Legal boundaries and teacher behavior: a multi-case study of educational discipline in Chinese primary and secondary schools

• In Event: Teaching and Teacher Education in China

Proposal

As global educational governance increasingly advances toward legalization and rights-based approaches, the legitimacy of teachers’ educational discipline has emerged as a critical issue in international education scholarship. Since the Convention on the Rights of the Child established children’s rights as a fundamental norm in international law, a growing number of countries have enacted legislation to comprehensively prohibit corporal punishment and advocate non-punitive alternatives to promote children’s holistic development (United Nations, 1989). Nevertheless, tensions between teacher authority and student rights persist globally, manifesting in diverse equilibrium paths across varying cultural and institutional contexts.
In China, the implementation of the 2021 Trial Rules on Educational Discipline in Primary and Secondary Schools (Rules) marks the entry of educational discipline into an era of standardization and legalization (Zhang & Wang, 2022). The Rules, for the first time in the form of a normative document, explicitly affirm the legitimacy of educational discipline and its relevant boundaries, emphasizing: “Educational discipline refers to the educational actions taken by schools and teachers, based on educational purposes, to manage, instruct, or correct students who violate rules and disciplines in prescribed ways, thereby prompting students to take heed, recognize, and rectify their errors” (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2020). However, the Rules reveal evident ambiguities in implementation: on one hand, the authorization provisions are overly principled, failing to adequately delineate specific disciplinary methods and boundaries in different contexts (Ye, 2021); on the other hand, while the prohibitive list imposes rigid constraints, it lacks standards for factual determination, making it difficult for teachers to gauge practical risks. These factors lead teachers into real-world dilemmas encompassing abuse, misuse, fear of use, and abandonment of use (Zhang & Huang, 2022; Liu & Zhang, 2020). Such tensions between institutions and practices often escalate educational disciplinary actions into judicial disputes, where judicial precedents, through vivid and specific case interpretations, comprehensively evaluate the motives, methods, degrees, and consequences of teachers’ educational discipline, gradually becoming key bases for defining the boundaries of disciplinary legitimacy.
Based on this, the present study proposes three core questions: (1) Between institutional texts and judicial rulings, how is the legitimacy of Chinese teachers’ discipline defined and transformed? (2) Under what circumstances do Chinese judicial authorities tend to support or restrict teachers’ disciplinary actions? (3) How do Chinese teachers dynamically balance educational motives, method selection, and legal risks when implementing discipline?
First, the legitimacy of teachers’ educational discipline must be grounded in explicit authorizations from statutory law (Hart, 1994). The Rules and related superior laws stipulate both authorizing clauses for teachers’ discipline and clear prohibitive lists, thus serving as the primary starting point for defining legitimacy. Second, educational practice is inherently complex. Bourdieu’s theory of field and habitus reveals that teachers’ disciplinary behaviors are not merely actions under legal constraints but comprehensive products of power relations, cultural capital, and behavioral habits within the school as a social field (Bourdieu, 1990). Therefore, only by integrating factual contexts such as teachers’ motives, disciplinary methods, student responses, and educational outcomes can we reveal how law is understood, implemented, and contested in educational behaviors. Finally, legal norms must be transformed into adjudicative rules through judicial interpretation and discretion. As Coleman (1990) points out, the tension between institutional norms and social actions requires institutional adjudication to achieve balance. In the education domain, this discretion manifests as judicial authorities dynamically defining the legitimacy boundaries of teachers’ disciplinary behaviors in rulings. Accordingly, this study proposes a three-dimensional analytical framework of “normative basis—factual context—adjudicative logic,” which both addresses the rule-of-law demands in education governance and explains the dynamic transformation of disciplinary legitimacy between institutions and practice.
This study employs a multi-case study method (Stake, 2006), centering on the definition and transformation of the legitimacy of teachers’ educational discipline as the core concept. Through longitudinal dissection of individual cases and horizontal comparison across different cases, it reveals common standards and differentiated discretionary paths used by judicial authorities in ascertaining disciplinary legitimacy. Data are sourced from the “PKU Law” legal database; after rigorous screening of judicial cases following the promulgation of the Rules, duplicates and irrelevant cases were excluded, ultimately yielding 25 judicial cases—primarily second-instance trials—involving teachers’ educational discipline as samples. These encompass diverse regions, school types, and educational disciplinary scenarios, incorporating teachers’ motives, methods, dispute foci, and adjudicative outcomes, offering strong representativeness and analytical value.
This study reveals the interactive logic of China’s educational discipline between institutional authorizations and judicial discretion. First, judicial practices concerning educational discipline in China exhibit an overall trend of “authorization contraction and prohibition expansion.” Courts adopt strict limitations when interpreting authorizing clauses, while continuously expanding interpretations of prohibitive clauses to prioritize the protection of students’ rights to life, health, and personal dignity. Second, Chinese judicial authorities display two stable attitudinal modes: a supportive mode, where courts tend to uphold teachers’ managerial rights when disciplinary motives are legitimate, methods are mild, procedures are compliant, and consequences are minor; and a restrictive mode, where courts tend to impose strict limitations—invoking external laws such as the Civil Code and the Public Security Administration Punishments Law—when methods cross prohibitive red lines, cause severe consequences, or involve procedural flaws. Third, the role of educational motives has significantly diminished. In earlier cases, Chinese teachers often invoked “educational purposes” as justifications, but judicial authorities generally treat them as subsidiary considerations rather than exonerating conditions. Legitimacy of methods and control of outcome risks have become the core of adjudications. Finally, Chinese teachers are gradually developing defensive teaching tendencies. In high-risk legal environments, teachers tend to avoid physical contact-based discipline, shifting toward non-contact, low-risk methods such as verbal criticism, after-class discussions, and home-school communication, while heavily relying on procedural compliance to mitigate legal risks. Although this trend protects students to some extent, it may also lead to a “disciplinary vacuum” and the weakening of educational management functions.This study develops a transferable framework to explain how courts balance child protection and teacher authority. Findings from China reveal defensive teaching and disciplinary vacuums, offering comparative insights for designing non-violent, proceduralized educational discipline worldwide.

Author

• Yawen Xie, Department of Education，East China Normal University