Beyond Discipline

From Compliance to Community, 10th Anniversary Edition

Alfie Kohn

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781416618829
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

What is most remarkable about the assortment of discipline programs on the market today is the number of fundamental assumptions they seem to share. Some may advocate the use of carrots rather than sticks; some may refer to punishments as "logical consequences." But virtually all take for granted that the teacher must be in control of the classroom, and that what we need are strategies to get students to comply with the adult's expectations.

Alfie Kohn challenged these widely accepted premises, and with them the very idea of classroom "management, " when the original edition of Beyond Discipline was published in 1996. Since then, his path-breaking book has invited hundreds of thousands of educators to question the assumption that problems in the classroom are always the fault of students who don't do what they're told; instead, it may be necessary to reconsider what it is that they've been told to do—or to learn. Kohn shows how a fundamentally cynical view of children underlies the belief that we must tell them exactly how we expect them to behave and then offer "positive reinforcement" when they obey.

Just as memorizing someone else's right answers fails to promote students' intellectual development, so does complying with someone else's expectations for how to act fail to help students develop socially or morally. Kohn contrasts the idea of discipline, in which things are done to students to control their behavior, with an approach in which we work with students to create caring communities where decisions are made together.

Beyond Discipline has earned the status of an education classic, a vital alternative to all the traditional manuals that consist of techniques for imposing control. For this 10th anniversary edition, Kohn adds a new afterword that expands on the book's central themes and responds to questions from readers. Packed with stories from real classrooms around the country, seasoned with humor and grounded in a vision as practical as it is optimistic, Beyond Discipline shows how students are most likely to flourish in schools that have moved toward collaborative problem solving—and beyond discipline.

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Chapter 1

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The Nature of Children

The evidence increasingly points to an innate disposition [in children] to be responsive to the plight of other people. . . . Creating people who are socially responsive does not totally depend on parents and teachers. Such socializing agents have an ally within the child.

—Martin Hoffman (1986)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Self-Centered and Power-Drunk

Every teacher has a theory. Even the educator who cares only about practical strategies, whose mantra is “Hey, whatever works,” is operating under a set of assumptions about human nature, about children, about that child sitting over there, about why that child did what she did just now. These assumptions color everything that happens in classrooms, from the texts that are assigned to the texture of casual interactions with students.

Despite their significance, such theories are rarely made explicit. No one comes out and says, “The reason I run the class this way is because I assume children are basically untrustworthy.” But precisely because they have such a profound impact on every aspect of education, it is crucial to expose these beliefs and decide whether they can survive careful scrutiny. By the same token, whenever a consultant on discipline offers advice, we should hold that prescription up to the light, much as we might search for a hidden watermark on a sheet of paper. What is he or she assuming about kids—and, by extension, about all people?

In particular, we need to be on the lookout for profoundly negative theories about the motives and capabilities of children, which frequently animate discussions about classroom management. Let's consider the hidden premises of some familiar assertions.

“If the teacher isn't in control of the classroom, the most likely result is chaos.” Counterposing control to chaos, apart from calling up memories of the television series Get Smart, has the effect of ruling out any other possibilities. But this isn't an error in logic so much as it is a statement about one's view of the people in the classroom. It says that students—or perhaps humans in general—must be tightly regulated if they are to do anything productive. Notice that this doesn't merely speak to the value of having some structure to their activities; it says that external control is necessary, and without it, students are unlikely to learn or to act decently.^*

“Children need to be told exactly what the adult expects of them, as well as what will happen if they don't do what they're told.” These twin assumptions, both corollaries of the preceding one, are staples of the classroom management field. They speak volumes about the orientation of the person who holds them. They hint of disaster if students are asked to reflect on how they should conduct themselves instead of simply being told. They suggest that even broad guidelines are insufficient; what is necessary are precise instructions on how to behave. They imply that requests and explanations never suffice, that reasonable expectations won't be honored without threats of punishment. The kind of people for whom these things are true would not be much fun to spend time with, which may help to explain the way folks who hold these beliefs tend to act around children.

