supervisors to clarify orders they receive and evaluate their safety, practicality, and legality before acting on them?
6. How do we develop healthy relationships between children and those in authority that form a foundation for both classroom and workplace behaviors?
We will begin to answer these questions in the next chapter.
