If you believe that most human concepts are lessons that need to be learned, be that calculus or morality/socially acceptable behaviours then it follows that not all students will respond equally to a given teaching method. Just as we're discovering that some students given some patience and different explanations can flourish at maths late on in their "education", perhaps the same can be true for individuals and them learning their lessons when it comes to ethics.
This story resonates somewhat with me as I was definitely a problem-teenager but have since mellowed out substantially, thankfully without ever encountering trajectory-altering consequences (although probably deserving to in some ways)
When I look back I simply wasn't engaged/challenged in the right ways and was looking for every opportunity to challenge myself - even pushing the limits of authority was a source of enjoyment and punishment was almost a reward for me: I never really responded positively to punishment and definitely didn't learn anything from them.
This became really obvious to me after I had the following observations:
- at high school I was highly disruptive
- at college I was fully engaged because the environment was academically challenging
- many years after at coding bootcamp I felt some of the old teenage urges to disrupt bubbling under the surface when classes were too slow (thankfully I know much better than to act on them now)
So I guess my point is that it feels natural to condemn the individual, but we really don't know anything about them or their circumstances, and with my educator hat on, I'd rather assume a misguided individual and challenge myself to find a way to teach a new lesson than opt for the easy way out and condemn them with some kind of heavy punishment (like expulsion).
Perhaps in this case some of the following may be useful lessons:
- some labour-intensive efforts that directly relate to cleaning up the mess of security breaches and election counting
- work on fixing vulnerabilities of the school network (if money were no issue, have the student try to protect the school against a pen-tester, in the hopes of establishing some empathy for the difficulties of being a time-poor underpaid school sysadmin, or at the least have some constructively directed black/white-hat energy)
- find some relatable issues on the morality / pain of vote rigging and have the student study them