Discipline

I havent written for a while. I havent found the quiet time to pen down my thoughts. My inability to find that quiet time has caused many things to happen lately. The most important of which has been my inability to step back, pause and just observe what is going on at the school. I have felt many frustrations in the past months, which could have been avoided/helped by some quiet observation.

We have experienced a serious lack of discipline at the school and have struggled in dealing with it. The symptoms came as follows -- students not coming to school on time, leaving early without providing an explanation, spending a lot of time outside of campus during school hours, not doing homework, skipping classes. Personally, I struggled to try and determine what was going on. In an environment without consequences and students having complete freedom it is not possible to enforce discipline. Nor do we want to. But that makes day to day functioning hard.

At one point, I had an insight -- I felt that at some level the students were not feeling safe and didn’t trust the school environment. I didn’t however pursue my insight to any level. Now that I think about it again, I do really think that we may have an environment in which students just don’t care and people generally don’t care when they don’t have a feeling of belonging. A feeling of belonging comes about when one feels connected and together with others. And, we come together when we feel safe.

So, now I am looking at what makes people feel safe. We are all essentially insecure and so can never feel safe if we keep searching for things to make us safe. Someone once said to me -- "You are most secure when you realize you can never be secure". So, I think we feel safe when we are open -- open to everything around us and open to learning. That (and many in between steps that are really hard to express in words) have in turn made me ask what I think "discipline" is. My one sentence definition is -- "Discipline is the commitment to being sensitive (open?) to everything within and around you". I will leave you to discern that for yourself (or start a dialog with me about it). The key to bringing about discipline is to create a safe environment in which everyone is invested in feeling safe.