Constructive Discipline

...WHERE IS EDUCATION ? By FRANCIS P. DONNELLY SK a tennis player where his skill in tennis is while he eats or sleeps, and he will tell you that he does not know the physiology of the subject, but that his fingers, arms, legs, eyes, body, their nerves and muscles, his own ability to concentrate and to keep cool, all these and other factors have been practised, co6rdinated, and like trained servants respond to his wishes almost automatically...

...For when everything has been said and done, moral discipline, or to use plainer language, the regulation of conduct, really means the putting of restraint on natural human impulses for the purpose of building up in human beings such control of these impulses as will make their ordinary conduct come into con-formity with their principles of what is right and what is wrong...

...that you cannot give it its head and let it run...

...Though virtually all reference to actual method has been omitted, the conclusions here presented are based upon many years of educational experience and have, we [eel very confident in affirming, been quite justified in practice.--The Editors...

...We must in some way induce them to go out after it...

...A certain measure of this sort of treatment is undoubtedly necessary, and within certain limita-tions, undoubtedly good, but it cannot be all that way...

...In the following paper, Dr...

...You have got to teach them that there is something in their own nature rebellious against restraint, and that they must resist it...

...Now if Father Hull will not allow us to bring up boys and girls under some strict system of rules and regulations which we try to induce them to worship as a fetish, and if we do not want to be leaders of youth as the cow-puncher is the leader of the stam-pede, we have to find some other way out...

...Nelson Hume discusses general principles of dis-cipline as these apply to twentleth-century youngsters...

...I say we have to find it...

...While that may be the only way to build an arch where you are deal-ing with solid blocks of stone, it is not the way to build up human character, where you are dealing with human acts that form human habits, and a continuing process of living...

...From the outset you might as well concentrate on the heart of things, and that is the heart of man...

...and that their eternal destiny depends upon their con-.fortuity with God's demands upon them...

...Is it possible that there can be any- thing wrong with human nature that it should need restraint...

...Their capacities are as great in general as the capacities of the best-living men and women the world has known...

...Can it be done...

...that boys and girls, while conforming merely through habit with these means of producing law and order, may be making no acts of their own wills...

...we must find the solution of it...

...that all that was good and fine and noble and aspiring has been used up in our generation, and that we have transmitted none of it to our children...

...The variety of opinions," says Dr...

...The most of what is going to last will have to be discipline that is applied by self...

...that if you leave it to itself, it will at long last evolve itself upon higher and better levels of conduct...

...They may not increase in number from age to age, but they may come from different quarters...

...They must be brought to believe that they can never acquire that art, as they could never acquire any other, without constant practice in the principle of doing little things, as the right way of finding out how to do big ones...

...If such a process of hard thinking should produce a disturbing reaction, there would yet be no need of jumping at once into the other camp and joining forces with those who believe that human nature should be left to itself without restraint, and that thus it will develop into what it should be...

...Young people must be stimulated to investigate their own natures...

...The fault, if fault there be, is not in our children but in ourselves if they seem wild and unrestrained, irrev- erent, disobedient, over-selfish, low in their ideals, hard to manage, headed for hell...

...This does not mean, however, that there is really anything wrong with youth...

...No easy task...

...If, however, you have the courage of your convictions, you have first got to teach young people their responsibility to God...

...As a help in what you are endeavoring to do, you can make use of the general desire for knowledge that makes any regular boy want to know about how an automobile engine works, and induces him to take an interest in chemistry or physics...

...If you have no reli- gion, you cannot apply it without being guilty of the basest hypocrisy...

...We might just as well admit it...

...controlling it in a way that will last...

...Can there be any doubt that some-thing is wrong and has been wrong for a good while ? What then can be the meaning of all the magazine articles, all the sermons, all the private conversations about the conduct or the misconduct of the rising generation...

...We must, in short, "sell" young people the idea that the best thing they can get out of education is the power of self-discipline...

...Then the system will break down to whatever extent the demands of self require for its own satis-faction...

...If you do not apply religion, you will have no sanction for any law that you lay down...

...If you do the wrong thing with a child for a year, for a month, for a week, even for a day, sometimes, in a crisis, even for a minute, the mark of your blundering stroke remains as a permanent disfigurement...

...Let us apply a little scientific salesmanship to our problem...

...The market is unlimited--as broad as the human race...

...Our trouble seems to be that we are not getting enough individuals to line themselves up on the right side...

...The re-sistance is the natural resistance of human nature to regulation, to control, to restraint...

