Many of us will recall frustration in childhood and adolescence about being criticised by our teachers for bad behaviour, when we knew that they were themselves guilty of similarly bad behaviour. For example, I remember observing teachers wrongly lashing out at colleagues, who would then blame students for wrongly lashing out at other students. We may think we were just being immature in getting frustrated about teachers acting that way. But I think the frustration was sometimes warranted – sometimes it is morally wrong for teachers to hypocritically hold students accountable. So I will argue here.

What do I mean by teachers holding students accountable? I mean accurate engagement with a student on why her behaviour was wrong, and why she must correct for it in certain ways, such as by apologising to victims, or changing her habits. A quite different response to bad behaviour is to penalise or punish it, say by getting students to sit in the corner or write lines. Like punishment, the engagement I have in mind may have costs. For example, its tone may be strict and emphatic so as to convey the significance of the wrong and urgency of the student’s need to behave better. But unlike in punishment, a core aim in an accountability process is not to keep students in check by threatening to harm them. Rather the aim is to help the student understand what to do about a wrong they have committed.

What do I mean by pursuing this aim in a hypocritical way? Suppose that when a teacher, either in front of a class or one-to-one, holds a student accountable for wrongly lashing out, the student (and rest of the classroom) witnessed the teacher wrongly lashing out at a colleague earlier that day. One thing a teacher might do when critically engaging the student is openly acknowledge the fact that she did something similarly bad: for instancing by saying, ‘Look, I know I behaved like that to my colleague earlier today, this is also an issue that needs addressing in a similar way’. Here I think the teacher does not behave hypocritically at all. The sort of hypocrisy that concerns me, then, is where a teacher tries to get a student to reflect on her behaviour without showing a willingness to reflect on his similar behaviour.

Why do I believe this is sometimes wrong? Because sometimes, rather than engage a student hypocritically, the morally better option for a teacher who has made similar mistakes is to engage the student non-hypocritically, by openly acknowledging what she did in the manner described above. This might seem counterintuitive, and I will consider some concerns about it in a moment; but let me first explain the positive case. Part of what teachers ought to be helping students learn is how to flourish as moral agents, and non-hypocritical blame can be better at doing this than hypocritical blame. One important piece of moral understanding that blaming-and-acknowledging-our-faults helps convey is that moral accountability is uniform across agents – even though some people have greater formal authority and power than others, everyone in similar circumstances is subject to similar moral demands. Furthermore, by being ready to discuss their own wrongdoing, teachers set a good example of how a person should respond to it; this communicates that someone who has behaved badly must be ready to engage in accountability processes with others. Showing a willingness to discuss our wrongs also promotes virtues of humility and self-criticism, and helps prevent vices like grandstanding and stubbornness. This combination of insights will both morally enrich students’ later lives, and makes social lives more tolerable for others as well as for them.

Non-hypocritical schooling might seem nice, but aren’t there also significant costs of teachers acknowledging wrongdoing? Worse, is it not plain unprofessional for them to do this? A teacher revealing wrongdoing risks creating fodder for classroom gossip, and creating the impression in students that certain kinds of behaviour are actually okay, or can be gotten away with. Such consequences make it hard for a teacher to do her job properly. Revealing wrongdoing can also put a teacher’s job itself at risk. The rules on penalties or dismissals for teachers can be particularly strict, given the delicate nature of this profession compared to others.

Obviously, these bad effects of acknowledgment show that teachers cannot always be required to stick to a norm of non-hypocrisy. However, they do not apply across the board. The example I gave – of lashing out at someone and unjustly causing them upset – is fairly common in the workplace, and is not normally cause for a harsh penalty or dismissal. Moreover, in that example, the teacher’s bad behaviour is already a matter of common knowledge. Any resulting penalties or learning disruptions are already underway, so the costs of revealing wrongdoing are largely overdetermined. In fact, being open about what everyone else knows about may be better for a teacher’s collegiate and student reputation. In such contexts, teachers seem morally required to engage students non-hypocritically rather than hypocritically. Not acknowledging what they did here sets the wrong moral example, while acknowledging it will underscore rather than confuse students about the nature of morality and its universal applicability.

Isn’t hypocritical blaming still morally good – surely, it is better than not holding them accountable at all? I claimed that helping students understand and respond appropriately to their bad behaviour can be apt and good for them, even if the process is unpleasant. Notice, though, that teachers can achieve all that in hypocritical blame: they don’t need to acknowledge their similar mistakes in order to accurately engage students about their mistakes. Not holding them accountable at all, however, lacks these good prospects. So, even if hypocritical accountability might be morally worse than non-hypocritical accountability, it is plainly better than no accountability. Indeed, teachers plausibly have a duty to blame students hypocritically rather than keep quiet, given that the latter is much more morally educative. But if teachers have duties to behave hypocritically rather than not to, it might seem odd to suggest that their hypocritical behaviour could be wrong.

Yet, this misconstrues the moral failure of hypocritical blaming. The failure of hypocrites is not that they hold people accountable rather than keep quiet; it’s that they hold people accountable hypocritically rather than non-hypocritically. Thus, when hypocritical blaming is wrong, this need not be because silence is better; it may instead be because non-hypocritical blaming is better. We know that acts can generally be wrong in this way – a lifeguard who rescues a swimmer acts wrongly where she could easily do something better, like also rescuing a second swimmer, even though rescuing no-one is hardly better. That is my thought about schoolteachers: Whilst it’s good that they criticised us, they sometimes could have done it better, and so did it in the wrong way. At least this is so when their similar moral faults were old news.

Note: This blog post summarises parts of an article co-authored with John Tillson, helpfully commented on by Matthew Clayton, Tom Douglas and audiences at MANCEPT 2019 and Pedagogies of Punishment 2019.

Kartik Upadhyaya is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is interested in applied and normative ethics. His current work is on why hypocrisy is morally wrong, why hypocrites lack standing to blame others, and the relationship between these two issues.