Individual Skills or Shared Culture?
Maynard wants us to see most common school misbehaviors, from inattentiveness and tardiness to bullying and fighting, as the result of skill gaps rather than character flaws. His catch-all solution is to teach “replacement skills.” Rather than focusing on consequences, he encourages educators to identify the positive behavior they want to see instead and teach it explicitly. Some of Maynard’s examples make the difference in approach especially clear. His proposed response to disruptive talking, for example, is to “assign the student to help lead a discussion or presentation, emphasizing the importance of listening or speaking at appropriate times.” The response to a defiant student, he suggests, might be assigning “a leadership role in a class activity to channel their defiance into positive leadership.”
There is a certain ingenuity in these responses, but also a curious reluctance to let misconduct simply be misconduct. The student who repeatedly talks over a teacher may not need an outlet for an untapped gift for public speaking. The defiant student may not be a frustrated leader awaiting recognition. Both may understand perfectly well what is expected but have simply chosen not to comply.
Maynard is absolutely right that “when we look at behavior this way”—that is, treating behavior problems not as acts to be punished but skills to be developed—“it changes everything.” But not in the way he thinks. It changes expectations. It changes agency and accountability. It changes how often adults interpret misconduct as incapacity rather than choice, and how readily students learn to do the same. Most consequentially, it changes the purpose of discipline itself—from forming judgment and responsibility to managing deficits and accommodating dysfunction.
Most importantly, discipline is never merely an interaction between an adult and one child. Everyone else is watching. There is a fine line between redirecting negative behavior and rewarding it, and students are acute observers of status and incentives. Elevating the disruptive student to discussion leader or responding to defiance with a leadership role may signal to every quietly cooperative child in the room that misconduct is rewarded with attention and authority rather than met with corrective accountability. A discipline system is instructive not only in what it says to the child who misbehaves but in what everyone else learns from watching the adults respond.
It’s not that skills are irrelevant. Schools rightly teach routines: how to move through shared spaces, speak respectfully, wait one’s turn, and so on. But it is a category error to treat every disciplinary problem as rooted in an unmet need or a failure of instruction. Some misconduct has nothing to do with a deficit in skills or knowledge. Sometimes it’s just a kid who felt tempted and made a poor choice. A child who cuts in line may need a reminder. A child who torments a classmate needs more than a mini-lesson.
A more illuminating way of thinking about all this comes from the Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof and his collaborator Rachel Kranton. In their influential paper “Identity and Schooling” (2002), they argued that schools are social institutions that shape identity. Students are motivated not only by rewards and punishments but by the kind of person they believe themselves to be and the kind of person their environment esteems.
It is worth pausing over the word identity, which has acquired a different meaning in contemporary education debates. For Akerlof and Kranton, identity did not refer to the personal attributes we claim and expect society to acknowledge (like race, gender, or sexuality). It referred to the social roles students inhabit and the norms attached to those roles: scholar or cynic, leader or follower, insider or outsider. Students do not merely follow rules, they perform identities.
