Essay
Discipline Is Not Punishment
Where Is this Much-Taught Discipline?
A week doesn't go by without a telephone call from some stranger wanting to speak to someone I never heard of. Why so many wrong numbers? Is the simple discipline of finding the correct number and pushing the phone buttons accurately too much for grown people to handle? After their having called the wrong party, they rarely apologize. More often, it is an angry demand, "Who's this?!" They are affronted by my answering the phone instead of the party they wanted.
Obviously the much-touted, constantly-applied "teaching of discipline" in homes and schools is not being learned. The admonitions, the sermons, the lessons, the threats, the shaming, spanking, and battering are not working.
While the methods of teaching basic disciplines like telephone use and every-day manners are defective, there are yet shrill demands for an escalation of the very "remedies" that have consistently failed to produce satisfactory results.
Is it not worth our considering new approaches to bringing about self-discipline and civility? And can we, in the process, perhaps save our crumbling society from having to choose between anarchy and a police state?
What Is Meant by "Discipline"?
Any local or national poll about childrearing and schools will show that what people want is "more discipline." What is meant is more coercion, more restrictions, more policing, more punishment, more fear. Above all, more fear. Such mean-spirited sentiment is behind the popular notion of discipline. But it is anti-freedom, anti-children, and anti-education. For fostering self-discipline is not possible in a climate of fear.
What most people mean by "discipline" is this: "Do what you're told by authority, do it without hesitation or question, regardless of what you think or how you feel; Do what is expected of you, do it cheerfully because a child's duty is to please grown-ups; Take your medicine, accept your punishment without complaint,
Where Is this Much-Taught Discipline?
A week doesn't go by without a telephone call from some stranger wanting to speak to someone I never heard of. Why so many wrong numbers? Is the simple discipline of finding the correct number and pushing the phone buttons accurately too much for grown people to handle? After their having called the wrong party, they rarely apologize. More often, it is an angry demand, "Who's this?!" They are affronted by my answering the phone instead of the party they wanted.
Obviously the much-touted, constantly-applied "teaching of discipline" in homes and schools is not being learned. The admonitions, the sermons, the lessons, the threats, the shaming, spanking, and battering are not working.
While the methods of teaching basic disciplines like telephone use and every-day manners are defective, there are yet shrill demands for an escalation of the very "remedies" that have consistently failed to produce satisfactory results.
Is it not worth our considering new approaches to bringing about self-discipline and civility? And can we, in the process, perhaps save our crumbling society from having to choose between anarchy and a police state?
What Is Meant by "Discipline"?
Any local or national poll about childrearing and schools will show that what people want is "more discipline." What is meant is more coercion, more restrictions, more policing, more punishment, more fear. Above all, more fear. Such mean-spirited sentiment is behind the popular notion of discipline. But it is anti-freedom, anti-children, and anti-education. For fostering self-discipline is not possible in a climate of fear.
What most people mean by "discipline" is this: "Do what you're told by authority, do it without hesitation or question, regardless of what you think or how you feel; Do what is expected of you, do it cheerfully because a child's duty is to please grown-ups; Take your medicine, accept your punishment without complaint,