Chapter 12: Some Current Threats to Humanistic Pupil Control

One of the more intriguing recent tensions in American school organizations concerns the observation that while schools are increasingly expected to provide a caring, communal, and constructivist setting for academic and social learning, a noticeable trend also exists toward the use of more bureaucratic and custodial forms of pupil control. Focusing on examples of this latter trend (e.g., the decline of recess time and the expansion of “zero tolerance” discipline policies), this chapter explores this tension and offers a number of theoretical avenues for understanding the variation in styles of pupil control across school organizational settings.