Self Discipline

Discipline is the suppression of base desires, and is usually understood to be synonymous with restraint and control. Self-discipline is to some extent a substitute for motivation.  Discipline is when one uses reason to determine the best course of action regardless of one's own desires, which may be the opposite of one’s self-discipline. Virtuous behavior can be described as when one's values are aligned with one's aims: to do what one knows is best and to do it gladly.

In self-discipline one makes a “disciple” of oneself.  One is one’s own teacher, trainer, coach, and disciplinarian.  It is all odd sort of relationship, paradoxical in its own way, and many of us don’t handle it very well.  There is much unhappiness and personal distress in the world because of failures to control tempers, appetites, passions, and impulses.

Positive Discipline is a discipline model used in schools, and in parenting, that focuses on the positive points of behavior, based on the ideal that there are no bad children, just good and bad behaviors. We can teach and reinforce the good behaviors while suppressing the bad ones without hurting the child verbally or physically. People engaging in positive discipline are not ignoring problems. Rather, they are actively involved in helping their child learn how to handle situations more appropriately while remaining calm, friendly and respectful to the children themselves. Positive discipline includes a number of different techniques that, used in combination, can lead to a more effective way for parents to manage their kids’ behavior, or for teachers to manage their students. Things become dubious for a child when his parents in home and teachers in school act in contravention of positive discipline.

The question has been at or near the center of Western philosophy since its very beginnings.  Plato divided the soul into three parts or operations—reason, passion, and appetite—and said that right behavior results from harmony or control of these elements.  Saint Augustine sought to understand the soul by ranking its various forms of love in his famous ordo amoris: love of God, neighbor, self, and material goods.  Sigmund Freud divided the psyche into the id., ego, and superego.  And we find William Shakespeare examining the conflicts of the soul, the struggle between good and evil called the psychomachia, in immortal works such as King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet.  Again and again, the problem is one of the soul’s proper balance and order without which an individual’s self-discipline cannot achieve positive enhancement.

 But the question of correct order of the soul is not simply the domain of sublime philosophy and drama.  It lies at the heart of the task of successful everyday behavior, whether it is controlling our tempers, or our appetites or our inclinations to sit all day in front of the television.  Our habits make all the difference.  We learn to order our souls the same way we learn to do math problems or play baseball well—through practice.

Practice, of course, is the medicine hard to swallow.  If it were easy, we wouldn’t have such modern-day phenomena as multimillion-dollar diet and exercise industries.  We can enlist the aid of trainers, therapists, support groups, step programs, and other strategies, but in the end, its practice that makes self-control possible.

Considerable disagreement exists over what should legitimately be studied in formal institutions of learning for self-discipline. Usually, some topics or subjects are considered taboo. These taboos may come about through interpretations of the law, as in the case of the exclusion of religious teaching from public schools in the United States. Or they may come about as a result of pressure from interest groups, as in the attempts to exclude sex education, teaching about Communism, and sensitivity training from American schools. The major considerations are that young children are not well equipped to resist heavy bias in teaching and that they are usually compelled by law to attend school and thus constitute a captive audience. It is sometimes argued, therefore, that they should be protected against religious and political propaganda and against material or experiences that require greater maturity to be handled creatively. On the other side, the danger in such arguments is that they can be used to keep all controversy out of schools and to render them places characterized by dull uniformity of thought.

There is nothing distinctively religious in recognizing that religious faith adds a significant dimension to self-discipline. No doubt that Faith is a source of discipline and power and meaning in the lives of the faithful of any major religious creed. It is a potent force in human experience.

A shared faith binds people together in ways that cannot be duplicated by other means.  Clashing faiths, on the other hand, divide people in sometimes the most violent ways. A secular world stripped of all vestige of religion would assuredly have no religious wars, but it follows, by no means, that it would be a world at peace.  We do faith a disservice in laying at its doorstep the fundamental causes of faction.

Faith contributes to the form and the content of the ideals that guide the aspirations for our self-discipline in our lives, and it affects the way we regard and behave with respect to others. “The fruit of the Spirit”—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23)—has its parallels in all the major faiths; and the Golden Rule, expressed in one form or another, is recognized almost universally. Faith can contribute important elements to the social stability and moral development towards self-discipline of individuals and groups.

There can be no disagreement in the fact that the major sources of self-discipline for a child are home and schooling. From birth to adolescence a child learns from imitating the behavior of his/her elders in home.  Also there can be no disagreement in the fact that elders at home and school are not always equipped with positive self-discipline, a situation which affects adversely on a child behavior.

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