Learning the Wrong Lessons From School Vandalism

• In Event: 18.023 - Juvenile Delinquency, Student Voices, and 20th-Century School Reform

Abstract

The public perception of unchecked juvenile delinquency between the 1940s and the 1960s had produced two developments by the late 1970s. The first was significant changes to local, state, and federal policies regarding school discipline and safety; the second was an outpouring of new academic scholarship. Both trends paid particular attention to property destruction in schools, which analysts used as a proxy for violence and disorder. Unfortunately, this paper contends, policymakers and academics diverged in their understanding of school vandalism, resulting in a significant disjuncture between practice and theory.

During the 1960s, explanations of vandalism shifted from the personal adjustment model favored by Freudian psychologists and social workers, which interpreted vandalism as a manifestation of psychic illness—to be diagnosed and cured—to an ecological model, in which vandalism became symptomatic of larger social and spatial arrangements. (B. F. Skinner’s philosophy of behaviorism provided the pivot between the two interpretations.) The ecological approach generated more holistic explanations of vandalism’s sources but often divided policymakers and academics. The former sought to use existing systems to curb vandalism, adopting new disciplinary measures and “hardening” targets like windows and bathrooms, reducing vandalism to a problem of organizational control. Meanwhile, the latter came to recognize property destruction as a phenomenon with intractable causes, implicitly indicting existing systems by shifting blame from individual youth to the society at large. More than a simple tension between theory and practice, divergent responses to school vandalism represented a fundamental breakdown in interpretations of and responses to children’s moral culpability. The trend continues to the present, with reductive (often punitive) approaches to vandalism outweighing more nuanced approaches.

Sources for this paper will include federal reports and legislation, academic and professional monographs from the era, and reports from large urban school districts.

Author

• Campbell Scribner, University of Maryland - College Park