Corrective discipline

“ Discipline and justice, then, must go together; they cannot be disunited. These principles, sir, are as old as the world, and as fixed as the foundations of the world; and, sir, in making this appeal to you, and to every member of this Court of Honour, I feel as sure of the response as if I saw every generous heart laid bare before me. You will all, without a doubt, uphold discipline, but you will not forget that to uphold discipline you must do justice; and to do justice you must take nothing for granted, you must insist on having proofs, undoubted, undeniable proofs ”

“ And so long as that is true, the criminal is just as conscious as we are that the discipline laid on him is the expression of a divided standard of morality, knowing perfectly well that we in like circumstances should not think such punishment good for ourselves or our children. ”

“ How are you to command the respect of those under you? Just where to draw the line, and how to enforce discipline? What advantage will you give to the men who are striving to obey rules, and do what is right? ”

“ Discipline—still a synonym for decency, for civilisation, for religion, in the average parent's mind—was enforced, not pitilessly, as aforetime, but with firmness, and as a rule in moderate and reasonable ways. ”

“ Not mere spurts of occasional punishment, but the incessant watchfulness and endeavour which go to the forming and preserving of the habits of the good life, is what we mean by discipline, and from this point of view never were there such disciplinarians as the parents who labour on the lines we indicate. Every habit of courtesy, consideration, order, neatness, punctuality, truthfulness, is itself a schoolmaster, and orders life with the most unfailing diligence. ”

“ Hence arises in men a disregard of reproof and instruction, rules of conduct and moral discipline, which occasionally come in their way: a disregard, I say, of these, not in every respect, but in this single one, namely, as what may be of service to them in particular towards mending their own hearts and tempers, and making them better men. ”

“ The question of discipline is sometimes rather difficult with so many dispositions, each requiring different dealing. We try, of course, to fit the penalty to the crime, so that the child's sense of justice will work on our side ”

“ I think it chiefly arises from a sort of distorted notion that there is something degrading and undignified in obeying an order. Why, man, obedience and discipline are the very life-blood of every institution worthy of the name. ”

“ Fancy you see me that must do justice to good and bad; reward and punish with an equal unbiassed hand; one that is to reconcile the severity of discipline with the dictates of humanity, one that must study the tempers and dispositions of many men, in order to make their situation easy and agreeable to them, and should endeavour to oblige all without partiality ”

“ Many others have committed the same error, led astray by the different meanings of the word discipline, which may be applied both to regular conduct founded on the deepest feelings of the soul or to a merely external restraint. ”

“ The requisite allowance being made for the natural impulses, we must now adduce the facts, showing that the characteristic of the Moral Sense is an education under Law, or Authority, through the instrumentality of Punishment.
(1) It is a fact that human beings living in society are placed under discipline, accompanied by punishment. Certain actions are forbidden, and the doers of them are subjected to some painful infliction; which is increased in severity if they are persisted in. ”

“ And yet, let it be remembered that it is this principle of restraint which is more especially the moral point in education; where it fails, discipline and self-denial are wanting, with all the strength they give to integrity, and honor, and true self-respect, with all the decencies of good manners which they infuse into our daily habits. ”

“ Let them learn that discipline in life is an essential feature of any community. Let them learn this lesson by personal experimentation. Thus they may recover some sense of self-respect. They will rejoin [Pg 95] the outer world with some measure of responsibility. They will return to freedom with a different understanding of life. ”

“ Education consisted in scolding and pulling the hair. Stern discipline was enacted in the home. Lying was unmercifully punished, disobedience likewise, and in after years corporal punishment was superseded by the menace: “What will people say?” ”

“ He is kept idle till he obtains by good behaviour the right to work, and learns by experience that work is an honour and a privilege. He passes through three stages of trial of his conduct under discipline, at school, and at work; his conduct is recorded, and he receives marks accordingly—a certain number of marks entitling him to promotion to a higher class. In brief, his behaviour is observed, recorded, and, above all, tested, from point to point. Bad conduct prevents his rising, or sets him back, or subjects him to punishment, according to its degree ”

“ A proficient disciplinarian would first give the delinquent a short lecture on the nature of her offence, then firmly insist upon the culprit herself fetching the instrument of punishment: to my idea, there is more shame and humiliation at having to bring the slipper to be flogged, than fear of the smart, which is always worse in imagination than fact. ”

“ Under discipline we must be, some of it, as we think, just, some of it unjust or seeming so: truths and doctrines checking our thoughts; rules checking our wishes; the wills of others, their selfishness or their necessities or their comfort hampering and limiting us, want of money or health or time hindering us from what we would do; bereavement and trouble taking from us what we would keep; our path and our fortune shaped for us, more perhaps than we shape it for ourselves. Is all this discipline certainly good for us? ”

“ The best-regulated home is always that in which the discipline is the most perfect, and yet where it is the least felt. Moral discipline acts with the force of a law of nature. ”

“ Chapter 16 Discipline A Serious Study for Parents
Discipline is not Punishment––'What part does Discipline play in your system of education?' We should hail the query as manifesting a cheering degree of interest if we were not quite sure that our interlocutor uses discipline as a euphuism for punishment. That conviction puts one's mind into the attitude of protest. In the first place, we have no system of education. We hold that great things, such as nature, life, education, are 'cabined, cribbed, confined,' in proportion as they are systematised. ”

“ Can there be any better discipline than to learn the cause and know the root of all evils, in order to avoid them, thus improving the morals and inducing one to take earnest pains to do well in the future? There is more satisfaction in doing right than many may think, if people were instructed how. ”

