Opinions

Hugging, schools and discipline

Valson Thampu

The disciplinary action taken by a school in Thiruvananthapuram, against two of its students for indulging in public display of affection on the premises, has landed it in court. The matter is in the air, and opinions are sharply divided. Listing the ‘for’ and ‘against’ marshalled by both sides may assuage academic interests; but it will not do, if our aim is to see the issue in an adequate perspective. We need clarity on key questions: Can education bypass character-formation? Can character-formation eschew discipline? What is discipline? And, most of all, what does it mean to educate?

As of now, an ambience of distrust surrounds educational institutions. It is assumed that they can no longer be trusted to secure the best interests of students. This has aggravated in the wake of the fall in esteem that all stakeholders in education have suffered.

Education is a cultural project and is susceptible to shifts in cultural norms. The nature of guru-shishya relationship  under the Indian system of education in the past is strikingly different from the student-teacher relationship in the western model of education we practise today. Historically and geographically we are oriental. Educationally we are occidental. This generates contradictions in our approach to, and expectations from, education.

Parents, when they look for ‘good’ schools and colleges, attach considerable importance to discipline. At the time of choosing institutions, they see a desirable connection between discipline—discipline in the abstract—and ‘good education’. Not surprisingly, most students resent discipline. Parents follow suit when their wards come at the wrong end of it, but continue to endorse the need for discipline in principle.
This is not to argue that institutions unfailingly understand ‘character’ or practise ‘discipline’ in a healthy manner.

From interactions with scores of institutional heads, hundreds of teachers and thousands of parents, I have realised that no one really has a good enough clue to what character is. This means that the ‘discipline’ practised tends to have little reference to ‘character-formation’; which is the crux of the matter. When discipline is delinked from character-formation, it becomes indistinguishable from harshness. The teacher ‘disciplines’ (read, punishes) the inconvenient in the classroom. Institutions discipline nonconformism, mistaking it to be indiscipline.

Character, wrote Aristotle, is a “form of obedience to a maxim or rule of conduct”. Why should there be any rule of conduct at all? Well, because rules of conduct are a requisite for leading happy lives, both as private individuals and as responsible citizens. Immanuel Kant argues that character formation must be deemed basic to education and to ‘nurture’. Culture, unlike nurture, is concerned only with acquisition of knowledge.

A defect in culture can be rectified. But a defect in nurture, Kant warns, is a source of life-long mischief for the individual and the society alike. The cynical reduction of the purpose of learning to success understood as material gain thwarts, according to John Dewey, the ethical formation of students. I cite these  views merely to submit that educational issues—especially those relating to discipline and character-formation—need to be seen in a wider context, and not through transitory cultural dispositions. Also, to suggest what passes for the western norm needs to be regarded with due diligence.

It is a principle universally respected that ‘external interference’—including that of the state—must be minimized in education. Its inviolability should be deemed as sacrosanct as that of an operating theatre, where no surgeon is dictated to as to what he should, or should not, do. This is not to argue that a surgeon should not be held accountable for his lapses. A patient is fully free to choose his surgeon and to choose, besides, to forego surgery. But if the surgeon is chosen and the surgical procedure opted for, the patient needs to leave it to the surgeon’s expertise. It is injurious to the interests of a society to infect the sanctuary of learning with distrust and hostility. Institutions, on their part, need to be zealous custodians of the trust reposed in them.

Significantly, in the debate that ensued the episode of disciplinary over-kill, the distinction between ‘public’ space and ‘institutional’ environment was eliminated. Display of affection in public, is not quite the same as how students conduct themselves in institutions. Unlike in the amorphous ambience, say, of a park, how a student conducts himself affects the learning environment. The distinction between public space and institutional domain comes into sharp focus, and is made much of, when issues of  ‘security’ of students surface. We need to be consistent in our assumptions while disputing proprieties in education.
Regrettably, institutions remain somnambulantly vague about their mandate.

As a result, they tend to be deaf to the educational challenges and opportunities to which the so-called ‘discipline’ issues clamour for attention. Educationally pro-active institutions read the sub-texts of such events aright. More often than not, what surface as discipline issues are pointers to the neglect of character-formation in the extant approach to education. Institutions are too busy grappling with syllabi to educate students even on basic courtesies to be observed in life.

Staggering under the burden of quantity, they tend to distrust spontaneity in students. This results in regimentation, which inhibits the joy of learning. Many situations of ‘indiscipline’ can be handled benignly and beneficially with a touch of humour. Often enough, issues are less serious than they are made to be by the Gradgrinds-in-charge, who tend to forget that institutions are meant to be places of growth.

Valson Thampu

Former principal of St Stephen’s College, New Delhi

Email: vthampu@gmail.com

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