As a teacher of at-risk students, I have seen firsthand how easily we turn to exclusion as our answer to misbehavior. In-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, long-term removals—each one a variation of the same response: remove the problem, isolate the offender, hope they return changed. But absence rarely teaches what presence should. Instead of addressing harm, we exile the student from the community they need most. Their seat remains empty as a silent record of failure—ours as much as theirs.
It is this conviction that has led me to believe so strongly in restorative justice. Not as a program or policy, but as a fundamental shift in how we see people—not as problems to manage, but as members of a community worthy of repair and restoration.
Yet this cycle of exclusion is nothing new. Its roots run deep, beneath the stones of our oldest institutions, often justified by the language of moral correction. I once visited a boarding school where boys were punished by breaking rocks. Hammer in hand, their task was to shatter stones until the pieces were small enough to sift through a metal colander. The fragments paved the very paths and driveways of the campus. Their labor became the foundation of the institution that disciplined them.
There was a cruel symmetry to it. Each stone reduced to size, made to fit—useful only once it no longer resisted. When the punishment wasn’t physical, it turned inward. Boys were sent into isolation, sequestered in treehouses with only a Bible for company. They had food and water, and so it was said this wasn’t cruel. But punishment isn’t always measured in what is withheld; sometimes it lies in what is imposed—silence, reflection twisted into penance, the long echo of one’s own unworthiness.
Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers captures this same uneasy truth. Painted on the eve of revolutionary France, it offers no sentimentality, no redemption through toil. Two figures—one young, one old—are bound to the earth by the weight of their labor. Their faces are turned away, anonymous and replaceable. The boy’s future is written plainly in the hunched back of the old man beside him.
Courbet refuses to grant the dignity of heroism to their suffering. There is no triumph here, only resignation. The scene is stripped of allegory and grandeur; it is raw, almost confrontational in its honesty. The French philosopher Albert Camus once wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” It is a question born from the same landscape Courbet paints: When life is reduced to meaningless repetition, why endure it?
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argued that modern punishment evolved not to save souls but to produce what he called “docile bodies”—individuals trained to obey without question, shaped not through enlightenment but through calculated control. “The body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body,” he wrote. This is the hidden curriculum of exclusion: not growth, but compliance. Not character, but submission.
This is why exclusionary discipline fails our students. It teaches them only how to disappear—how to survive in the margins, unseen and unheard. It reduces their presence in the community to nothing more than absence. And in doing so, it breaks more than rules; it breaks relationships, trust, the very sense of belonging that makes change possible.
But there is another way. Restorative justice invites us to see discipline not as the removal of the offender, but as the restoration of the community. It asks: What harm has been done? Who has been affected? And how can we make things right? It acknowledges wrongdoing without defining a person by it. Where exclusion demands silence, restoration calls for dialogue. Where punishment isolates, restoration gathers.
This approach does not excuse harmful behavior—it confronts it honestly and directly—but it does so with the belief that people are more than their worst decisions. In the words of bell hooks, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
When we choose restoration over exclusion, we give students the space to learn from their mistakes without being defined by them. We offer them a chance to rebuild trust, to see themselves as part of a community worth investing in, rather than a system determined to cast them out.
I wonder about those boys with their hammers and Bibles—whether they ever saw beauty in a stone after that. Whether they believed every hardship must be endured without question, or if they found their way back to defiance. Did any of them, sitting alone in those treehouses, realize that true character is not forged by imposed suffering but by the choice to rise above it?
And as I return once more to Courbet’s Stone Breakers, I wonder if this, too, is our calling—not to break people down, but to build them up. Not to pave the road with their suffering, but to walk it together, toward something better.
The question remains, sharp as ever:
Must we be broken to be good?
Or can we, at last, learn to build without first destroying?