“You need to give positive reinforcement to a child who does something nice if you want him to keep acting that way.” This common defense of praise seems to imply that the only reason a child would ever demonstrate kindness is to be rewarded with the approval of an adult. To talk about the need to “reinforce” a behavior suggests that the behavior would disappear in the absence of that reinforcement. Orthodox behaviorists believe this is true of everything. Lots of educators seem to believe it's true specifically of helpful acts. If qualities like generosity must be propped up by verbal rewards, they must be unnatural, which is to say that human beings left on their own are concerned only about themselves.

“At the heart of moral education is the need to help people control their impulses.” The virtue of self-restraint—or at least the decision to give special emphasis to it—has historically been preached by those with a decidedly dark view of human nature, from Saint Augustine to the present day. In fact, at least three assumptions seem to be at work here: first, that we are all at war with ourselves, torn between our desires and our reason (or social norms); second, that these desires are fundamentally selfish, aggressive, or otherwise unpleasant; and third, that these desires are very strong, constantly threatening to overpower us.

What goes by the name of “character education” has enjoyed something of a resurgence in the mid-1990s, and we would do well to understand just what beliefs about human nature are driving the movement, or at least some of its most prominent advocates. Give them credit for candor, anyway; there is no need to speculate about hidden assumptions here. A “comprehensive approach [to character education] is based on a somewhat dim view of human nature,” acknowledges William Kilpatrick (1992, p. 96). That view includes the assumptions that “the ‘natural’ thing to do in most situations is to take the easy way out” (p. 25) and that “most behavior problems are the result of sheer ‘willfulness’ on the part of children” (p. 249). “Character education . . . sees children as self-centered,” says Kevin Ryan (1989, p. 16) and, according to Edward Wynne (1989, p. 25), is grounded in the work of theorists who share a “somewhat pessimistic view of human nature.”

Mainstream writings on discipline differ from the dominant approach to character education mostly in that the former rarely own up to being based on a dim view of human nature. But here's what they do say:

• “‘Working independently’ is a euphemism” for higher rates of disruption and time off task. “In other words, while the cat's away, the mice will play” (Jones 1979, p. 30).
• “When [students] succeed in littering or in writing on walls, they feel encouraged to challenge other, more sacred, rules like the prohibition against assaulting fellow students” (Toby 1993/94, p. 8).
• “Children are not innately motivated to behave in school” (Canter and Canter 1992, p. 7). (See Appendix 2.)
• Does offering a reward for compliance constitute a bribe? “Sure—that's how motivation operates. . . . When people cooperate with us, they do what we want because doing so serves their purposes in some way” (Bluestein 1988, p. 117).¹
• Without the “powerful reinforcement” of recognition, “students will likely revert to less cooperative ways” (Albert 1992a, p. 93).

The last declaration is offered as part of a program called Cooperative Discipline, whose author's favorite metaphor for describing students is that they dangle a rope in front of teachers, trying to lure us into an unproductive conflict. We must learn not to take the bait, which is to say we must resist the basic inclination of children (namely, to interrupt the learning process). Elsewhere in this program, we are introduced to a 1st grader who “just can't seem to concentrate” on his assignments even though he “can sit in the block corner for hours.” The author's description of the child reads, in its entirety: “What a powerful manipulator!” (Albert 1989, p. 47).

Rudolf Dreikurs, whose theories and techniques have been incorporated into a number of popular discipline programs, observed that “every educator's approach to the educational process is based on a certain concept of human nature” (Dreikurs, Grunwald, and Pepper 1982, p. 8). His own concept was, to a significant extent, borrowed from the psychology of Alfred Adler. Along with some dubious claims about the significance of birth order,² Adler offered a theory of behavior as fundamentally goal-directed, and he argued that social interest, a desire to belong, is a central human goal. At times, Dreikurs seemed to endorse a benign view of children consistent with this Adlerian principle, saying that misbehavior represents a misguided attempt to feel significant and that kids who make trouble are mostly just discouraged.

