Reclaiming Discipline for Education

Knowledge, relationships and the birth of community

James MacAllister

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317478812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Discipline is of profound educational importance, both inside educational institutions and outside of them in personal and social life. Reclaiming Discipline for Education revisits neglected philosophical ideas about discipline in education and uses these ideas to re-think practices and discourses of discipline in education today.

Chapters in this book trace the evolution of thought regarding discipline in education all the way from Kant through to Durkheim, Foucault, Peters, Dewey and Macmurray. MacAllister also critically examines the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary school discipline practices in the UK, the US and Australia, including behaviour management, zero tolerance and restorative approaches. The educational credentials of psychological constructs of grit and self-discipline are also questioned.

This book concludes by considering the current and future state of discipline in education on the basis of the different philosophical, practical and policy perspectives discussed. In particular, MacAllister examines why it is problematic to consider practices of discipline in isolation from the wider purposes of education. This book is suitable for an international audience and should be read by anyone who is interested in education and educational leadership, as well as those interested in the philosophy of education.

1
What is discipline? What should it be for in education?

Erin:	Have you heard what she did in Bill’s class today? She peed on some bog roll before coming to his class and then threw it at Samantha Collins. It hit her right in the face too. The other kids went nutty and they had to call the police in.
Tim:	It’s outrageous. She’s gone too far this time – kick her out – that’s what I say. A message needs to be sent out that this behaviour won’t be tolerated. Once one of them thinks they can get away with something like this, then others will too.
Mary:	I can see what the fuss is about but what will happen to Zoe if she’s expelled? What good will punishment do for her? Zoe needs our care and understanding – not our judgement and punishment. She has a tough lot at home – we all know that. It’s not good what Zoe did but what other school will take her if she gets expelled? Once a kid gets expelled their future prospects get pretty grim. Zoe is not all bad.
Duncan:	Zoe has always been fine in my class. She has no discipline problems. I’d even say that sometimes she loves learning from poems and stories. Is part of the problem not just that she finds maths a little bit boring? And let’s be honest – lots of kids act up in Bill’s class. We all know his teaching is … well … a bit dull. She is acting up as we are making her take a subject she does not enjoy with a teacher who does not care about teaching kids he thinks will flunk the exam.
Mary:	Zoe is not stupid. She knows the exams are coming up and she knows that she is never going to do maths again in her life. She does not need to pass the exam and that is all Bill talks about in his lessons. If it was taught differently she might not be so off the wall in his class.
Tim:	Why are we blaming Bill? It was not Bill that made her do that. She did it. Teachers get a hard enough time as it is – it’s the government that says we must get five A’s for 75% of kids….
Duncan:	Or else we will be closed and converted into one of those awful new academies. They are like military barracks those ones – every lesson has to have five key points that are covered in the exams or else you get a telling off from the sponsors of the school. They have rules for everything, rewards and sanctions everywhere and no room for laughter, joy or individuality. At least Bill would fit in.
Tim:	(exasperated) Oh stop it Duncan … Bill’s not so bad. He is doing his best. We all are. Anyway, he is not the problem – she is.
Erin:	I think Tim is right. Zoe needs to learn it’s not all about her. She needs to learn that she just cannot treat other people like that and get away with it. She needs to learn that life is rarely about doing what we want. Why should her needs and wants be more important than the majority that are well behaved? She caused mayhem today. Besides, this is bigger than Zoe. There is a crisis of discipline in this school, in lots of schools, and it won’t be solved until we get tough with kids like Zoe and show them who is boss.

Schools test students, but what is learned when students test schools?

There is a crisis of discipline in a great many schools. In this I agree with Erin, the teacher at the heart of this fictional school staffroom discussion. However, unlike Erin, I do not think the answer resides in getting ‘tough’ with unruly students. I actually think it is profoundly unhelpful to regard individual students as being the cause of incidents of indiscipline in schools. I think ‘misbehaviour’ in school is a symptom rather than a cause of the ‘crisis’. Student indiscipline is one symptom of a much wider and more pervasive problem. The real crisis of discipline in education is not one of student misbehaviour. The real crisis concerns fundamental confusion over the purposes that school discipline serves and those it ought to. Discipline in education ought to serve a variety of diverse educational purposes. Instead it increasingly serves a narrow agenda of training, control, punishment and examination. The real crisis of discipline in education concerns the extent to which so many formal institutions of learning have confused the ends of examination and education. It should go without saying that examination and education are not the same thing. One can pass an exam and yet fail to be educated in many important senses of the term. Similarly, one can be very learned in a subject and yet never have sat, let alone passed, a formal examination in it. Most people probably know this, yet too many institutions of education today proceed as if exams are what really count when all is said and done. Might some students not have figured this out and decided learning focussed on examinations is not for them? This is what Mary in the foregoing scenario invites us to think about.

