Bring the Discussion Outside the Classroom
Sonia Chajet-Wides, ‘21
February 2020
Starting two weeks ago, when the BHSEC community received an abrupt email announcing the new locked-door policy, the school has been buzzing with frustration. The tension between the students and faculty is palpably high. It seems that a lot of this chaos could have been avoided if, from the get-go, the seminar-style discussion that BSHEC is famous for continued outside of our classrooms consistently.
BHSEC’s classrooms, at this point, exist in an entirely different world than the general school environment. In BHSEC classrooms, students are expected to behave and perform academically as adults. The BHSEC model involves giving students undergraduate & graduate-level material starting in 9th grade, and there is the expectation that quality college-level work will take place. This is obviously even more heightened during the College Program. Additionally, BHSEC uses the Bard liberal-arts motto of “A place to think,” and prides itself on its values of exploration, intellectualism, and dialogue. One of the main ways that this is expressed is in the seminar-style discussion format of many BHSEC classes. In class discussions, students and faculty engage with each other and each other’s ideas alike and students’ ideas, independence, and potential are taken very seriously.
In contrast, the disciplinary policies at BHSEC, in particular the cell phone policy and the original process of this new locked-door policy, are notably not discussion-based, nor designed with the expectation of maturity. At the beginning of the year, students are essentially forced to sign a pre-written cell phone policy and that signature is used as a reason to take students’ cell phones throughout the year. There is no school-wide discussion about this policy and no input from students. The cell phone policy itself is infantilizing and foolish. It bans cell phone usage outside of the classroom, during free periods, and lunch. This is pointless because most of the same functions that can be performed on a cell phone can also be performed on a tablet or a computer, both of which are allowed in the library and the hallways. It is also infantilizing, expecting immature behavior from students as opposed to the expectation of adult behavior in classrooms. The ability to use cell phones in the library could actually help students develop an adequate sense of time management, and obviously, if students waste too much time on their phones, they will learn their lesson and suffer the consequences on their own.
The locked-door policy, too, was not preceded by a discussion among students and faculty. Unlike the cell phone policy, there’d never been a clear protocol for empty classrooms; there was no discussion of it during Writing & Thinking, no general guidelines for what is acceptable and not acceptable to be doing in an empty classroom, etc. Obviously, the events that prompted the new policy should have been naturally assumed to be wrong. But part of the reason that the policy has caused such an uproar is that there was no warning or previous discussion to the topic, let alone the specific policy.
If we want to have a restored school culture and relationship between students and faculty, the maturity and dialogue of BHSEC classrooms must be replicated outside of them. It is simply not fair to expect students to bear the responsibilities of being college students but then not let them have the benefits of independence and respect. In order for this to happen, though, both parties (faculty and students) must be willing to engage in this dialogue. It is incredible that this eventually happened with the town hall, but students should be incorporated into these processes as they are developing, similarly to many colleges, not just after there is uproar. Thus, there should have been meetings with students earlier on in the development of the policy. It’s important that in the future, students and faculty give each other the benefit of the doubt, and that faculty work to include students in important discussions, just as they do in the classroom.