Justice vs. Mercy

Hello everyone,

As long as I'm getting esoteric, I might as well talk about justice and mercy.

The umbrella culture we live in, I think, has a fixation on justice. The culture cries for the punishment of everyone who isn't us, and it wants the punishment to be as severe as possible. The culture doesn't want to consider mitigating circumstances; innocence before proof of guilt is decried; the prison and crime enforcement industries are among the most powerful lobbies in the state.

The educational establishment has a fixation on mercy. We are taught to understand the problems our students face and grant them mercy because of those problems. We are asked to pass them whether they deserve it or not (beware of a high failure rate!); we are not allowed to suspend them without many interventions first; we are asked to take high responsibility for our students' failures. We are rarely allowed to hold students truly responsible for their decisions.

The ideal lies somewhere in the middle. In fact, if the previous two paragraphs caused a pendulum swing of emotions in you, you can see graphically the problems that arise when justice and mercy get out of balance.

There must be justice. There must be consequences for things. We should try to make our classes as fair as we are able ("fair" is almost a synonym of "just"). Students must be held accountable for their choices. The rights of the vast majority of our students who want to learn must be protected from the small minority who want to disrupt learning.

On the other hand, we must create an environment in which students feel comfortable attempting new things, even if they fail in the attempt. We must not encourage despair; there must be hope as much as possible. If we give the natural consequence for every single mistake, no one would ever have a chance of passing; indeed, few would learn anything except how much to hate school.

It takes time to establish the balance between justice and mercy, but the balance must be established, and we should always be careful of the times we fall out of it.

Jeff Combe