According to Commonsense, a good student was able to follow instruction, have no distractions, learn through whichever way the educator presented, listen quietly and respectfully, remember the rules, stay on task, and perform on demand in the way that was asked.
Students that have limited outside distractions or worries in their lives are privileged in this definition of a good student. A good student in this text caters to those who learn well from a specific instructional strategy, there wasn’t room for interpretation or creativity in their learning/presentation so those that needed that would be labelled a bad student. Those students with learning struggles or disabilities, having trouble with instruction and staying on task may result in being labelled a bad student.
I would say that schools had a big focus on discipline historically, they were more strict and more focused on behaviour than schools now. If there were any behavioural issues in the past, there would be punishments. This showed dominance for the teacher and would emphasize good students vs bad students. Stemming from that time, it is still very important to the educational experience to have that good behaviour. The idea of a teacher having control over their classroom has always played a role in what kind of a teacher you might be, I think this has kept the importance of ‘good behaviour’ in the classroom.
This is really good! Your description of what constitutes a privileged student in the mainstream school system is spot-on and makes it clear that changes have to be made to be inclusive to all students. Do you believe in the effectiveness of the historical views on discipline?