Might it not be possible that students like Zoe disengage with education and act up in schools in part because they have concluded their schooling will not help them to get on in life?¹ Note that in raising these issues I am not saying that educators like Tim and Erin are wholly mistaken. They are not. Schools do need to socialise students and prepare them for life after school. Making students aware of social norms and of others is an essential (but certainly not the only) function of schooling. Neither am I saying that exams cause student indiscipline. That would be much too simplistic an explanation for student ‘misbehaviour’ that would in many cases also be inaccurate. Nor I am saying that students would suddenly stop ‘misbehaving’ if we as a society collectively became a little less obsessed with test scores. What I am saying, however, is that schools are complex social institutions. What I am saying is that if there is a discipline issue in a complex social institution like a school, it is unlikely that only one person will be the sole cause of that issue. A range of factors will instead be at work, both personal and institutional. Yet too often individual students are punished in schools for incidents of indiscipline, while institutional practices remain unaltered. Opportunities for learning about students as persons are too often lost in a barrage of rules, sanctions and tests. Tests are important in educational institutions – of course they are. So are rules. Tests can help us know who knows what, and who does not. They can inform future teaching. They can help educators and prospective employers decide who might be ready to take on a particular challenge and who might not be. But in focussing on what might be learned about students through testing, have policy makers, parents, educators and educational institutions created conditions where it has become all but impossible to learn from students when they test the boundaries and rules in schools?

Part of growing up and becoming a person involves testing boundaries. Young people will probably always do this – inside schools and outside of them. Often this is no bad thing. Sometimes students will go too far when they test the boundaries. Yet too often this is labelled as a ‘crisis’.² Educational institutions systematically test students, yet when students test the boundaries, too often they are punished in ways that have little to do with the ends of education. I am not saying school staff should ignore indiscipline – far from it. Instead I am saying that educators should treat discipline and indiscipline very seriously. More seriously than they often do. For me, being serious about discipline in education means recognising the complexity of persons and schools, colleges and universities. It means thinking about what discipline and education actually mean. It means thinking about whether educational institutions should discipline and punish students or not and why. It means thinking about what the purposes of discipline in education are and might be. It means thinking about what might be learned from incidents of indiscipline. It means eschewing easy answers like getting tough on pupils.

This book attempts to take the subject of discipline in education seriously. I do not seek to come up with easy answers to the myriad problems associated with discipline in education. I do not seek to come up with easy answers for I do not think there are any. Those of you looking for easy answers should stop reading now. If you are looking for easy answers I would suggest reading the work of Tom Bennett or Bill Rogers.³ In this book I will instead try to think about what discipline and education mean. I will try to think about what the purposes of discipline in education are and might be. I will try to disentangle the differences between discipline and punishment. I will try to make some sense of the ways in which formal institutions of education might actually contribute to issues of indiscipline. Here I will suggest that excessively valuing examinations in education might not help many students to be disciplined. Nor too may prevalent disciplinary practices such as zero tolerance sanctions or behaviour management policies. However, rather than just critiquing some current policies and practices of discipline in education, this book also represents an attempt to consider how discipline might be reclaimed in education for the benefit of students, schools and wider society alike. Indeed, it is my argument that discipline can significantly contribute to the reclamation of education over examination. This introductory chapter will first explore different meanings of the concept of discipline in education before going on to summarise the key arguments in the book, chapter by chapter.

What does discipline mean in education?

