Public Schools’ Best-Behaved Kids Suffer Due To Liberal Empathy

One of the biggest problems in our society is that people in positions of power care more about empathy toward troublemakers than dishing out justice. 

I was reminded of that this week when I let myself get sucked into a debate against liberals over discipline problems in public schools. 

Discipline and bullying in public schools are out of control  (and no one wants to talk about it). Money and politics and political correctness create an environment where public school administrators are too timid and too weak to really lay down the law on this problem. 

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My father was a public school teacher. He complained about this constantly. School administrators would never back him up when it came to administering discipline to troublemakers in his classroom. I’ve interviewed other teachers who told me the same. I witnessed things during my own time in public school that corroborate this. 

I’m reminded of a quote from the great economist Milton Friedman, when he was asked about public schools and all their many problems.

“You can’t reform any institution from inside because people don’t act against their own interest. The only way you reform institutions is by competition from the outside,” Friedman said, as he promoted the concept of school choice. 

As long as the public schools have no real competition, the bureaucrats who run them have no incentive to fix that problem. 

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Granted, the bullies and discipline problem kids probably come from dysfunctional homes. As sad as that is, I advocate only for well-behaved children who go to school to learn but can’t because the discipline problem kids create an environment that is not conducive to learning. 

And this brings me back to people on the Left, who seem to think that bad kids are entitled to an education, no matter how many problems they cause in a classroom or how much time they distract a teacher from actually teaching. They want the child kept in class, and they want the public schools to intervene because they naively believe public schools can and should redeem bad kids. 

Programs like Restorative Justice, which seek to rehabilitate offenders rather than punish them, are ineffective. They do nothing to decrease bullying nor do they increase the school’s average academic scores, and they also discourage more and more adults from entering the teaching profession. 

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The people who advocate for the discipline problem kids need to find another solution. They could start by realizing that these kids are not so much children as much as they are future adults — and stop coddling them — and realize it’s time to start acclimating them to the rules and standards we’re all expected to abide by in a functioning society. And they can only learn that through hard discipline. 

I’m not saying empathy is a bad thing. People with empathy balance out the people who want justice and discipline…..and vice versa. 

But….the balance is out of whack. Too many people who score high on cognitive empathy tests have too great a say in how society gets run, especially in our public schools. And a lot of good children suffer for it. 

This needs to get fixed. 

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