INTRODUCTION

1. Why Discipline Is Necessary

There are no two persons in all the world, however separated by space or circumstances, who do not in some way affect each other. This influence is unseen and untraceable in most cases; it is only when the relations are very immediate and obvious that we realize how unified is the life of the people on the earth. The welfare of the whole race is tied up in the welfare of each man, woman and child; and so it is the duty of each to work for the welfare of all his fellows. When each person controls his actions and contributes his influence so as to further the interests of all, present and future, the world is in harmony, civilization progresses and happiness reigns on earth.

But it is not natural for people unselfishly to strive for the good of all other people. All men are born with strong instincts of self-preservation, and their limited outlook upon life, their small knowledge of remote things, often prevents their seeing that, in the end, social action best protects their own interests.

Instinct urges, “Look out for number one. Enjoy yourself. Catch at the immediate good, for you are not sure of the future.” Something higher than instinct in man says to him, on the other hand, “Deny yourself for the good of others. Find a greater life 14in the life of the race. Endure hardship now, submit to privation, that in the future you and others may be more happy.”

It is this higher standard of thought and action which we call right; it is passive submission to the dictates of selfish instincts which we call wrong. Right and wrong have other phases than these of social effect, but upon these most men, of whatever faith or philosophy, agree; and these social phases are the ones which affect the whole problem of discipline most. Briefly, then, we may say that for our purposes those things are right which contribute to the welfare of men, and those things are wrong which interfere with their happiness and progress.

The great men and women of the world are they who make the richest contribution to human progress and happiness. They are the artists, the thinkers, the givers of every kind, who leave their fellows better for their passing by. They who in their coming and going add nothing to the sum of human welfare, are the paupers, the criminals, the imbeciles. Paupers may live in palaces, and criminals may for generations receive great honor of men, but unless they have really made the world better, men in their final judgment can not count such glorious rascals among their friends. They are not civilization-builders, they are not race-leaders, nor have they real strength in themselves, for they have never conquered those selfish instincts which dominate men in the lowest stages of their development.

The big problem of mankind, then, is to make of the naturally selfish and self-centered individual a helper in a great social enterprise, that is, to make him 15nothing less than a contributor to the evolution of the whole race toward its final high estate. How can this be done? And who is to do it? These questions are fundamental to human progress. Men have been grappling with them for centuries. This is a great world-question which, looming behind the more immediate problem of discipline, gives it all the significance it has. It is because through disciplinary processes the world is to be made better, and not primarily because such processes will make schools more orderly and homes more delightful, that we study the subject and hope to become skilled in the practice of its technique.

The responsibility of making each person a contributor to social progress rests largely with those who hold in their hands the training of the young. Hence such training is, in a peculiar sense, the business of parents and teachers. Not for long have people worked intelligently toward the socialization of human interests. Christ taught this doctrine nearly two thousand years ago in Galilee, but only lately have very many persons realized that His message is a practicable one. The Middle Ages were given to an effort to realize the gospel individually; today we see a great effort to apply it universally. But the individualism of the past still dominates the thinking of the older generation; selfishness and prejudices, which are intrenched in tradition, seem altogether justifiable to peoples whose children will fully realize their inadequacy and falseness.

It is in these children that the hope of the race inheres; these are they who must bring about the new order of things. Not in reforming the adult criminal, 16not in making the adult pauper a producer, not in making the adult individualist a humanitarian, lies the true secret of world-betterment, but in rearing a new generation which shall meet the old problems with instincts controlled, powers trained, and with a potent altruism that has been developed from impulse to habit and from habit to conviction.

Society is sadly taxed to care for its undisciplined members. Alms-houses, slums, jails and prisons are filled with the more hopelessly uncontrolled, while every forward movement is hampered by the indifference or opposition of those whose individualism is of a more mild and respectable type. It is from the ranks of the undisciplined that all trouble-makers come; it is the disciplined soul who not only makes his own life successful but who gives freely for the advancement of others.

These premises involve strong claims for discipline. If it is true that discipline bears this close and vital relation to human progress, then it is indeed a topic for the closest and most careful study. Before the reader can judge for himself of the claims made, he must know more of the nature of the discipline for which so much is claimed. For the discussion of its nature he is referred to the following paragraphs.

2. What Is Discipline?

We have seen that all human beings are closely knit together, interdependent and mutually influential; and that the success of the community depends upon the individual contributions made by persons whose attitude 17is a socialized one. We have seen also that the socialized attitude, the will to contribute to the general good, while frequently conspicuous among even savage peoples, finds higher and ever higher expression, as civilization advances. Since “the greatest good to the greatest number” is “social good,” it follows that the more this evolved, altruistic attitude can be made to exist and function, the happier mankind will be; and persons who have the good of the race at heart will try to find means of developing the socialized attitude in large numbers of their fellow-men. Since it is easy to form the minds and wills of children, and hard to remake grown persons who have become fixed in individualistic ways of thinking, feeling and doing, this hopeful process seems to belong inherently to childhood.

