So also we never fail to distinguish and carefully separate the two parts of the teacher's work, his ability as a disciplinarian and his skill in imparting information, for it is an accepted commonplace of school technique that ability to teach is one thing, and the power to maintain discipline is another. It is one thing to be able to keep the class attentive to the discussion of a given subject, and quite another to treat this subject suitably for the needs and attainments of the pupils. Discipline is considered thus as a mere threshold; the real teaching comes after. For, it is argued, discipline has no cultural content; it is nothing more than the spiritual disposition and adaptation which should precede the acquisition, or if we so wish to call it, the development of real culture,--a disposition which is obtained when respect for the authority of the teacher is ensured. The recognition of that authority simply means the establishment of a necessary condition; as for the real work of education, that is yet to come. And if we should stop at what we have called the threshold, we should have no school at all. There are teachers, in fact, who keep good discipline, but who are yet unable to teach, either through lack of culture or because they are deficient in methods. All these are commonplaces to which we often resort without stopping to consider their validity. And, in truth, it is because of this lack of consideration that we are able to use them without noticing their absurdities and without therefore feeling the necessity of emending our ways. This lack of reflection resolves itself into a lack of precision in the handling of these concepts. They are formulated without much rigour with a great deal of elasticity, and in the spirit of compromising with that truth against which they would otherwise too jarringly clash. First of all, no one has ever conceived the possibility of separating discipline from education. What is often done is to distinguish discipline from that part of education which is called instruction, and to consider the two as integrating the total concept of education. Mention is often made of the educational value of discipline. But this kind of co-ordination of the two forms of education--discipline and instruction--and their subordination to the generic concept of education are more easily formulated than comprehended. For if we should distinguish them simply on the grounds that one is the necessary antecedent of the other, we should have a relationship similar to that which connects any part of instruction with the part which must be presupposed before it as an antecedent moment in the same process of development. But the relationship which exists between any two parts of instruction cannot serve to distinguish from instruction a thing which is different from it.