But when Dreikurs and his associates began to address specific scenarios in homes and classrooms, their comments reflected a remarkably different view of children and their motives. In case after case, Dreikurs attributed anything that went wrong in a classroom to a child's unreasonable demand for attention. Thus, he argued, adults should never give a child attention “when he is seeking it” (Dreikurs and Cassel 1972, p. 36).³

Dreikurs's second favorite explanation for inappropriate behavior was the child's drive for power or superiority. Apparently, the possibility never occurred to him that a struggle to come out on top might be initiated by an adult, or that the child's need for power may reflect the objective situation of powerlessness that students usually face. Dreikurs's world was one populated by “power-drunk children” (Dreikurs and Grey 1968, p. 55) and defiantly “inattentive students” (p. 134). Doodling on desks is the act of “destructive children” (p. 162); if 1st graders come to blows, it is just because kids of that age “love to fight” (p. 154). Students who are late (p. 108) or fail to “heed instructions or to carry out assignments are doing this to get attention or want to show their power to do anything they want without anyone stopping them” (p. 193).

Dreikurs was disgusted by “the lengths to which children will go when they pretend to read but actually refuse to do so” (Dreikurs 1968, p. 152). He even remarked that “there is only a quantitative difference between . . . the ‘normal’ American child . . . [who] does not take a bath, refuses to do his homework, and so on . . . [and] the juvenile delinquent, who is openly at war with society” (Dreikurs 1968, p. 6). Adler's contention that children have a basic need to be part of a group became, in Dreikurs's hands, not reassurance about their motives but an invitation to rely on peer pressure as a way of controlling nonconformists (see Chapter 4). And a child who “resent[s] being discussed by the class” in this way was written off as someone who usually “takes all rights for himself and never grants the same rights to others. Often this child has serious behavioral problems” (Dreikurs et al. 1982, p. 167).⁴

Not long ago, an elementary principal in Wisconsin whose staff had been trained in the “STEP” program, a Dreikurs derivative, explained to me the philosophy they had adopted: “Kids have reasons for misbehaving and the idea is not to give them what they want.” At the time, having accepted on faith what others had told me about the value of Dreikurs's work, I viewed her summary as an almost comical misreading of what she had been taught. Gradually, as I read that work for myself, I came to see that the problem lay less with her formulation than with the theory itself.

I linger on the views of Dreikurs—and, indeed, will return to his writings at several points in this book—because of the scope of his influence on contemporary educators. But the larger point here is not so much what he, or any other individual, believes. Rather, it is that we need to look carefully at what we are doing, and what classroom management theorists recommend, to determine the assumptions about children from which these practices emerge.

Auspicious Circles

We can often predict the way an adult will treat children simply from knowing what she believes about them. Someone who thinks that kids are always trying to get away with something is likely to believe that we adults must overcome these unsavory motives, force children to obey the rules, and see to it that they are punished when they don't. Indeed, research has shown that a dark view of human nature tends to be associated with controlling and punitive strategies (Clayton 1985). Truly, what we believe matters.

But even when an educator or consultant has nothing at all to say about the nature of children, his practices or prescriptions may speak for him. Because practice follows from theory, we can often derive theory from practice. Marilyn Watson has observed that discipline plans typically seem to proceed from the assumption that Thomas Hobbes's famous characterization of life also applies to children: they are nasty, brutish, and short. One example of this, Watson continues, is the policy of arranging for students to experience what Dreikurs called “logical consequences.” This practice is predicated on the disturbing and disrespectful assumption that children need to feel pain before they will stop behaving badly.⁵ Something similar may be implicit in the very idea of “discipline” or classroom “management.”

