Very important point here: > She accomplished [having well-behaved students] not though harsh discipline, but by treating us with respect and being genuinely h

Very important point here: > She accomplished [having well-behaved students] not though harsh discipline, but by treating us with respect and being genuinely hurt if we did not return it. People rise, and lower, to your expectations. The more you treat your students like potential criminals, the more they'll act like ones because of (largely unconcious) expectations that that's how they're supposed to behave. My college had a very liberal behavior policy. During student orientation, we were all told, explicitly, that the only real rule was "don't be a jackass." We were allowed as much alcohol as we wanted, as long as we drank responsibly. We were allowed take-home tests, as long as we didn't cheat (most such tests had hard time constraints, too). We were allowed free run of the academic facilities at all hours, as long as we didn't abuse the privelage. We were allowed to make all sorts of bonfires as long as no one got hurt[1]. You were allowed to pull all sorts of stupid pranks on people, including faculty and administrators, as long as you left contact information and could clean it up in 24 hours. Guess what? There were very few problems. No incidents of alcohol poisoning, vanishingly small amounts of alcohol-related theft or assault or property damage, and maybe one or two instances of people breaking in and stealing/breaking things during my time there. All of the stupid pranks were done in good faith, taken in good humor, and tended not to involve the police (unless that was part of the prank). No fire damage, and no drunk people falling into fires. People self-reported if they accidentally went over the time limit on a test. Perhaps most importantly, the students had very good relationships with the faculty and administrators. Being able to walk into a professor's office and ask them for help (whether academic or otherwise) is invaluable, both as a resource and as a habit to develop. The escalation of security in schools is a Chinese Finger Trap. Kids are acting juvenile, sound the alarm, we must stop them! Now they're acting even more juvenile, sound the alarm louder and try even harder to stop them! Et cetera. Treat kids like criminals-in-waiting and you'll get criminals. Treat them like responsible adults and you'll get adults. [1] Actually, there were some additional restrictions on fires, but that wasn't our fault. One time the women's college across the street thought a dorm was burning down and called the fire department, so now bonfires are not allowed to exceed the height of a dorm building.