The question of the necessity of school punishment was raised, but not satisfactorily answered, in an exchange some time ago between John Wilson and James Marshall. Wilson argued that social interaction in schools must be governed by rules and that rules only exist if violations of them are normally punished. Marshall objected that there are some rules whose existence plainly does not depend on punishment of violations. Here I revisit and try to resolve the disagreement between Wilson and Marshall. I contend that, while it is not true of rules per se that they must be backed by punishment, there is an important subset of rules that do require this backing, and that subset includes at least some of the rules governing social interaction in schools.

中文翻译：

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论学校惩罚的必要性

在约翰·威尔逊和詹姆斯·马歇尔前段时间的一次交流中，提出了学校惩罚的必要性问题，但没有得到令人满意的回答。威尔逊认为，学校中的社交互动必须受规则约束，而且规则只有在违反规则的行为通常受到惩罚的情况下才存在。马歇尔反对说，有些规则的存在显然不依赖于对违规行为的惩罚。在这里，我重新审视并试图解决威尔逊和马歇尔之间的分歧。我认为，虽然规则本身并非必须得到惩罚的支持，但有一个重要的规则子集确实需要这种支持，并且该子集至少包括一些管理学校社交互动的规则。