School discipline

“ What we want to teach is interdependence, that efficiency waits on discipline, that discipline is obedience to the whole of which I am a part. Discipline has been a word long connected with school life—when we know how to teach social discipline, then we shall know how to “teach school.”
The object of education is to fit children into the life of the community. ”

“ It is only where a narrow and fixed image of traditional school discipline dominates, that one is in any danger of overlooking that deeper and infinitely wider discipline that comes from having a part to do in constructive work, in contributing to a result which, social in spirit, is none the less obvious and tangible in form—and hence in a form with reference to which responsibility may be exacted and accurate judgment passed. ”

“ The term educative instruction frequently occurs. It means, primarily, instruction that has, in the broad sense, an ethical bearing, or an influence upon character. It is based on the idea that, not school discipline alone, but also school instruction in the common branches should be of service to the child in moral and especially in social growth. ”

“ The school that is free in its teaching must be carried on by disciplined teachers, united in a purpose of progress clearly recognized and agreed upon, to teach discipline that the minds of men may dare to be free. ”

“ The school also educates the will through its discipline. It demands of the pupil that he shall be obedient to the rules of order, and adopt habits that make it possible to combine with one's fellows. ”

“ Get back to basics, tighten standards, heighten academic requirements, and remember discipline in the classroom is vital. In short, make sure that Johnny and Mary can read and write, and make sure their school is allowed the peace without which no student can learn and no teacher can instruct. ”

“ How to establish the moral aim in the center of the school course, how to subordinate and realize the other educational aims while keeping this chiefly in view, how to make instruction and school discipline contribute unitedly to the formation of vigorous moral character, and how to unite home, school, and other life experiences of a child in perfecting the one great aim of education—these are some of the problems whose solution will be sought in the following chapters. ”

“ The measureless transformations of the adolescent period throw a vast majority of people out of sympathy with the adolescent and still more with those of younger years.
The system of school discipline advocated in this Course for teachers, frankly rests on coöperation with the pupil, initiative being taken by the teacher in working out disciplinary problems in frank, wholehearted adjustment to pupil needs and characteristics. No teacher can adopt the policy represented by this principle without attaining, in a measure, and further developing his own self-control. ”

“ How common it is for those who assert that education is for social efficiency to assume that the school should return to the barren discipline of the traditional formal subjects, reading, writing, and the rest! This, too, regardless of the fact that it has taken a century of educational evolution to make the course of study varied and rich enough to call for those impulses and activities of social life which need training in the child. ”

“ While every effort is made by those in charge of the school to make the students happy and contented, there is yet, an earnest belief in such strictness of discipline, compliance with regular duty, vigorous work with mind and body as shall train the character and fit the students for the important work that is before them in actual life. ”

“ The school as it is looks first after its discipline, and next after its instruction. Discipline concerns the behavior, and instruction concerns the intellectual progress of the pupil. That part of moral education which relates to habits of good behavior is much better provided for in the school than any part of intellectual education. ”

“ The final comment which may be made in this connection is that the teacher must recognize that school discipline is a professional and educational problem, not a matter of purely personal relations between pupil and teacher. The teacher is dealing with a problem of group organization; he cannot allow the fractious pupil to pull him down to the level of a personal controversy. ”

“ The school lesson would feed the mind, while the thorough, patient and conscientious acquisition of it would gymnaze the intellect and strengthen the moral force. Why have one class of studies for discipline only, and another class for nourishment only, when there are studies which at once fill the mind with the materials of thinking, and develop the power of thought,—which, at the same time, impart useful knowledge, and afford an intellectual gymnastic? ”

“ Furthermore, what immediately follows has reference mainly to the lower grades, because there the child’s school habits are formed, but the teacher who is on the alert for principles that are fundamental will be quick to perceive that whatever laws are basal in the control and discipline of children in primary grades, are equally so for older pupils because they are laws that apply to all humanity. ”

“ To attain it teachers have inspired themselves solely with the principles of discipline and authority, which always appeal to social organisers; such men have only one clear idea and one will—the children must learn to obey, to believe, and to think according to the prevailing social dogmas. If this were the aim, education could not be other [50] than we find it to-day. There is no question of promoting the spontaneous development of the child’s faculties, or encouraging it to seek freely the satisfaction of its physical, intellectual, and moral needs. ”

“ The school must and does use compulsion. Discipline is an important means of elementary school education, and such education is unthinkable without discipline. But children are sufficiently disciplined by mere attendance at school for a certain time. ”

“ If discipline, so called, does not make the city-schooled youth superior to his country cousin, what is it good for? Well, it is good to keep the school-room in order. The larger the school the more necessary it is for a teacher to maintain order. In a building containing two or three thousand children, as many school-buildings in the larger cities do, rigid discipline is absolutely necessary to this end. ”

“ In conclusion, therefore, shall we make moral character the clear and conscious aim of school education, and then subordinate school studies and discipline, mental training and conduct, to this aim? It will be a great stimulus to thousands of teachers to discover that this is the real purpose of school work, and that there are abundant means not yet used of realizing it. Having once firmly grasped this idea, they will find that there is no other having half its potency. ”