“ In the final analysis, the punishments which nature inflicts are kind, because they are warnings which, if heeded, will prevent serious injury. The purpose of all discipline is to produce a self-governing individual, not one who needs to be governed by someone else. Until a person learns to govern himself he counts for little in this world.
Two serious mistakes are made in child government. ”

“ This is the age of preventive medicine, why not also of preventive crime and delinquency? Instead of confining our practise to punishing offenders, necessary as this may be under the present conditions, why not strive more to prevent the commission of offenses? As far as normal individuals are concerned much can be done by early cultivation in self-discipline and through the establishment of moral backbone by training in the overcoming of difficulties. Much, very much, also remains to be done in the correction of wrong social conditions. ”

“ School conditions favorable to this division of mind between avowed, public, and socially responsible undertakings, and private, ill-regulated, and suppressed indulgences of thought are not hard to find. What is sometimes called "stern discipline," i.e., external coercive pressure, has this tendency. Motivation through rewards extraneous to the thing to be done has a like effect. ”

“ I have said some things about lack of discipline in thought and discussion, but that is nothing compared with the lack of discipline in conduct which you see in a man who has never known what honor is, whose whole moral constitution is so formless and flabby that it can perform none of its functions, and who is continually seeking some special plea, or sophistry, or deceptive device for paying homage to the right while he does the wrong. ”

“ When the ideas are once in mind, it is necessary to determine what they tell us in the way of truth. Hence, to train the mind to make proper discriminations, he declares in the Conduct of the Understanding that practice and discipline are necessary. ”

“ The author believes that the lack of discipline, through moral and religious motives and in accordance with moral and religious ideals, in the home-life, in school and in college, and in society at large, is the prime source of all our national evils so far as they are connected with the educative processes as now in vogue. ”

“ Kingsley, permit me to say that the annals of crime contain many such cases. Unhappily, neither education nor moral training is sufficient safeguard against transgression, where the tendency to wrong-doing exists. ”

“ By discipline I suppose we mean the subordination of the self to something outside of the self, or, at least, the subordination of the self to law, even though that law be self-made. The psychologist could explain to you that the law of habit is the controlling factor in all discipline. The thing that has been done many times is finally done with ease, is perhaps done automatically. ”

“ Yet human nature in its most favorable circumstances and in its most favored individuals has its twists and its anti-social impulses. For the potential criminal-and that means for every one of us-there must be elaborated also a system of moral or religious training which shall seek to develop the better nature that is in every man and enchain the brute. With such a discipline imposed upon each generation there would be a far greater hope for the repression of evil tendencies, whether due to temperamental perversion or provocative environment. ”

“ The justifiable reliance placed by our fathers upon religion and discipline has given place to a reliance upon understanding. It is assumed that youth will abstain from wrong-doing, if only the physical consequences of wrong-doing are made sufficiently clear. ”

“ The question how to maintain discipline among masses of human beings is of very wide application, and is therefore the subject of a great variety of experiments. In the wide field of moral control, it includes a principal function of government, namely, the repression of crime—a department that has lately received much attention. To collect the lights furnished in each of the spheres where moral control has to be exercised, is to contribute to the illumination of each. ”

“ The whole discipline is to put a man in possession of his faculties, to give him self-respect, to get him in the way of leading a normal and natural life. But it is true that what he acquires by the discipline of study and the discipline of work will be available in his earning an honest living. Keep a man long enough in this three-ply discipline, and he will form permanent habits of well-doing. If he cannot and will not form such habits, his place is in confinement, where he cannot prey upon society. ”

“ It would therefore be well if this fact were borne in mind by all persons whose duty it is to enforce discipline and require obedience. Considering that there are certain cosmical influences at work, which make it note difficult for the ordinary human being to submit to discipline, it might not be inexpedient, in certain cases, to take these unusual conditions into account and not to enforce in their full rigour all the penalties involved in a breach of rules. ”

“ It is essential to the success of all reformatory discipline that moral responsibility must be recognised and observed. In fact it may be said, that reformation is complete when moral responsibility, insisted upon by the discipline, becomes at last acknowledged by the man. ”

“ Instead of bringing into play those egotistic feelings whose predominance is the cause of criminal acts, there are brought into play those altruistic feelings which check criminal acts. Thus the discipline of natural consequences is applicable to grave as well as trivial faults ”

“ What I mean is that, in deciding what sort of moral instruction should be given to the young, or what sort of actions should be punished by the criminal law, we should do our best to consider what sort of actions will promote or hinder the general well-being. ”

“ But it is the same problem that we have in all our education, be it the training of the mind, the development of the body, or the use of both to good ends. And it goes without saying that its successful solution, in a reformatory for criminals, depends upon the character of the man who administers the institution. ”

“ Our entire education, in school as in life, rests upon suggestion. What keeps us from crime is the inhibitory ideas, which are instilled into us until they permeate our flesh and blood and control our actions, without our being conscious of it. ‘Thou shalt’, ‘thou shalt not’, these general prescriptions of right and morality, of religion and philanthropy, or whatever you choose to call it, must determine our conduct, unless we stop to consider, hesitate, and delay.... ”

“ Service begins with self-discipline. Self-discipline presupposes rational arrangement of, and adjustment to, basic values. Therefore the essential purpose of the parent State should be to establish, or reëstablish, basic values in minds either cheated of, or switched from, basic values.
The process may not be put up in a neat parcel of print. It includes all that must be put off, put on, amended and repaired. Nothing germane is so small as to be negligible. Nothing is too big to be attacked. ”