Musings
April 13th, 2009I had a partial conversation with a student the other day.
The student in question had no real idea where I was coming, and probably didn’t see anything of deeper significance in the conversation we were having. On its face, it was about vocabulary, about the meaning of words—and the student not understanding why we were having a disagreement.
The vocabulary word in question was discipline.
To the student, this was a rotten word. Discipline meant punishment—it meant pain, and suffering, and hundreds of other rotten things. Individuals who were disciplined were slaves, were beaten down, were not free. It wasn’t possible to be free and disciplined—the two were mutually exclusive. To a certain extent, the word was everything the student hated about government, about adults, about life in general.
In short, there was no connotation that the word had any redeeming merits at all.
There’s not much surprise here. America was born during the Enlightenment, but it came of age—and formed its sense of self—during the Romantic movement, with its metaphor of growth, of nature. The mindset and the ideology was emotion over logic, the idea that we can and should do what we want. The idea of reining in, of controlling the self is antithetical to this mindset—and it’s more or less the mindset that rears up every time a parent comes in to discuss a problem with their kid.
It’s also antithetical to most of the kids. Freedom, for the kids, is being allowed—even encouraged—to be brought wherever their heart and their feelings brings them. I agree with this, and I do think it’s vital to find a way to draw every individual in through their interests. But at the same time, there’s also a point where we’re not doing our job to really free them of anything if we can’t teach them to control themselves.
It doesn’t really matter if one is enslaved by one’s own passions, or someone else’s. In either case, one is a slave.
It’s not exactly a common or popular viewpoint—we live in the “just do it” society. Still, isn’t the best thing we can do, in a world full of ever more potent ways to control the outside world of nature, to train people how to control themselves?
I’m hovering around the edges of this as an idea. It’s really easy to excuse cruelty and caprice as “discipline” to excuse the rule of a tyrant in the classroom as imposing discipline. I’m not entirely sure how to get around that, how to set up the mindset that controlling oneself is a worthwhile goal to achieve, and that breaches of self-control are issues that ought to be corrected.
It feels like this ought to be an explicit goal of the school—that by teaching self control, by teaching discipline, we can avoid a great many of the more serious issues that confront adults in life. Certainly, financial discipline appears to have been seriously lacking (and we’re all paying for that now) and I think it’s safe to say that a great many of the more than two million Americans currently in prison probably could use more self-control.
I’m not entirely sure is this is a school issue, per se. It feels much closer to a requirement for the national mood, something that we ought to make the conscious decision to recognize as a virtue and attempt to instill. In many ways, it’s no different than any of the other ideals that we’ve agreed schools should attempt to instill—civic pride, political and social engagement, a love of the arts, and a half-dozen other elements that as a culture we’ve identified we want our people to possess.
Though, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure if Americans really view it as something worth possessing. I do think that having this articulated as part of the schools mission would help in a hundred little ways—what I don’t know is how to get there—or even if it’s viewed as a place worth going. But it’s something that needs to be addressed, and it’s seen everyday, everywhere.
