In my former life as a high school teacher, I one day came across the following item in my school’s morning bulletin:
“Donate blood to help out children that are in need. Sign up in Rm. 177 and get 10 hours of DETENTION CLEARED!!!!”
Clever idea, I thought. Misbehaving students learn a valuable lesson while serving a socially useful purpose; meanwhile, the school is spared the cost of supervising hours upon hours of detention. Seems like a win-win. Except for one thing:
It’s corporal punishment.
Whatever might be said for such a policy, there’s simply no getting around the following fact: it makes the violent depletion of a child’s bodily fluids into a state-sanctioned method of discipline. It lets students atone for their misbehavior — for, say, throwing a paper airplane across the classroom — through a procedure in which a needle punctures their skin, penetrates their vein, and forcibly pumps out blood by the pint.
True, students are not required to liquefy their detention hours in this way. It’s just an alternative to serving the time. But that doesn’t make it any less objectionable: a policy where students were given a choice between ten lashings or an hour’s detention wouldn’t pass legal or moral muster, notwithstanding the elective nature of the lashings.
But here’s the difference, some might say: giving blood promotes a social good, maybe saving lives. The school isn’t offering delinquent students a substitute punishment, but rather rewarding them for doing a good deed.
Of course, traditional corporal punishment also promotes a social good – the deterrence of mischief. Nevertheless, we refuse to tolerate it; we recognize that any state-directed invasion of a child’s bodily integrity is a categorical wrong, not something mildly unsavory that can be justified if there’s enough of an upside.
What’s more, the school’s policy sends a perverse message about charity and altruism – that service to one’s community is transactional, a quid pro quo, a way to “learn your lesson.” Any positive, edifying effect that might arise from the act of giving, then, will surely be overwhelmed by the negative context in which it is compelled. This negative association — between punishment and charity — will sound most loudly for three groups of students.
First, “good” students will be deterred from giving, not wanting to put themselves in the company of mischief-makers and not wanting to partake in an activity that has been equated with detention. After all, they didn’t cause trouble in class, so why should they have to give blood? And for those who do voluntarily give, the feeling of pride that should rightfully be theirs may well be tarnished.
Second, the policy is particularly unfair for students who receive detention after they have already participated in the blood drive. By virtue of their earlier charitable act, they’ll be denied an option available to their less altruistic peers.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the blood-for-detention offer is primarily aimed at seniors, who are not allowed to graduate until they’ve wiped their detention slate clean. The message sent to these students has a troublingly coercive tenor: Give blood, or don’t graduate.
Teachers, too, are caught up in an uncomfortable moral haze. If giving blood really does save lives, should they be more quick to assign detention, knowing the great social good that will result? What if a terrorist attack or massive earthquake created a desperate need for blood — should they then lower the threshold for potentially life-saving detention hours?
Self-sacrifice is admirable, even heroic. But compulsory self-sacrifice is at odds with our society’s commitment to personal autonomy. So strong is this commitment, in fact, that we think it cruel and unusual to invade the bodily integrity of those who rape and kill.
It is similarly cruel, and should be just as unusual, for those who smack their gum a little too loudly in math class.