To take this idea another step, the practices that flow from a teacher's beliefs tend to elicit certain things from students. Label a particular child a troublemaker and watch him become one. View children in general as self-centered, and that is exactly the way they will come to act. Treat students “as if they need to be controlled” and you “may well undermine their natural predispositions to develop self-controls and internalized commitments to upholding cultural norms and values” (Watson 1984, p. 42).

Watch what happens when students escape temporarily from a teacher who thinks along these lines and has relied on tactics of control. When they are at lunch, in music or art class, on the bus, or in the hands of a substitute—in fact, whenever they are out of sight of the controller—the students may well explode. It doesn't take a degree in psychology to figure out that they may be trying to reclaim some of the autonomy that has been denied them.

But now notice what happens when this teacher discovers what has happened in her absence. Does she stop dead in her tracks and say to herself: “Whoa. I guess I need to take a hard look at these (negative) assumptions and (coercive) practices. Just look at the effect they're having”? Hardly. She announces triumphantly, “You see? You see what these kids are like? Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile!” And she proceeds to respond with tighter control, tougher discipline, more coercion—and, above all, less trust.

The good news is that a more positive view of students has real-world consequences that are just as powerful. You may remember the so-called Pygmalion effect, documented in the 1960s, which showed that when teachers were led to believe that their students had extraordinary intellectual potential, these average students really did end up achieving impressively in their classes. Well, teachers who assume that children are capable of acting virtuously can likewise set into motion a self-fulfilling prophecy. They can create an “auspicious” circle rather than the more familiar vicious one. Thus, if a teacher trusts her students to make decisions, they will act very differently from those in her colleague's classroom if left on their own; typically, they will act responsibly and go right on with their learning (DeVries and Zan 1994, Hyman 1990).

This is compelling evidence that such a teacher is not just being naive or romantic in her assumptions, as the cynic may claim. (Of course, the cynic invariably denies being cynical and insists he is just being “realistic.”) But what exactly does this more positive theory look like?

To reject a sour view of human nature, one predicated on the assumption that people are inherently selfish or aggressive, is not necessarily to assume that evil is illusory and everyone means well. We do not have to cast our lot with Carl Rogers—or Mr. Rogers, for that matter. Rather, we might proceed from the premise that humans are as capable of generosity and empathy as they are of looking out for Number One, as inclined (all things being equal) to help as to hurt.

Scores of studies from developmental and social psychology support exactly this conclusion and challenge the beliefs reviewed at the beginning of this chapter—that children will act generously only when reinforced for doing so, that people are motivated exclusively by self-interest, that students need to be controlled, and so on. Elsewhere, I have reviewed this literature in some detail (Kohn 1990a). For our purposes here, it may be enough to cite the conclusion of some of the leading researchers in the field of child development, whose own work at the National Institute of Mental Health confirms what other studies have found:

Even children as young as 2 years old have (a) the cognitive capacity to interpret the physical and psychological states of others, (b) the emotional capacity to affectively experience the other's state, and (c) the behavioral repertoire that permits the possibility of trying to alleviate discomfort in others. These are the capabilities that, we believe, underlie children's caring behavior in the presence of another person's distress. . . . Young children seem to show patterns of moral internalization that are not simply fear based or solely responsive to parental commands. Rather, there are signs that children feel responsible for (as well as connected to and dependent on) others at a very young age (Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner, and Chapman 1992, pp. 127, 135).

When children do not act in a way consistent with these capacities, we might therefore come to a very different conclusion than that reached by the cynic. “Thoughtless” actions may be just what that word implies: attributable to a lack of thought, or skills. Children who act unkindly may be unaware of the effects of their actions on others, or unable to act otherwise. Carolyn Edwards (1986, pp. 40–41) offers the example of a group of four- and five-year-olds disparaging a three-year-old boy in their class who was physically as large as they were but, not surprisingly, lacked some of their skills. Were they being cruel? On the contrary, these children, given their level of cognitive development, were simply unable to understand that a child of their own size might not be as old, and thus as advanced in other respects.

Even older children may act in troubling ways ...