Learning Obsolescence: Urban School Discipline in the Making and Management of Illiberal Subjects

• In Event: 15.061 - MTCC Roundtable Session Two
  In Roundtable Session: 15.061-6 - Centering Race and Marginalized Voices Across Policies and Practices

Abstract

This paper summarizes research I conducted at an inner-city elementary school that was characterized by zero-tolerance discipline and every infraction of the countless, minutely defined rules was met with automatic and harsh punishments. However, instead of creating order, the disciplinary system created chaos and conflict because it simply could not be put into practice. This structural failure ultimately produced the very behaviors the disciplinary system was supposed to prevent and empowered a set of alternative behavioral norms characterized by an inversion of the moral and social dimensions of schooling. Against this background, I posit an 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).

Author

• Anne Kathrin Scheer, Southern Illinois University