Against Shaming: Preserving Dignity, Decency, and a Moral-Educative Mission in American Schools

Abstract

Shaming has become a substantial phenomenon in K-12 schools. Educational shaming punishments stigmatize the targeted student by exposing him or her to the school community’s condemnation. Designed to penalize behavior through degradation, school shaming punishments include strip searches, forced apologies, dress code violation determinations, and transgender student restroom access denials. While there has been an extensive amount of legal scholarship that explores criminal shaming sanctions, there has been almost no critical assessment of shaming punishments in schools. This Article fills this gap by advocating for the invalidation of school shaming punishments through a legal theory lenses. Specifically, the article draws upon the analogous critical rejection of shaming punishments in the criminal law context by Professors Dan Markel, Martha Nussbaum, Stephen Garvey, Toni Massaro, and Eric Posner to argue for their removal from the educational context. This extrapolation concludes that schools should not utilize shaming punishments as they conflict with dignity, decency, and a moral-educative mission — the very pedagogical goals and civic aims of education of children in American public schools.