If discipline is necessary to education, the best discipline for it is that which is not maintained. Enforced discipline is indiscipline in chains which, while they restrict its movements, has no power to change it to fruitful energy. The so-called strict disciplinarians! Our martinets, are, therefore, a sort of keepers of a sort of indiscipline.
The discipline that helps teaching cannot be obtained from school-rules and their sanctions. It must be a product of teaching itself, a tendency that rises out of it. The basis of right discipline is right teaching, and persistent indiscipline is a certain sign of wrong or bad teaching. Therefore, the place of discipline in education may be expressed thus : Discipline comes from good education and good education is made better education by discipline.
The position partakes of the nature of a riddle to some degree. It perhaps requires some elucidation. Right teaching is sound education, which means self-education much more than passive reception of what is told. The greater part of right teaching must consist in the teaching of pupils by themselves for themselves. Even class-teaching to be worth anything at all must be based on this principle. The teaching of pupils by themselves for themselves means occupation to the pupils, and rightly done, an occupation of absorbing interest. Occupation is orderliness, which is also called discipline is to be desired which is the one and only type of discipline worth having the students must get to live in the idea that they come to school to learn. Secondaly, when once they are gathered in the school they must be given the opportunity to work and learn.
The astonishingly large amount of idleness that one meets with in the average schools of to day is a great menace to education. Idleness, which is about the same thing as emptiness has never been known to be kind to education. On the other hand all work is education of a sort. Mere unoccupied idleness the hundred per cent inactivity, is not to be expected from boys whose minds and limbs are restless impatient to grasp and see and understand the thousand new things that meet them in a new world of numberless surprises and shocks. If, therefore, the school refuses them work they will shift the best they can to find it for themselves. It may be first the school rules that they choose to lay hands on. Or it may as well be their teachers themselves, whom they generally so much like to study by provoking some fermentation in their behaviour. Idleness puts on the physiognomy of useless and hurtful activity in one or another of its manifold forms. Beckoning chances in pleasing postures line the road from mere inattention in the class room to sex prurience. It must be owned that these too have some education to give but the trouble is that it is not to receive this education that young boys and girls come to schools.
Indiscipline in the sense we have understood is very much in evidence to day in most educational institutions. One of the commonest cause of this indiscipline is the failure of class teaching as it has been practised. If any one thinks that listening is an easy enough art he does not probably know what he is thinking. In that form of class teaching which has almost universally established its dominance in education the teachers work the pupils witness the teachers speak the pupils hear. It is not so much as listening as merely hearing. Listening entails some conscious controlled activity of mind. Such activity is too much to expect from the very young. Grown-up people having some experience of the amenities of the platform need not be told how soon they tire to even real eloquence, how soon that saying sense of boredom creeps into them. That is why successful eloquence is so rare. It is sheer senselessnes if not inhumanity unintended though to ask the young a hungering for exploration in a world just unfolding its mysteries to them to sit in correct docility and listening passively to the words of reputed wisdom that fall from the teachers' lips like so many magic statues. Even words of the highest beauty and wisdom throbbing with the fire of life and the power to rule do not always get the atmosphere they deserve. And therefore when teaching takes the shape of telling unless it be amply aided by force and unless the teacher is endowed with the rarest gifts indiscipline must steal in with crafty cheerfulness which is its normal gesture. It is a good sign after all. It means that boys and girls tender as they are cannot easily be subjugated. It means that they bear in their bosoms enough health to stand out a siege or two. Although surrender might be quite welcome to the school authorities it must be reckoned a loss if the sum of possible human values not monentary gains is what matters in education no less than in progress.
When people talk about indiscipline they do so with an unconscious certainly that the school rules and school methods of teaching are the last word in this line. They would put down breaches with a heavy hand. They would shut the mouth that talks simply run a hole in the ear that is closed and crunch the fingers that scribe on the wall. It is all delight fully funny and what is more than that it is sometimes effective too. Only it is absolutely wrong. Given the proper opportunity for work the question of discipline need never rise for all we know. But suppose this opportunity is not there try as we might for all we are worth indiscipline must continue to speak in various little acts that arise from the irrepressible impulses of the young.
It is quite possible that in any school where the misfortune of false teaching is unusually heavy indiscipline might assume a character that calls for a drastic application of force. Even then the question against whom this force would be appropriately employed must rise. There is the Headmaster who is ultimately responsible for the health of the school. There is his staff of teachers who are in some measure responsible for the health of the classes under them. And lastly there are the boys who bear no visible responsibility for the very reason that an all embracing system of guidance has been superimposed on them. The counsels of force will have to be justly shared.
It is not, however intended to exonerate the pupils altogether. Some may walk the wrong road with an air of omniscience and in a manner that invites some kind of pungent correction but such pupils are happily exceptional and perhaps the educative idea cannot be easily adapted to them. In the main where students go astray, a little investigation will lead us to the school hiding the guilt in its bosom. The guilt is not very much less there because it has not been consciously deliberately cherished.
Methods of education and of school organization and management that are now in vogue have been in doubt built up with infinite care to secure the well being of the young. We have been for example striving to make education as easy as possible to the young so that they might the soonest become educated. But far from being able to reap the harvest we have been so hopefully anticipating we are coming up against strange results as if we had scattered a curious sort of dragous teeth. Easy education has led the young to idleness emptiness vociferous indifference and careless states of indiscipline. We must do the justice that examinations have at least prevented these qualities from getting worse than they actually are. Often the only reality in the present educational system is the coming of that stern fellow the Examination and it is often fear of it that keeps the young from completely rusting out from completely going wrong. It might look curious nevertheless it is true that examinations afford a good antidote to the prevailing educational system. They at least keep reminding us that if a man won't work neither shall be eat.
The peril of made-easy education and the all too frequent tendency of class teaching to forget the individual learner lead to various manifestation small or great of indiscipline. The main problem in orthodox class room practice is to accord collective instruction with individual guidance in self-effort. Indiscipline is not a normal state. It uprises from jarring elements in education from the difficulty of reconciling apparently opposed tendencies and interests and unless these could be removed in-discipline must persist in one shape or another for all our laws and sanctions for all our strict disciplinarians might ever be able to accomplish.