Will Heaven Be Boring? A Conversation About Beauty & Good Taste

The high school classroom needs to be a place of ritual, tradition, convention, form, and ceremony, all of which are better means of maintaining decorum than a stern eye, even though there’s nothing wrong with a stern eye. When the habits of classroom decorum are formal—standing together, sitting together, reciting together, addressing one another by surnames—they create a mood, an ethos, which is far more effective in regulating and elevating behavior than an abstract credo like, “In this class, we believe our classmates deserve respect.”