Discipline is Distracting

To focus on discipline is to ignore the real problem: We will never be able to get students (or anyone else) to be in good order if, day after day, we try to force them to do what they do not find satisfying.

-William Glasser

Often we express sincere frustration when we can't get someone (who usually has less power than us) to do what we want them to do.

When we catch ourselves or others making this complaint, we need to resist engaging in carrots and sticks -- instead we need to first reflect on the task that we are demanding be done. 

If it is sincerely something that no one would ever want to do willingly, then we shouldn't be surprised that we are met with resistance.

If it is something that we would sincerely wish others to be inherently interested in and authentically engaged with, then we must move away from doing things to people to gain compliance and shift towards working with people in an effort to encourage engagement.

The real problem isn't that you can't get them to do what you want - the real problem is that they don't see why they would want to, and force won't solve this problem; in fact, it will only make things worse. 

Which is why discipline is distracting.

Made to learn

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of a desire to go on learning. To ignore whether children like learning or not is ignorant to the fact that where interest appears, achievement usually follows.

However, as Alfie Kohn explains in Punished by Rewards, American education, for the most part, gets this wrong:

A top corporate executive, acccustomed to the exercise of power, lamened not too long ago about the decline of education in this country. Children, he declared, must be "made to understand the importance of learning." The approach captured in this short phrase is emblematic of what is wrong with American schooling. The aggressive attempt to "make" children do things - and even more absurd, to "make" them understand why they should care about what they have been made to do - is a recipe for failure. If, to paraphrase a famous critical report, an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America a mediocre educational system, it could have devised no better plan than to establish mechanisms for tightly controlling what students do in school.

William Glasser confirms Kohn's tone:

Coercive teachers are the rule, not the exception, in our schools... We pressure students to learn what they do not want to learn, and then punish them with low grades when they do not learn it. We lose them as learners.

When we focus more on simply enforcing learning we engage in something that looks less like real teaching and more like bullying.

When Glasser says we lose them as learners, he's not kidding. While some students may choose to physically attend but mentally checking-out, many more are voting with their feet and refuse to even show up - they're dropping out.

With current day drop out rates being as high as they are, there comes a point when blaming the kids or doubling the dose of more of the same is simply not a productive use of our time.

While it is true that children are made to learn - this is not the same as making them do so.