Discipline

Trevor Marbut

Mrs. Hudak

Blog Post Number 2

Discipline

Discipline is defined as the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience. Discipline is a big and very important part of any society that is attempting to be successful. Even though I myself often disagree with discipline, I understand how important it is. Without discipline, almost nothing would be able to be enforced properly, and rules would scarcely be followed. 

In life there are all different types of discipline. For example theres elementary school discipline where you mostly likely just get put in timeout or something very non severe like that. Theres high school discipline where you could get detentions, suspensions, or expulsions. Theres also real life discipline, where you could get probation or go to jail or something very severe like that. For the purpose of this post I would like to focus primarily on high school discipline. The way and severity of how you get disciplined almost completely depends basically on the simple effect of what school you go to. Different school can be much stricter and much looser at discipline.

In high school it seems more often than not that the punishments given seem far to severe. With this comes the questions of who determines what type of discipline should be enforced? and why was that punishment chosen? Unless theres is a handbook that has the exact offense, and has the punishment for that offense, I think the second question is almost impossible to answer. Discipline is a very broad subject, and discipline can be understood different ways by different people. I think that discipline should be decided by multiple people, to create a more fair punishment at the high school level. I think that this is part of the reason discipline is often unsuccessful at the high school level, because most of the time students think that their punishment is unfair. Most people think that the only option for repeat offenders is to give them an extremely harsh punishment, and that will stop them from committing the same offense. This theory often doesn't work, because giving the offender a harsh punishment will often just frustrate them, and lead them to commit more offenses.

       Another issue with discipline is that often times the offender does not think that what they did was "that wrong". This is a huge issue, because almost no matter what the punishment is, if you think that what you did wasn't wrong than no matter what you are going to disagree with the punishment. I think the solution to discipline in high school, is that there needs to be a disciplinary committee combined of students and teachers that changes fairly often so it isn't the same people (almost like a real life jury). I think that the committee should look at the situation, and come up with a fair punishment, and most importantly be able to explain the punishment to the offender. I think that if the offender still does not agree with the punishment, they should be able to say why they disagree, and it should actually be taken into account. I think that this is the best solution to making discipline effective in high school.