Focus on Policy: Discipline or Punish? Some Suggestions for School Policy and Teacher Practice

This article seeks to restore a counter-narrative of discipline as distinct from punishment. Punishment is retribution for an offense, an exclusionary act by which students are removed from the opportunity to learn. It is harm inflicted by an external agent as a mechanism through which outside regulation becomes internalized subjectivity. Too often, this is the rubric from which we speak of classroom management and school policies on detentions, suspensions, and expulsions. By contrast, discipline is an act of rigorous physical or mental training, a practice of will that can lead paradoxically to docile compliance or emancipatory possibilities. If we think of any challenging endeavor, in athleticism, art, performance, or work, then we know that there is a fine line between authoritarianism and rigorous creativity. This article is concerned with discipline as praxis its transformative possibility and by what methodology it may be found, studied, and nurtured in classrooms and schools.