Discipline in its true meaning is not “punishment.” It is the training of every power to the end that it may be controlled and used for personal good and social service.

A well-disciplined person, may have every instinct, trait and ability under perfect control and still not choose to use these highly-trained powers for the good of mankind. For him discipline has failed of its proper end.

A good disciplinarian, then, is one who helps each person for whom he is responsible to bring those powers under control and to use them in such a way that he shall become a useful member of society. The disciplinary process may be subjective or objective—that is, it may be self-imposed, or directed by another person. In most cases it is directed from without in early childhood, but becomes more and more a matter of 18volition and self-direction as the subject approaches maturity and realizes more the necessity for self-control. He then becomes his own disciplinarian.

Whether the disciplinarian be engaged in his own training or that of others, he must have a definite aim in view. The lack of such definite aim is one reason why there is so much poor discipline.

“Say, ‘Thank you’ to the lady,” the mother directs her child, not because she wants that child to develop a spontaneous skill in expressing his sense of obligation to the society that has nourished him, but because she has a vague feeling that this is the conventional thing to do and so her child must do it. This imitative, traditional type of disciplinary training is far better than none, but it fails of the splendid results that come from training given with an intelligent understanding of its nature and objects.

Therefore the trainer, to be the very best trainer possible, should have an illuminating conception of the great trend of human progress which is advancing the good of all. He should feel keenly that every thought and act which contributes to human welfare accelerates the rate of progress; that whenever an individualist opposes his will, his interests, his institutions to that onward moving stream, he hinders its flow and causes suffering to some one. Such an individualist needs discipline; he needs to learn to subject his selfish ends to the social ends of the race. Public opinion may open his eyes to his mistake; if he offends too far, society may force him to stop stemming the tide, or put him entirely out of the stream by shutting him up in prison, where he can do less harm. Criminals, then, are those 19who retard the stream of progress. They may do this in ways that society recognizes and punishes, or in ways too slight for society to take notice of, or in ways which society does not yet see to be really harmful. But whether their wrongdoing is punished or not, they are the enemies of mankind. They are the “undisciplined.”

Babies, and older persons of defective powers and limited training, are solely the creatures of instinct. In a state of nature the immediate ends of self-gratification and self-preservation are so urgent that any others have little reality for primitive beings. The cave man could not see that by coöperating with his neighbor, he gained more than he could gain by fighting him. It required long, tedious trial and repeated effort, to teach men that they might trust judgment to supplant instinct or at least to control it. All these ages of experimentation and effort since man was in a primitive condition are now compressed into the childhood of every member of civilized society, through an elaborate training process which we call education; and an “educated” person is one who has learned to live with his fellow-men in cheerful and profitable coöperation.

Having a clear idea of the nature and importance of discipline, two kinds should be noted carefully. There is a discipline which takes the child while still in a very plastic condition, and shapes each instinct and ability as it develops toward usefulness and righteousness. There is another which deals with children or grown persons whose habits and attitudes are already formed, but wrongly formed. These persons seek to 20change and remake until they approach at least a better standard. That is to say, there is constructive or anticipatory discipline, and corrective discipline.

Obviously, that type of training which works with fresh material in Nature’s own time, is the more economical and efficient. The child who learns right behavior at the start, whose growing powers are subjected to proper control before they wax too lusty for easy government, is the child who is best disciplined and therefore most amenable to high appeal. Such a child is a fine citizen in the making. Wise parents and teachers, therefore, watch for the appearance of new traits, and anticipate the development of the successive instincts, by planning a constructive treatment, for each situation. They do not allow things to go wrong; they keep them right, rather than keep righting them. Even with such watchfulness, as a matter of fact, much corrective discipline is necessary, especially in schools; but the amount, even when dealing with children from the worst homes, can greatly be reduced by employing constructive methods consistently.

3. Causes of Children’s Wrongdoing

Much of the trouble with children could be obviated if teachers only understood the real causes of wrongdoing. There are hardly more than six such causes that are fundamental.

1. Untrained Instinct. This is the basic cause for trouble. The first of all the instincts to develop, that of self-preservation, in its many manifestations, brings one into endless conflict with social custom; and so with 21each of the other instincts. The need here is for both inhibitory and developmental training; the child must be led to deny expression to his instincts if they are harmful to his social relations, and must be encouraged to free and repeated expression of those impulses which grow from his altruistic instincts.

It is instinctive for a child to give his attention to the most appealing of the many stimuli about him. Therefore his natural impulse is to look out of the window at the passing wagons, automobiles and people, rather than to look at the uninteresting arithmetic which he is supposed to be studying. When he has been led consciously to deny this instinct until the lesson is learned he is well disciplined in this one respect.