Discipline has become something of a dirty word in education. This is both understandable and unfortunate. It is understandable as discipline in education is increasingly linked with examination on the one hand and regarded as synonymous with control and punishment on the other. It is unfortunate because (as I hope this book will show) there is more to discipline in education than examination, control and punishment. Discipline is not just about restraining, controlling, training, punishing or examining – it can also be a personal quality well worth educating. It was Foucault who in the latter half of the twentieth century first suggested that examinations can be regarded as the disciplinary technology par excellence within education systems.⁴ However, discipline has had less than a favourable press with educationists since well before Foucault. Some two hundred years earlier Kant defined discipline as the essentially non-educational restraining of student unruliness.⁵ These twin takes on discipline have become rather ingrained in the consciousness of many educators, students and parents, even those who have not read Foucault or Kant. I have much sympathy with Foucault here. There is too much examination, control and punishment in education. Punitive approaches to discipline have increasingly led to unfortunate educational consequences for many US high school students, as we shall see in Chapter 2. The fixation with examinations does not help many students engage with education either. However, that does not mean that discipline, or a lack of it, must cause or contribute to these problems. Discipline only causes or contributes to these problems if we agree with Foucault and Kant – that punishment, control and examination are about all there is to discipline. However, while discipline can mean punishment, control or examination, it can also mean much more than this.

At the level of etymology, there are at least two ways in which the term discipline is used: external discipline imposed in the army, or in schools, and the discipline internal to an academic subject or a musical or sporting or artistic practice. The Cambridge dictionary offers two such different definitions of discipline. Discipline as training and discipline as a subject. In respect to the former, discipline is explained as ‘training that makes people more willing to obey or more able to control themselves, often in the form of rules, and punishments if these are broken, or the behaviour produced by this training’. The example given in the dictionary regarding training, is that the first task of every teacher is to learn how to discipline, i.e. control their class. However, according to the Cambridge dictionary, discipline can also be a very specific type of academic training – it can be more than control or self-control. Here discipline is a ‘particular area of study, especially a subject studied at a college or university’.⁶ Note, however, that whether discipline is conceived of as training and control, or internal to a particular academic body of knowledge, discipline is not essentially synonymous with either examination or punishment in dictionary definitions of the word. Discipline is more like control and training than punishment and examination in the dictionary definitions. Indeed, while punishment might sometimes result in a disciplinary situation gone awry, this only legitimately occurs if the rules have first been broken.

In this respect Richard Peters (1970) pointed out long ago that while discipline involves a pupil observing the rules of an activity, punishment is normally only justifiable when a student has breached the rules of such activity. Discipline and punishment are sometimes related then, but they are certainly not the same. Punishment usually only occurs after discipline has lapsed. Moreover, discipline in the sense of academic training is not the same as mere examination either. While someone might sit an examination near the end of a course of academic studies, there is no necessary connection between studying an academic discipline and sitting an examination in that discipline. Someone could spend a great deal of time being disciplined by a body of academic knowledge without ever being examined in it.⁷ However, these dictionary definitions of discipline probably cannot take us that far. Discipline has taken on a variety of different meanings when related to education, some of which bear little resemblance to these dictionary definitions. To gain a deeper understanding of what discipline in education might mean, wider reflection upon the nature and purposes of discipline in education is needed. In this respect, there is a rich body of philosophical literature concerning the nature and purposes of discipline in education. A body of literature that has been regrettably neglected.⁸ The aim of this book is to come to terms with some of this literature and to relate it to some contemporary educational challenges.

The nature and purposes of discipline in education

A core purpose of educational institutions is preparing students for meaningful participation in social and economic life. Institutional disciplinary mechanisms such as examinations, school cultures and rules, play a key role in passing on ways of acting, being and knowing that are valued while discouraging types of knowing, being and acting that are not. Such institutional mechanisms may have important social and individual value and they may help to create conditions conducive for learning. However, discipline is not just something that is enacted by institutions and educators working in them. It also requires student effort. Indeed, discipline can be a valuable perso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A note on this book and acknowledgements
• 1 What is discipline? What should it be for in education?
• 2 Discipline in recent education policy and practice
• 3 Rules, education and moral development
• 4 Discipline and punishment in education
• 5 Disciplines of knowledge, disciplined interests and student agency
• 6 Relationships, community and personal discipline
• 7 Restorative approaches to school discipline
• 8 Discipline in education: The birth of community
• Bibliography
• Index