Civility in Classroom Discourse A Reflection

Civility in Classroom Discourse: A Reflection Copyright (c) 2014 Jonathan Kenigson It is incontrovertible that the median performance of U.S. secondary-school students lags behind that of many European students on a number of internationally normed metrics of academic achievement. My purpose in this brief article is not to pronounce another jeremiad over the supposedly bloated corpse of U.S. public education, but to provide a series of perspectives upon several oft-neglected facets of comparative education that ought to be discussed.

In particular, I wish to advance the following (possibly controversial) tenet: U.S. secondary schools are, in my opinion, some of the best in the world - if by "best" one means that students and faculty have the greatest number of college and career opportunities after graduation. Also, U.S. students learn to reason critically and not merely memorize and regurgitate information to instructors on high-stakes exams. In my opinion, these factors are illustrative of the ideological agenda of liberal Western democracy, in which individuals (and in particular students) are desired and expected to reason "beyond the text" and reach personal conclusions that can in turn be debated and negotiated.

U.S. students and parents should be especially thankful for these positive traits that (in greater or lesser measure) undergird the ideological superstructure of education systems in the U.S. In a Hegelian sense, however, it is precisely this freedom and individualism that generates (from what I have observed) the greatest deficit in the U.S. education system: students who believe that comportment with decorum and civility in the classroom is unimportant and who, consequently, disrupt the learning environment.

From my investigation and personal experience in many major world education systems (British, praca berlin budowlanka Russian, U.S., and French), I can state with confidence that the U.S. system is the only one in which students who exhibit continuously uncivil behavior in the classroom (for instance: interruption, gross immaturity, sexual innuendo, chatting with friends instead of paying attention) are not merely removed from the learning environment so that serious and interested students can succeed.

In most classroom observations I have conducted, student misunderstanding of basic concepts is due in no small part to students' general inattentiveness pursuant of the (generally unstated) belief that it is the responsibility of the teacher to provide entertainment instead of education. I have found that consistently disruptive students in U.S. schools (proximally and for the most part) believe that it is the teacher's responsibility to merely ignore such behavior instead of confronting it head-on.

As a consequence, such students miss important information and end up with mediocre grades, possibly hampering their future achievements. By contrast, in most Bulgarian schools that I have investigated, students treat teachers with great respect, and are silent when the teacher speaks or presents material. Students know that difficult end-of-year exams will be objectively graded to a high standard; that extra-credit or "make-up" exams are impossible to obtain; and that failure to prepare for adequately for exams will almost certainly result in an inability to either study within Bulgaria's university system or abroad.

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