...Men and women who are dealing with boys and girls all the time and really know them have no patience with that kind of talk...

...These are the obstacles to good disci- pline, these are the chief and changing causes of resis- tance to it...

...Now ask an educator where a student's education is when he gets it, and you will receive a bewildering variety of answers...

...He has one with a striking title, Collapses in Adult Life...

...We must try to teach them to know themselves...

...In meeting attacks from so many quarters there is no use in running around the edges of things, for by the time you have regu206 THE COMMONWEAL June 26, I929 lated the automobile in its influence on youth, you will probably have to change your tactics in order to deal with the airplane...

...To answer yes to that question would seem old-fashioned to that class of educators who during the last few decades have been arguing in favor of the removing of restraints on the natural impulses of youth...

...There should be rewards, too...

...It behooves us to look around for some way of controlling it without damaging it...

...There can be motives for good conduct other than religious motives, but they will be developed from self--self-respect, self-interest, self-advancement--and they will be strong enough motives, too, to do a fairly good job until the time when self thinks that it will be better served by some other less conventional and approved course of con-duct...

...If some wizard would invent a virus against bad behavior that could be injected with a hypodermic needle into boys and girls, all of us would probably be quite as That the will as well as the intellect need training is both true and trite...

...I am sure that human nature must be restrained, must be disciplined, must be controlled...

...The methods that we have used may have been out of date, and while the purpose of them is the same from age to age, we find the subjects of our efforts floating in a different medium of manners, customs, moral and physical impulses, distractions, temptations...

...His answer is that they in their youth did what they had to do simply because they had to do it...

...It is our task to make them realize it...

...Orata, in addition to the thirty conclusions which Rugg classified under ideational factors, attention factors and attitu- dinal factors, has added other lands of learning bring- ing the number up to Io 3. Dr...

...that the causes for collapses in adult life may all be summed up by saying that whatever discipline was practised in the lives of such people was not self-discipline but forced discipline which had its strength and power only from the strength and power of older people to force it on the young...

...Everybody will admit that it can be done and has been done with countless indi- viduals...

...suppose that this is the fundamental philosophy of people who are so strong to urge giving children in school freedom of action, so that they may develop themselves, realize themselves, and thus make their minute contribution to this "progress" toward higher levels of human conduct...

...Years of actual experience in dealing with young people and some unprejudiced thinking have guided me to the conviction that there is no need of wrecking the house in order to improve it...

...They carry their skill with them, and that skill enables them to perform easily and consistently in their own chosen profession...

...204 THE COMMONWEAL June 26, 1929 CONSTRUCTIVE DISCIPLINE By NELSON HUME S CHOOLMASTERS and parents generally agree in being in favor of good discipline...

...There is such a thing as self-induced blindness that comes from being too sure...

...A great hero and a great master in this field of research, the Reverend Ernest R. Hull, S.J., formerly editor of the Bombay Examiner, has done this in sev- eral books...

...That would be an example of what I should call destructive discipline...

...Actually they are not leaders at all except in the sense that the fox is leading the hounds, or that the cow-puncher is lead- ing the mad stampede thundering at his heels...

...You must, if you can, get them interested in this aspect of their lives, and you must make it worth while for them to do it...

...Their life was being built up as a great arch is built, upon what is called a false-work of scaffolding...

...The commod- ity we have for sale, or for acceptance, is the idea of the benefit and the blessing that comes to a man from knowing how to manage his life...

...that during these formative years they are not exercising their own wills constantly in the art of choosing to do right when they might choose to do wrong...

...Punishment is neces- sary, but it is by no means the only way or even the best way of bringing about the desired end...

...controlling it in a way that will give it strength, not weakness...

...But since every generation really has a will of its own, the question as to how this can best be dealt with is quite new...

...Unfortunately, however, none of the scien- tific foundations has yet produced a serum of this kind, and, as far as we know, none of them is even working in that direction...

...Our fathers and mothers never had to reckon with the automobile as a destroyer of discipline, or the tele- phone, or the moving pictures, but they must have had other things to contend with...

...Now to get about doing it--and here we come to the parting of the ways...

...The belief that by following this method they are leading the youth of the world into a better landmgreen fields and pastures new--is a delusion...

...While it is true that the results of this regulation of conduct by external pressure are not always bad, or even bad in the major- ity of cases, they are bad often enough to make people who are responsible for the training of boys and girls pause to do some hard thinking...

...and that the theories of materialistic evolution break down more completely in their attempts to explain moral things than they have done even in their attempts to explain material things...

