Nor is it any more plausible to maintain that discipline, though it may
not chronologically precede instruction, is its logical antecedent, in
the sense that there are at every instant of the life of the school both
discipline and instruction, the former as a condition of the latter. The
difficulty here is that if we assumed this, we ought to be able to
indicate the difference between the condition and the conditioned; which
difference, unless we rest content with vague words, is not forthcoming,
and cannot be found. I maintain that were it possible for the teacher
definitely to enthrone, so to speak, discipline in his school, all his
work were done. He would have fulfilled his entire duty, acquitted his
obligation, and achieved the results of his mission, whether we look
upon this mission in the complex of its development, or whether we
consider it ideally in the instant of its determined act, which is yet
a process and therefore a development. For what, in fact, is discipline?
Is it established authority? But this authority is the whole of
education. For authority cannot be, as I have explained before, a mere
claim: it must become actual in the effective action performed by the
educating personality, and this action _is_ education. And when this
education consists, for example, in the imparting of a rule of syntax,
education becomes actual when the pupil really apprehends that rule from
his instructor exactly as it is taught to him, and thus appropriates the
teacher's manner of thinking and his intellectual behaviour on that
special subject, and acts and does as the teacher wants him to. And from
the point of view of discipline, this is all we want at that moment.
If in the course of education, considered as a whole or at any
particular moment of it, we should separate discipline from instruction,
now turning our attention to the one and now to the other, we know from
experience that we should never get anywhere. As a matter of fact, the
distinction thrusts itself to the fore only when the problem of
discipline is erroneously formulated by treating it abstractly. For who
is it that worries over discipline as such, and as though it were a
thing different from teaching? Who is it that looks upon this problem as
an insoluble one? Only the teacher who, unable to maintain discipline,
frets over it and failing to discover it where it is naturally to be
found, desperately looks for it where it is not, where it could not
possibly be. And so he is helplessly perturbed, like the man who,
feeling upon himself the concentrated gaze of all the guests seated in a
parlour, is no longer able to walk across the floor; it is the same
difficulty and impediment we encounter every time we try to watch and
study our movements. In the same way the spontaneous outburst of
eloquent sentiments that flow from the fulness of our hearts is checked
by the endeavour to analyse them, to study the words--to substitute art
for nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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