The Principle of Discipline
“The purpose of discipline is to disciple; discipline is teaching, not punishment.”
Discipline is something all principals encounter in their work even if they don’t deal with it directly. This is always difficult, especially at first. It’s downright intimidating if you lead a tough school.
Most principals I talk to think of discipline as a mechanism for ensuring safety and maintaining a productive learning environment. Certainly both of these things are true. But we don’t always achieve them, especially if we consider what teachers deal with behind classroom doors that never makes it down to the office.
Discipline is challenging under all circumstances. There are no easy answers. But I believe there is a fundamental principle we can use to guide our efforts in a more productive way. I also believe that if we base our approach on this principle, we will achieve significantly better results no matter how difficult our schools are or how much difficulty we have personally within the domain of school discipline.
Discipline is not a necessary evil. It’s actually one of the best opportunities we have within a school community to help kids learn some of the most important lessons in their lives. Whether those lessons are positive or negative depends on the paradigm of discipline we hold and the degree to which we commit ourselves to effectively working within it.
The Dominant Paradigm
I’ve seen as many approaches to school discipline as I’ve seen schools. Most principals admit to me in private that none of these approaches work very well. They often take more time and energy than they’re worth, and most address only surface symptoms, not root causes.
One way to know if a particular discipline action works is a matter of assessing the extent to which its use reduces the degree to which it needs to be used. If the number and type of discipline issues remains fairly consistent, or if discipline problems increase, the system isn’t working. By definition, a well-functioning discipline system is self-eliminating: the more we use it, the less we need it.
Though great variety exists in school discipline approaches, most are grounded in the paradigm of “discipline as punishment”. This is something I think of as a cultural constant. I use the word “cultural” here because I think it is our cultural orientation to school discipline that more often than not stands between us and success in this area.
For me, “culture” has two meanings in this context: the culture of schooling and the broader culture in which we live. Traditionally, school culture in America has been authority-driven, conformity-affirming, and deficit-based. Discipline, in this context, is a direct extension of the culture itself—an application of the culture’s power to assert its authority, to demand conformity, and to highlight deficits.