The development of judgment goes hand in hand with the growth of the power of inhibition. Much trouble is caused because people expect, often justly, a degree of judgment in a child which he has failed for some reason to develop. A fifth grade boy, for instance, was very anxious to make a perfect grade in spelling. His sister did this easily and his family taunted him with being beaten by a girl. In his anxiety to win he cheated, and was caught; whereupon he was driven to lying in an effort at self-protection, and thus became enmeshed in a series of humiliating and dishonest acts. Here the boy’s judgment, ideals and will-power were all weaker than a fifth grade boy’s should be. His habits, heretofore honest, yielded to the temptation of the situation, because his instincts of emulation and self-esteem were stronger than the powers developed by training.

At some point in this boy’s training, or more probably 22at many points, the discipline which should have prepared him for such a situation was weak or wanting. We may assume that every child will meet situations in which he will find strong temptation to be dishonest, ungenerous, unclean, lazy, self-indulgent. It is the disciplinarian’s duty to prepare his charge for these situations, by seeing that the boy has learned to keep his instincts in leash, and that he is supplied with ethical standards, clearly and concretely defined, with which he may compare the new situation in order to gain a standard for his decision. Nor must he be unpracticed in making decisions at an age so critical; he should often have gone through the process of examining, comparing, evaluating and determining.

2. Failure to Comprehend the Reason for Demands Made. Man is a reasonable creature, and one of the first signs of his growth is his demand for reasons. There is no insult to authority in a request for reasons, as so many parents and teachers seem to think; there is merely the righteous wish to be an intelligent, rather than a blind coöperator—to wish to play the social game with open eyes. Perhaps the one greatest cause of trouble in home and school in disobedience. This may come from a number of causes, but when it is not a bid for attention or a mere imitative action, it comes from one of these two causes as a rule:

(a) A resentful feeling that the act demanded is being imposed upon the pupil without any adequate reason. This comes from a lack of knowledge of the nature of things, and is best met by a frank explanation of the reasons for asking the thing demanded.

(b) Lack of faith in the one who gives the direction. 23Often the reason for giving the direction is beyond the comprehension of the child; sometimes there is no time nor opportunity for explanation. In such cases the child should obey, not because he knows why, but because he believes that his parent or teacher has a good reason and is to be trusted to direct wisely. Parents who never condescend to explain their reasons, teachers, who say, “You are to do this because I say you are to do it,” are not building up this kind of trust in children.

3. Mere Imitation. Imitation is really one of the instinctive causes, but it persists past the stage when most of the other instincts have been subjected to control, and it plays so important a part that it needs a separate treatment. Bad manners of all kinds, vices, even the attitudes of mind which dictate conduct are copied by children from their elders and from each other. Children are often punished, when parents or elder brothers and sisters are to blame. Teachers need to know the home-life and environment of their charges, if for no other reason than that they may analyze the influences that go to make up their pupil’s attitude toward control.

4. Desire to Attract Attention. Teachers realize that what some pupils do simply and directly as an unconscious expression of personality, good or bad, others do because the doing of it puts them in the limelight. They want attention, admiration, astonishment, sensationalism in some form or other.

5. Abnormal Physical Conditions. When a teacher suspects that bad behavior grows out of poor hearing, poor sight, adenoids, subnormal mentality, malnutrition, 24nervous excitement, or any other physical cause, he should apply a test at once and find out the truth. Tests, simple enough to be used by any intelligent adult, have been devised for all defects liable to be found in schools. Having ascertained where the trouble lies, the teacher should next consult a specialist or physician as to corrective measures. The attitude of teachers toward pupils who offend, often changes abruptly when it is discovered that a physiological defect lies back of the apparent badness; the pupil becomes a patient, to be treated, rather than a criminal to be punished. If teachers would remember that mental defects also are as real and as amenable to treatment as physical ones, they would see themselves always in their true characters of physicians to boys and girls who need a specialist’s help.

6. False and Perverted Ideals in Society. Lastly, society, for whose good we train the pupil out of his littleness and selfishness into breadth and altruism, even society itself harms him frequently by setting before him false ideals, bad examples, inadequate standards. Society wants its members to practice self-control, but it allows them to buy and sell drugs which destroy the power of self-control. It wants them to lead moral lives, but allows every inducement to immorality to be presented to them. It calls to unity and harmony, but fosters discordant elements in its own fabric. Sometimes these social influences for evil may be controlled by the teacher, sometimes they are beyond his power to touch; but if only the teacher can learn to recognize the sources of such influences when they affect his own problem, he has gained much.

25DIVISION II

OBEDIENCE

Where justice reigns, ’tis freedom to obey.

—J. Montgomery.

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