children of our time

Schools around here get a lot of parent volunteers and rely heavily on them.
Some of the kids have an interesting attitude about this.

I was talking to a friend recently. As with many of the volunteers she has no training in education and no experience with actual teaching of groups. She is a professional with two kids of her own.
She mentioned the "two trouble boys" in the class she was helping with, and said she had tried to work with one of them.
After trying to cajole him and then order him to do something, he turned to her and told her bluntly: "I'm not doing it, and you can't make me".
He is seven years old.

And, he is right.
She is in a position of authority, she has literally the strength to make him and she could call in the full authority of the school to force the issue, but she won't, and the boy knew it. It would ruin the class atmosphere, probably cause lingering trouble for her kids, and the school might not back her up on the issue but just sweep it under the rug. They barely back up their own teachers, and this is a very good school by any measure.
The problem is that there are no intermediate measures - the in-classroom penalties of public censure or sternly worded letters are only effective if the student has internalised that these are serious in-and-of-themselves.
Because, in practical terms they are just words on paper.
And, if the parents have not inoculated the kids with the respect for this authority, then the kids have no reason to take notice.
The next level of punishment available is too high - there is really nothing of relevance until you hit suspension or expulsion from school, and those are extreme measures, rarely used.

This is a problem.

I don't know the solution.
In the old days somebody would spank the li'l buggers, but we know that doesn't really work and has its own long term problems.
In some schools, post-corporal punishment, there was informal enforcement, but that is also not necessarily healthy - although such mechanism seems to emerge in most cohesive social structures, where informal authority structure exists in parallel with the official structure.

But, this is not the real problem.
The real problem is that these kids will grow up and become lawyers and government cabinet officials, and they will continue to ignore the sternly worded letters, because, dare-double-dare-you-can't-touch-me, the enforcement mechanisms are still too drastic to use in most any situation.
That is a structural problem. We have this problem.
Those of us who internalised that you must accept the lowest level of warning in the enforcement option chain, still don't fully comprehend, I think, the magnitude of the attitude of "so what? I won't and you can't make me" and the long term implications for oversight and system of checks and balances.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elected, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."