The Dangers of Obedience: Heroes Have Discipline Problems
A girl in your class can't breathe. She clearly needs help. The teacher tells you to stay seated. What do you do?
I would have stayed seated. At least, that's what I would have done when I was 15, the age of Texas middle schooler Anthony Ruelas.
You hear the girl wheezing and gagging, but the teacher refuses to let the students leave their seats. She has emailed the school nurse and is waiting to hear back. Do you still stay put, hoping the nurse's office doesn't use overly aggressive spam filters?
How about when, several minutes later, the girl falls out of her chair?
I'd like to think I would have shown Anthony's courage and character. I'd love to claim that I’d have defied the teacher's authority and carried my afflicted classmate to the nurse's office.
I even like to imagine myself saying what Anthony did as he took action: "F— that! We ain’t got time to wait for no email from the nurse."
But at his age, I suspect I would have stayed obediently planted in my desk-chair, like the rest of the kids, admiring and maybe envying the boy who risked getting in trouble in order to save a girl in distress.
And he did get in trouble. Gateway Middle School suspended him for two days, for what Reason's Robby Soave calls "the unspeakable crime of escorting an asthmatic classmate to the nurse’s office."
“I was like what?” Anthony later told a reporter. “I’m suspended for this? Like, I was trying to help her.”
When school officials informed Anthony's mother of his suspension, it seems they failed to mention the asthmatic classmate. She reports that when her son tried to explain to her what had happened, “I wasn’t trying to hear it. I was like, 'No, they already told me what happened — you walked out of class.'"
To be fair to his mom, this wasn't Anthony's first suspension. And we have to wonder if past discipline problems have anything to do with his still being in 8th grade at age 15. But maybe that's the point: model students don't challenge their teacher's authority, even when they should. They have too much to lose.
Asked if he'd make the same decision again, Anthony replied, "Most definitely!"
Are his obedient classmates as sanguine about their behavior?
A Question of Discipline
When I was Anthony's age, there was an ABC Afterschool Special called The Wave, based on an experiment conducted by a high school history teacher in 1967. Ron Jones had found it difficult to explain to his students how the German people could have acquiesced to — even cooperated with — Hitler'sNational Socialists.
Jones decided to spend one class period demonstrating the appeal of fascism, though he didn't use the F-word at first. He took his class of about 25 students (who were all about Anthony's age) and introduced them to some old-fashioned discipline. For one period, he had them practice marching in and out of the classroom in formation. At their desks, they had to sit straight and smile. It turns out the students liked it.
When Jones came to class the next day, he found them all sitting at their desks with perfect posture and broad smiles. Jones says he hadn't planned to extend the experiment past the first day, but now it had a momentum of its own.
An article at the San Francisco Chronicle tells what happened next:
By the end of day two, participating students had developed a secret hallway salute, which caused enough campus curiosity that by dayHeroes Have Discipline Problems | Foundation for Economic Education: