PART THREE
Discipline: Its Province and End
What is discipline? It is the habit of obedience. It is submissiveness to order and control. It is subjection to rule. It is a training to act in accordance with established rules. Discipline obviously must be control. Definition after definition may be sought, all ultimately designating discipline as control. Though it is known that discipline is control or submissiveness to order and system, still there remains much to be said to clear up the idea of discipline. In examining the province of discipline, many questions arise. Does discipline guarantee that a teacher is able to punish all offenses with the correct punishment, and by so doing insure against the recurrence of offense; or does it mean any given code of rules that will prevent misdemeanors; or does it mean the assigning of punishment for offenses so as to display vengeance against the wrong doer, suppressing him for the time being, but instigating him to further wrong when the opportunity offers itself? It means far more than can be fully explained in any brief answer.
The Province of Discipline
Discipline is that vital control of an individual that molds character. All those agencies that are employed to perfect and round out character are disciplinary devices.
“The daily discipline of a good school is a constant instruction in morals. The idea of order that is suggested in the appearance of the school is here perceived in action. There is a regulated system into which the individual must enter. He must subordinate his own desires and impulses to the general social welfare. Thus he learns the elementary virtue of obedience. He takes orders and obeys them. He becomes accustomed to an authority which he must respect.”[[9]]
Were every product of the school-room a perfectly disciplined product, the pupil would be self-controlling and the prophecy that perfect discipline would annihilate prisons, reforms and courts of justice would become a fact. A human being self-controlled after experience under a sound system of discipline would offer little difficulty as a subject of school management. Since discipline is a training in self-control and self-direction, which are prime elements in character, discipline is indispensable in character building.
Training in self-mastery is impossible without a prearranged determination of conduct. Some one must analyze the possible types of activity and wisely direct the immature person in choosing his standards of conduct.
[9]. Sneath and Hodges, op. cit., pp. 194-5.