...that they may be developing no power of self-control, beJune 26, I929 T H E C O M M O N W E A L 205 cause the control of their conduct is in other hands than their own, dependent upon wills stronger than theirs...

...Mistakes, faults, rebellions against discipline must be looked upon as coming from a lack in themselves, a defect in the management of their lives and of their conduct, which, if they are to be happy, they must learn to correct...

...in brief, to disci- pline...

...As with everything else, we are here in great danger of going wrong if we do not often take an objective survey of what we have done, of what we are doing, and of what kind of results we are obtaining...

...It may be all right to waste the rats and guinea-pigs, but it seems a shame to use willing to submit them to this process as we are to have them inoculated against diphtheria and whoop- ing-cough...

...Orata, it is true, is not explicitly localizing education, but he does give a sum- mary of tile findings of educational experimenters who wish to determine how education carries over from acquisition to use, and is therefore equivalently stating where the experimenters think education is located in the interim...

...It seems, then, as though our task is to "sell" the idea of self-discipline to this rising generation, to "flaming youth...

...They must be made to understand that the finest art they could ever practise is the art of the regulation of their own conduct...

...There is no reason why any human being should sub- mit to a "Thou shalt not" if the imperative comes from anyone less than God...

...Yet there is a school of thought which believes that even on the moral side, human nature is undergoing a process of evolution...

...There is less unquestioned obedience than there was...

...In it he makes a study of the problem (and gives an answer to it) of why men and women who have been strictly trained in religious schools and colleges, who have lived exemplary lives while in these schools and colleges, frequently collapse morally and religiously when they have grown up...

...process always seem to me to have been used for the purpose of laboratory ex-periment somewhat in the same way as white rats and guinea-pigs are used for ex-periment in pathological and biological laboratories...

...The minds and hearts of these boys and girls we are dealing with today are made of as fine stuff as any that ever came from the hand of God...

...It is my firm belief that Father Hull was right...

...Children subjected to this children for experimental purposes...

...Young people are less respectful of the ideas and opinions of their elders than they used to be...

...There is...

...You should make them un- derstand that you expect them to do the right thing when they are on their own and not because they are under control or supervision, and when they continue doing the right thing over a considerable period of time, they should have some very precious reward...

...Discipline, therefore, implies re-straint, and for some reason human nature hates re-straint...

...Father Hull points out that we are too easily satis- fied with mere outward conformity to rules and regu- lations...

...you must teach them that one of the most interesting subjects of study for each man is himself...

...and you must above all things try to make them assume for themselves full responsibility for everything they do...

...They may not realize this them- selves...

...The so-called increasing materialism of the age has not yet gone that far...

...The singer and speaker and musician and artist and pugilist even, all have the same convictions as a Tilden or a Wills...

...In other words, the problem is ours, not theirs...

...Often, like the wolf in sheep's clothing, it can, as we apply it, appear to us to be good, whereas it is wholly bad...

...Yet some of us insist on being old-fashioned...

...How can it be done...

...Orata, "is staggering," and he despairs even of a logical classification...

...Our experiences of life teach us that human nature has indeed got something wrong with it...

...If educational psychologists would adopt a common language such as mathemati- cians and chemists and other scientists have, the ordi...

...My title, Constructive Discipline, implies that there is a kind of discipline that may become destructive...

...Even if we do base our ideas of discipline upon the principles of religion, we can easily go wrong in applying these principles to human con-duct...

...The problems of moral discipline are still recognized as being beyond the scope of material research and experiment...

...This is the great age of scientific and expert salesmanship, of research into the causes of sales resistance, of the capacity of the market to absorb production...

...Pedro Tamesis Orata (The Theory of Identical Elements, I928 ) has summed up what might be called the geography of education, in his treatise where he gives the conclusions of educators on the famous question of "transfer...

...They have, in a word, good habits, habits which have been implanted by practice in trained faculties...

...to teach them that God has revealed Himself in the natural law and in the divine, positive law of the Ten Commandments...

...Are you going to apply religion to the problem, or are you not...

...What was it that gave point and mean- ing to the phrase, "flaming youth" ? Even discounting much of the nonsense that has been written and spoken in this regard, even taking into account the fact that as far back as history goes the records of each age show us that nearly every serious thinker, each in his own time, could see only that the rising generation had been given its head and was running to the devil, we are, nevertheless, confronted with a fact and not a theory: young people are harder to manage nowadays than they used to be...