The Limits of Compliance

There's more to life than "Get it done."

In my upcoming novel, Box of Night (watch this space for more information), there’s a scene in which a mother confronts a school counselor about an evaluation for giftedness that her son recently completed, about which the counselor has some concerns:

His mother takes this in for a moment, then says, “Danny told me the point of the exercise was to show which cats had whiskers.”

“That was only part of the exercise,” the counselor says. “I had no doubt he could tell the difference. Some children can’t. That is not Danny’s problem. Following directions and respecting authority are.”

“I see,” says his mother. She looks over to him. Then she looks back. “Did you tell him that the point of the exercise—the whole point of him being in your office—was to follow directions and…respect your authority?”

“Mrs. Kanin,” the counselor says, with a dramatic show of patience, “the point of every activity in school is to follow directions.”

Is it?

Why do we send our children to school? We send them to learn about the world. We send them to learn something about themselves. We send them to make friends. We send them to become “socialized,” whatever we think that means. We send them so that they’ll have the tools to have happy and productive adult lives.

Many of those things have as much to do with behavior as they have to do with academics. In large classrooms, even academics has a lot to do with behavior. It’s hard to learn in chaos.

Unfortunately, those needs can lead teachers and administrators to prioritize behavior over everything else, making compliance the most important learning standard of them all, even if it’s not listed on any state documents or captured in any multiple-choice tests. Whether intentionally or not, having students sit still and shut up can end up meaning more—and teaching more—than a lesson in long division.

School reformers have decried the “factory model” of American schooling for decades. It can be dispiriting and uninspiring, and it may even run counter to the democratic aspirations and spirit of our country. In his 1975 book, The Night is Dark and I Am Far from Home, Jonathan Kozol railed against the conformity and rigidity of American schooling, and he drew a rhetorical line between its unspoken curriculum of mindless obedience and the persecution of war crimes and atrocities during the Vietnam War.

On a less extreme but still angry note, this 2010 presentation from Sir Ken Robinson dissected what he called the “batch-processing of children by age,” and its inability to meet the individual needs and gifts of our students.

If “I did what you told me to do” becomes more important than, “I understand what you were trying to teach me,” a lot of student mistakes and misunderstandings can fly under the radar. Compliance just requires a checklist. Learning requires a conversation.

Compliance is a chore, and nobody likes chores. If students feel that the daily lessons they sit through in school are chores for their teachers, how seriously will they take the content they are being taught? How many questions will they ask? How much will they care?

Why should they care about the big concepts in mathematics and science and language and history—the “enduring understandings” as Grant Wiggins used to call them—if the adults around them seem to care more about “coverage?” What is coverage if not a culture of “get ‘er done?” We covered the whole curriculum! We got to the end of the textbook before we ran out of time! Yay?

This has implications beyond school. The more things we see as chores that we need to “get done,” the less thoughtful and careful we are about those things. And some of those things matter a lot.

In my world of online product development, there are all kinds of requirements and compliances that need to be met. For many of them, a merely dutiful approach can end up missing a lot of important nuance and detail, leading to a less-than-ideal product.

One example: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in 1990. It took five years for the first set of web accessibility guidelines to be established. A lot of different guidelines from a lot of different authors were pulled together into a unified set of website accessibility guidelines in 1998, leading to version 1.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, in 1999. We are now living under version 2.0 of those guidelines.

You would think (always a dangerous way to start a sentence) that after 35 years of law and 25 years of official guidelines, all commercial websites and online products would be universally—or at least minimally—accessible. They are not. You would think that programmers and developers would be leaving their college and graduate programs well versed in the WCAG requirements and well prepared to build accessible products. They are not. At two different companies, I’ve had to find budget to provide training to design and development teams to help them understand the requirements and know how to meet them.

Even among designers who claim to know the requirements, I’ve seen very few who take them to heart or approach them thoughtfully or creatively.

Thoughtful and creative? They’re requirements. Come on, dude.

In the course that I took, we were told over and over that, “accessible design is just good design.” They didn’t want us to think about accessibility as a chore or an annoying add-on, done grudgingly and only to meet a legal requirement or help a minority population of users. They wanted us to see accessibility as a better and more elegant way of doing what we were already trying to do—better for everyone.

As examples, they pointed to curb cuts in sidewalks and ramps next to stairs, both of which were originally mandated to help people with wheelchairs, and both of which have turned out to provide benefits to a whole host of people, from bike riders to people pushing shopping carts to parents with baby strollers. When you think deliberately and carefully about these things, you get a better result—for everyone.

Can you get to better with a compliance mindset? Possibly—but you may not recognize that it is better. You may miss out on the aha moments that come from listening and learning and caring.

Think about what a compliance mentality can do to something like ethics. If you approach your required corporate or government trainings as compliance tasks—as a checklist to get done as quickly as possible—then you’re simply following rules so that you don’t get in trouble. You remain outside a system of ethics instead of taking that system into your heart. You may not break the rules, but it doesn’t mean that you’re actually treating people as they deserve to be treated.

All of that “compliance training” should be about care—about taking care of the people around you, seeing them as real people, taking their concerns seriously, not seeing them as things to be used by you or means to your ends. But we may not have that thought if we just click through the screens as fast as we can.

And we will click through the screens as fast as we can if we don’t have our own reasons for being there, if we don’t see any value in doing the thing we’ve been asked to do. It’s merely a compliance task. We do it because we must. We know that game. Get the bullshit done and move on to the stuff you care about. We’ve been doing that since elementary school.

The sad thing is that the good things in life don’t happen by racing through checklists. They require maximum input from us: learning new concepts, developing new skills, creating a piece of art, building a love relationship. We can take shortcuts to every one of those things, and we can get some kind of result out of it. But is it a valuable result? Is it a lasting and meaningful result?

When you put in the work—when you make the decision that the work is worth your effort, that it’s an investment in something meaningful—then the work doesn’t simply give you something new; it also makes you something new. It does something to your mind and your heart. It changes you, just as much as committing to a fitness regimen changes your body.

Isn’t that what we want education to be?