The Hidden Hand of Historical Bias

"We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational." ~ T. S. Eliot

"It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias." ~ Simone de Beauvoir

"There are only two ways to be quite unprejudiced and impartial. One is to be completely ignorant. The other is to be completely indifferent. Bias and prejudice are attitudes to be kept in hand, not attitudes to be avoided." ~ Charles Curtis

"If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced. Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it. We tend to grow emotional when a prejudice is threatened with contradiction. Thus the difference between ordinary prejudgments and prejudice is that one can discuss and rectify a prejudgment without emotional resistance." ~ Gordon Allport

Power is never exercised with pure force. It is rather most often ingrained in the frameworks that control our daily existence, out of sight but unavoidable. In Canada, the school discipline system has existed for years as a control instrument, a representation of deep-set prejudices that allocate punishment, leniency, and failure guidance to certain children, a scaled-down replica of society.

Masking themselves as guardians of order, schools have targeted Indigenous, Black, and other excluded students disproportionately, stereotyping them as disruptive, ineducable, threatening, violent, or requiring discipline. This subtle hand of bias has shaped their fates, keeping cycles of exclusion intact with the wider webs of society.

No group has experienced the iron fist of school discipline more stringently than Indigenous students. For over a hundred years, residential schools existed not as schools for learning but as assimilation instruments, where punishment was control. Physical assault, forced labour, and psychological distress were legitimized on the presumption that Aboriginal kids must be removed from their culture and made "civilized." While the schools have officially closed down, the shadow that their legacy leaves on the country lingers on. In the public school system today, Indigenous students continue to be over-represented in suspensions and expulsions, victims of a zero-tolerance policy that assumes defiance rather than attempting to understand why. Trauma cycles through generations as frustration, disengagement, and resistance, behaviours met not with assistance, but with further exclusion.

History does not repeat, it changes and hopefully gets better. Traditionally for African American students, schools' discipline systems have operated as a hidden caste system, hindering their mobility and reinforcing a social hierarchy that devalues them. Streaming classes have been used historically to track them into lower-level academic paths, suggesting their goals should be humble. When they push back, they are rapidly and aggressively disciplined. Studies confirm what Black parents and students have long understood, discipline against them is not merely response to behaviour but control. Suspensions, police referrals, and the common assumption of their inherent danger create a pathway that sends them from playgrounds to courtrooms with ruthless efficiency. The "adultification" bias that Black teens are perceived as being older and more threatening than they actually are, results in them being disciplined like adults but never granted the privileges of adulthood.

Power does not act indiscriminately. It targets those least capable of protecting themselves. Historically for poor students and students with disabilities, discipline has all too frequently been a blunt tool used with no consideration of their difficulties. A misbehaving child because of hunger, stress, or untreated learning disability or obsessive defiance is answered with intervention, not punishment. It is the schools in poverty communities that are likely to rely on the police system to manage disorder, ensuring that students become used to viewing themselves as suspects rather than learners. "Problem child," "troublemaker," "unmanageable" labels are all but permanent. They are steered into other programs, pushed out of mainstream education, and compelled to fight a world that has already determined their worth.

Bias in school discipline has historically not just been limited to race and class; it reaches gender and sexuality as well, maintaining rigid assumptions regarding behaviour. Girls are supposed to be quiet, obedient, and submissive, and boys are disciplined for aggression even when they are showing the same behaviours that others are allowed to get away with. The consequences are even greater for 2SLGBTQ+ students, whose very presence has been viewed as a disruption throughout history. Many have been disciplined not for being bad, but for not conforming, whether through their appearance, their relationships, or their refusal to be discriminated against. Schools, schools of learning in name, had rather served as agents of maintaining social norms, determining whose identities matter and whose need to be suppressed.

School boards, more recently, have instituted restorative justice policies in an acknowledgement of the failure of solely punitive measures. Some provinces have begun to accept the reality of racial bias when it comes to punishment and suspensions among younger generations. The underlying power structures are left intact, and the biases that fuel school discipline are kept hidden but intact. Black and Indigenous students keep getting disciplined at higher rates, low-income and disabled students keep getting pushed out, and those who challenge the status quo keep getting threatened with being pushed to the edge.

Discipline is never all about order, it is about establishing who belongs and who does not belong. Schools have been mini-societies for centuries or microcosms of Canadian society, mirroring the hierarchies of the world beyond their doors. Until prejudice is not merely accepted but transformed into warm, loving, humane, compassionate, merciful environments of learning for success, the hidden hand of power will continue to decide the destiny of those who are considered less than worthy.