“ The irregular class. Two ways of remedying the evil. Boys' love of system and regularity. Object of securing a majority, and particular means of doing it. Making school pleasant. Discipline should generally be private. In all cases that are brought before the school, public opinion in the teacher's favor should be secured. ”

“ Disciplinary problems in the high school should be solved on the largest basis possible. The increased scope of vision enables a pupil to view a situation in the larger connections. In the grades each act tends to stand by itself. ”

“ It should be part of every child's education. But many schools are too busy teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, and others are too busy preserving discipline, and others are too busy coquetting for the good will of their pupils and trying to amuse them—too busy to give heed to a set of habits that are of paramount importance in the life of civilized society. This school took up the matter of training in good manners as an essential part of its duty, and it accomplished this task quickly and effectively. ”

“ But while he was putting in a perfunctory attendance at lectures, his education was proceeding in another school—the school which, as in his after years he so insistently testified, affords the only real discipline for life—the world of real men and women. ”

“ The fine technique of the unconscious school as worked out by educators in normal schools and teachers’ colleges in the last forty years can be read in any current school survey. Here the coincidence of work and study with the child’s interests is accidental. Indeed, many parents and teachers are still opposed to making too large a part of the curriculum appeal to the child’s ephemeral interests. Discipline is still thought of not as willed skill, which it is, but as the ability to do painful things. ”

“ She leaves discipline and severity to the school, to which the child is sent early. And the school does what it can; gives style and grace to the outward being, but leaves the inward very much, probably, as it found it. ”

“ DISCOVERER’S METHOD OR THE REAL INDUCTIVE METHOD ADAPTED TO CLASS ROOM WORK.
A revolt has already set in against this insatiate desire to teach knowledge, rather than to teach the child. Many schools are permitting a study of those topics which vitally concern every day life. Less attention is being given to formal discipline, and more attention to self activity. Gradually will the scheme of education be directed toward fitting the school work to the child, rather than fitting the child to the school work. ”

“ Firm after firm announces that their employees must have at least a good high school education. The mental discipline and self-control128 given by a good high school course will give self-direction and grasp of conditions to your boy long after the Latin endings and algebraic formulae which gave the discipline have been forgotten. It is discipline for life’s duties that is the real worth of the high school to the boy. ”

“ While they realise that every child, dull or clever, benefits by being under discipline and by taking part in the social life of a [9] school, they know also that a certain proportion of children undergo no mental development commensurate with the time and labour expended on their behalf. ”

“ Six hours a day I lived under school discipline in active intercourse with people none of whom were known to those at home, and the other hours of the twenty-four I spent at home, or with relatives of the people at home, none of whom were known to anybody at school. ”

“ Hence school life must include the actual occupations, nature study, and the like. It must relegate formal education to a secondary position. The moral atmosphere of the schoolroom must change from one primarily of discipline, even formal447 discipline, to one of co-operation. ”

“ Thus in every department of education the result of the training administered intelligently, and with almost infinite long-sightedness and subtlety during school-days, will be to form character, not by repression of any natural predilection, but by cultivation of mental and moral impulses to good. ”

“ In short, it means that the school-system should be adapted to the boy and not the boy to the system, and, further, that education authorities should regard it as part of their function to guide into proper channels the special abilities which the teachers have reared. ”

“ Even an ordinary child has her peculiarities, which should be allowed for, but, in the main, it is the regularity and uniformity of the school routine which make the most valuable part of her education. ”

“ One such tendency dominates many schools notwithstanding prodigious efforts on the part of the teachers to rouse slumbering minds. Indeed, the more the teacher works, the greater the incuria of the children, so the class is prodded with marks, the boys take places, the bogie of an oncoming examination is held before them. Some spasmodic effort is the result but no vital response and, though boys and girls love school, like their teachers and even their lessons, they care not at all for knowledge, for which the school should create enthusiasm. ”

“ Now seeing this difference, how much education is there in school or college? In the classrooms there is none. All that is given in classes is instruction, which may be useful or detrimental inasmuch as it helps personality or not. ”

“ That manners are a matter of individual training, so that they could never be learnt from a book. They can scarcely be taught, except in their simplest elements, to a class or school as a whole, but the authority which stands nearest in responsibility to each child, either in the home circle or at school, has to make a special study of it in order to teach it manners. ”

“ It should be our purpose to construct, not to destroy. The school, this glorious inheritance of human experiences, this ever-glowing hearth where the human spirit kindles and sublimates life as an object of constant criticism and of undying love, may be transformed, but cannot be destroyed. Let the school live, and let us cling to the teacher and maintain his authority, which limits the spontaneity and the liberty of the pupil. ”

“ The school, the whole school, is your field, the elevation of the mass, in knowledge and virtue, and no individual instance, either of dulness or precocity, should draw you away from its steady pursuit.
(6.) The teacher should guard against unnecessarily imbibing those faulty mental habits, to which his station and employment expose him. Accustomed to command, and to hold intercourse with minds which are immature and feeble, compared with our own, we gradually acquire habits, that the rough collisions and the friction of active life, prevent from gathering around other men. ”