We have seen that all human beings are closely knit together,
interdependent and mutually influential; and that the success of the
community depends upon the individual contributions made by persons
whose attitude is a socialized one. We have seen also that the
socialized attitude, the will to contribute to the general good, while
frequently conspicuous among even savage peoples, finds higher and ever
higher expression, as civilization advances. Since “the greatest good to
the greatest number” is “social good,” it follows that the more this
evolved, altruistic attitude can be made to exist and function, the
happier mankind will be; and persons who have the good of the race at
heart will try to find means of developing the socialized attitude in
large numbers of their fellow-men. Since it is easy to form the minds
and wills of children, and hard to remake grown persons who have become
fixed in individualistic ways of thinking, feeling and doing, this
hopeful process seems to belong inherently to childhood.
Discipline in its true meaning is not “punishment.” It is the training
of every power to the end that it may be controlled and used for
personal good and social service.
A well-disciplined person, may have every instinct, trait and ability
under perfect control and still not choose to use these highly-trained
powers for the good of mankind. For him discipline has failed of its
proper end.
A good disciplinarian, then, is one who helps each person for whom he is
responsible to bring those powers under control and to use them in such
a way that he shall become a useful member of society. The disciplinary
process may be subjective or objective—that is, it may be self-imposed,
or directed by another person. In most cases it is directed from without
in early childhood, but becomes more and more a matter of volition and
self-direction as the subject approaches maturity and realizes more the
necessity for self-control. He then becomes his own disciplinarian.
Whether the disciplinarian be engaged in his own training or that of
others, he must have a definite aim in view. The lack of such definite
aim is one reason why there is so much poor discipline.
“Say, ‘Thank you’ to the lady,” the mother directs her child, not
because she wants that child to develop a spontaneous skill in
expressing his sense of obligation to the society that has nourished
him, but because she has a vague feeling that this is the conventional
thing to do and so her child must do it. This imitative, traditional
type of disciplinary training is far better than none, but it fails of
the splendid results that come from training given with an intelligent
understanding of its nature and objects.
Therefore the trainer, to be the very best trainer possible, should have
an illuminating conception of the great trend of human progress which is
advancing the good of all. He should feel keenly that every thought and
act which contributes to human welfare accelerates the rate of progress;
that whenever an individualist opposes his will, his interests, his
institutions to that onward moving stream, he hinders its flow and
causes suffering to some one. Such an individualist needs discipline; he
needs to learn to subject his selfish ends to the social ends of the
race. Public opinion may open his eyes to his mistake; if he offends too
far, society may force him to stop stemming the tide, or put him
entirely out of the stream by shutting him up in prison, where he can do
less harm. Criminals, then, are those who retard the stream of progress.
They may do this in ways that society recognizes and punishes, or in
ways too slight for society to take notice of, or in ways which society
does not yet see to be really harmful. But whether their wrongdoing is
punished or not, they are the enemies of mankind. They are the
“undisciplined.”
Babies, and older persons of defective powers and limited training, are
solely the creatures of instinct. In a state of nature the immediate
ends of self-gratification and self-preservation are so urgent that any
others have little reality for primitive beings. The cave man could not
see that by coöperating with his neighbor, he gained more than he could
gain by fighting him. It required long, tedious trial and repeated
effort, to teach men that they might trust judgment to supplant instinct
or at least to control it. All these ages of experimentation and effort
since man was in a primitive condition are now compressed into the
childhood of every member of civilized society, through an elaborate
training process which we call education; and an “educated” person is
one who has learned to live with his fellow-men in cheerful and
profitable coöperation.
Having a clear idea of the nature and importance of discipline, two
kinds should be noted carefully. There is a discipline which takes the
child while still in a very plastic condition, and shapes each instinct
and ability as it develops toward usefulness and righteousness. There is
another which deals with children or grown persons whose habits and
attitudes are already formed, but wrongly formed. These persons seek to
change and remake until they approach at least a better standard. That
is to say, there is constructive or anticipatory discipline, and
corrective discipline.
Obviously, that type of training which works with fresh material in
Nature’s own time, is the more economical and efficient. The child who
learns right behavior at the start, whose growing powers are subjected
to proper control before they wax too lusty for easy government, is the
child who is best disciplined and therefore most amenable to high
appeal. Such a child is a fine citizen in the making. Wise parents and
teachers, therefore, watch for the appearance of new traits, and
anticipate the development of the successive instincts, by planning a
constructive treatment, for each situation. They do not allow things to
go wrong; _they keep them right_, rather than keep righting them. Even
with such watchfulness, as a matter of fact, much corrective discipline
is necessary, especially in schools; but the amount, even when dealing
with children from the worst homes, can greatly be reduced by employing
constructive methods consistently.