Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper explores the extra-pedagogical function of school discipline as an instrument for the management of the urban poor in the “neoliberal government of social insecurity” (Wacquant, 2009). Drawing on a qualitative analysis of disciplinary policies at a U.S. urban school district and how these are put into practice at one elementary school, I argue that the district has abdicated its responsibility for its students’ moral and social education. In theory and practice, discipline has been stripped of its educative purposes and instead serves as a means to prepare students for futures in which they have been constructed as civically and economically obsolete. Against the background of its own history of failure, the decline of the ideal of educability, and the broader socioeconomic realities of social insecurity and mass incarceration, the district constructs its high-poverty, high-minority student population as always already hopeless. The punitive ideology of No Child Left Behind produces an amalgamation of morality and performance in which the district seeks to meet performance pressures by “cracking down” on the state of indiscipline that allegedly dominates its schools. Although it is designed to control, the resulting disciplinary overregulation is doomed to fail because it simply cannot be put into practice. This structural failure of the official normative order formalized in the disciplinary system empowers a set of alternative behavioral norms that inverts the moral and social dimensions of schooling. By facilitating this alternative normative order, the school constructs students as illiberal subjects who “must” be governed in authoritarian ways.