Rory Fox

To clarify the concept of misplaced kindness I am going to start with an analogy. Imagine a person who feeds a pet dog on chocolate. The person does it out of kindness and love for the pet, but chocolate can be poisonous for a dog. The giving of the chocolate is not a ‘false’ kindness or an ‘unkindness’ as the person does it with a generous and sincere desire to be kind. However the outcome for the recipient is bad.
Misplaced kindness can be a very serious problem in education. Ultimately it can lead to school standards collapsing to the point that a school can become a ‘failing school.’

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  1. shinichi Post author

    When misplaced kindness undermines education

    by Rory Fox

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-misplaced-kindness-undermines-education-rory-fox

    To clarify the concept of misplaced kindness I am going to start with an analogy. Imagine a person who feeds a pet dog on chocolate. The person does it out of kindness and love for the pet, but chocolate can be poisonous for a dog. The giving of the chocolate is not a ‘false’ kindness or an ‘unkindness’ as the person does it with a generous and sincere desire to be kind. However the outcome for the recipient is bad.

    I am tempted to call this type of kindness a miskindness, as it is a kindness which has missed its mark and gone wrong. But inventing new words can cause confusion. So, I shall call it a misplacedkindness.

    Misplaced kindness can be a very serious problem in education. Ultimately it can lead to school standards collapsing to the point that a school can become a ‘failing school.’

    Failing schools are often very ‘caring’ places. The staff are really concerned for their children and they genuinely want the best for their children. But they approach the children with a misplaced kindness which ends up seriously damaging the children’s educational outcomes.

    I shall give two examples of this, starting with a school which decided to ‘let off’ poorer pupils from the requirement to do their homework. There is a separate question about whether a school should be setting homework at all. But I think it is a common sense conclusion that if a school decides to set homework which is compulsory for any pupils, then all pupils should be treated fairly and equally. There shouldn’t be exemptions for children based on their parental income.

    Yet when misplaced kindness started to arise in that school, the common sense assumptions of fairness and equality where amongst the very first casualties. Several teachers decided that children from disadvantaged homes had nowhere quiet to work at home, so it was not the fault of the pupils when they couldn’t do their homework. As it wasn’t their fault, then the kind thing to do was to refrain from punishing those children for failure to do their homework.

    This approach seemed logical and ‘kind’ to the teachers involved. But over time it had the effect of making homework optional for disadvantaged children, whilst creating resentment amongst other children who were still required to do the homework. Many of the most educationally needy children came from disadvantaged homes. They were the ones who stopped doing the homework and they started falling behind their peers who were still doing homework.

    This widening gap between different socio economic groups of children damaged the pace of teaching within mainstream lessons. Teachers could no longer plan a lesson on the assumption that a class would have made specific amounts of progress in their learning. So they ended up repeating material in lessons for students who had not done homework, whilst the students who had done their homework sat bored, frustrated and disengaged.

    There were many other examples of misplaced kindness undermining the school’s ability to get the best outcomes for its students, but a particularly interesting one involved the problem of children turning up to lessons without a pen.

    At first it was suggested that children should be rewarded for carrying a pen, but rewards made no difference. Then it was suggested that children should be punished if they turned up to a lesson without a pen. But teachers felt that that was unkind. Some of the children came from very disadvantaged backgrounds and had chaotic lives. Some of the children had to get themselves up in the morning and it was felt that they did well just to get themselves to school. Punishing them for not having a pen would be unfair and unkind.

    The problem of missing pens grew worse and worse in the school. Pens were constantly being handed out and then becoming immediately lost, as children realised that ‘not having a pen’ meant that they could opt out of doing their school work. In desperation some teachers tried taping pens to lessons with string, but those pens also got lost.

    The school was buying more and more pens, but stocks were constantly running out. At its peak, in a school of just over a thousand children, the school was getting through several thousand pens a month. That was clearly financially (and ecologically) unsustainable. It was also having a disastrous impact on the quality of education in lessons.

    Teachers were changing their teaching style to reduce the need for pens. This led to less focus on improving pupils’ writing skills and so overall the educational standards in the school just declined still further. Something as simple as ‘having a pen’ had become a major cause of overall school failure.

    Educational experts came and went. New styles of teaching were introduced. Staff had additional training in all the latest educational theories. But nothing seemed to improve standards in the school. And the reason for that was very simple. The teachers were already knowledgeable and competent teachers. They didn’t need training in new ways of teaching.

    The cause of the educational failure in the school had nothing to do with education. It was a problem of misplaced kindness. Treating a problem of misplaced kindness as if it is an educational problem was never going to be successful because it was trying to treat the symptoms, rather than the cause.

    Misplaced kindness can be a serious problem in schools, but we have also seen it as a serious problem undermining educational standards in refugee camps. On more than one occasion we have been teaching a group of children, only to have bystanders suggest to us that the children are too traumatised to learn. Even though the class is all clearly and obviously engaging successfully in school work, it can still be put to us by well meaning bystanders that the children should be doing therapeutic drawing and colouring instead of learning geometry and grammar.

    When children have a genuine need for therapy then of course they should have access to therapy. But the attitude of assuming that all children need therapy and should therefore not be learning school work is simply ‘misplaced kindness’. It may seem a kindness to let the children just colour pictures all day, rather than taxing them with school work. But it is certainly not a kindness in the long run when the children cannot get employment because they have not had a proper education.

    Solving a problem of misplaced kindness is one of the more difficult scenarios in which to raise educational standards. Kindness is often experienced as a feeling. Understanding that a particular instance of kindness is ‘misplaced’ requires intellectual realisation. But rarely will intellectual arguments change emotional feelings. In these kinds of contexts, it is difficult to get buy-in to school improvement strategies until teachers return to first principles: the values and moral mission.

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