Inviting student self‐discipline

Abstract

restricts individual freedom and personal choice. Yet educators are charged with establishing and maintaining control (usually referred to as discipline) as an essential part of education. Early approaches to discipline were primarily punitive. One of the first schoolhouses built in the United States was equipped with a whipping post (Manning, 1959) and in the good old days a vast array of devices and techniques was used to inflict physical punishment. Fear played a major role in the discipline process and students received terrifying warnings from pulpit, home, and school of what happens to disobedient children. While vestiges of a more punitive and primitive time still linger (such as paddling and other forms of corporal punishment) most contemporary methods of discipline are generally positive. Charles (1981), Dreikurs and Cassel (1974), and others have provided excellent suggestions on how to deal with misbehavior without relying on such negative forces as fear and punishment (e.g., behavior modification techniques that seek to reinforce desirable behavior while extinguishing undesirable actions). Both early and contemporary approaches, however, tend to focus on techniques, skills, or methods. This article presents an alternative approach to establishing and maintaining order which has come to be called