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The Discipline Trap

By Dr. Jane Bluestein | August 11, 2012 | Behavior Management, Behavior Management, Classroom
management, Cultural Changes, Culture and Community, Discipline, Schools in Society, Teaching, Win-
win authority | Leave a comment

Catching up to the 21st Century

Note: The earliest version of this piece was written for a now-out-of-print book, 21st
Century Discipline, back in the mid-1980s when the 21st century still felt a way off. The
material was reworked slightly for The Win-Win Classroom, the project that updated and
replaced the original discipline book, the content even more relevant, perhaps, now that
the new millennium is well underway.

If you’ve ever watched any of the television family sit-coms of the 1950s, you may have
noticed how, regardless of the show, the family structures and priorities were remarkably
similar. To a great extent, the values of suburban, middle-class America at the peak of the
post-war industrial era were products of the current factory economy. During this period,
as so clearly re ected in the television programming of the time, uniformity was the goal;
innovation and initiative were viewed seen as odd or eccentric, if not downright
threatening.

These values were clear in the workplace and the classroom, where authority
relationships were typically power-oriented and hierarchical. Competitive goal structures
limited the number who could succeed and behavior was governed by fairly rigid
expectations. In the industrial era, success, recognition, and advancement, whether in
school or in the workplace, depended on compliance, conformity and the ability to avoid
making waves.

But a gradual shift in economic realities was taking place and by 1956, for the rst time in
our history, there were more service-oriented jobs than manufacturing. With the
continuing technological developments of the past few decades, the industrial economy
gave way to an information society. I saw this rst-hand as a resident of western
Pennsylvania in the 1970s. When I started college there in 1969, the steel mills were
running three shifts a day. By the end of the following decade, nearly all of the mills in
Pittsburgh had shut down, replaced by restaurants and shopping complexes. Thousands
of mill workers were faced with the need to retrain for the newly-emerging white-collar
economy.

It isn’t just the type of available jobs that has changed as this change progresses. This
new economy demands a different set of work skills than those required by a factory
economy, particularly in areas such as interaction, innovation, negotiation, and
communication. With a need for different work skills comes a gradual shift in what is
valued and expected in the workplace. While the worker of the industrial age may have
looked for security and permanence, workers in the current economy shows a marked
preference for individuality, autonomy, personal ful llment, a sense of purpose, and
potential for growth.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that while our systems of education have generally made strides in the
curriculum and technological resources, they are still, behaviorally and philosophically, set
up to crank out factory workers. I hear evidence of this discrepancy when I interview
business leaders, who almost uniformly tell me that the last thing in the world they need
are kids who are conditioned to simply listen well and follow orders. “Those kids are a
liability to me. I need kids who can think and take initiative,” one C.E.O. told me. “I’m not
always going to be there to tell them what to do.” Perhaps the best indication of this shift
is re ected in a comment from one executive who reported, “I need kids with vision and
attitude. That’s what will make my business grow.”

Well, vision and attitude are all well and good until we realize what actually happens to
kids when these attributes show up in school! The skills and personal traits that our
economy needs are often the very things that will land kids in detention or special-needs
classes. (A teacher of gifted students recently told me that a large number of kids end up
in his classes not because they are signi cantly more cognitively skilled than the other
students, but because they are behaviorally more manageable.) Nonetheless, present-
day businesses, which lean more toward networking, cooperation, negotiation, exibility,
creativity and divergence than their industrial-era counterparts, often attract students
schooled in a system that values—and is structured in the context of—factory-era skills.
Business leaders report that these students often have dif culty making the transition to
an information-age workplace. Even when individual teachers recognize these needs and
make a commitment to build toward the future, we are so much a product of factory-era
traditions that our teaching and interaction skills may lack congruence between well-
intentioned goals and our ability to carry them out.
How many of us have probably vowed, at one time or another, never to act or sound like
an authoritarian teacher we did not like when we were in school? And how many of us
have actually kept that promise? Regardless of how much we may have resented those
behaviors, these individuals were our role models. We grew up with these behaviors; it’s
what we know best. At least some of our teaching behavior will re ect what is most
familiar, and even the most conscious teacher, when tired or angry or stressed out, will
revert to default behaviors, which are generally among the most primitive and negative
in our repertoire.

The value system of the industrial era seeped into all authority relationships. These values
shaped the behavior of our parents and teachers, who used strategies necessary to help
us t in to a factory society. Perhaps by necessity, the model was rigid and power-
oriented, competitive and geared to win-lose outcomes; like it or not, this was how most
factories operated. (Ask anyone who ever spent time working on an assembly line—
myself included—how much creativity and initiative we were invited to bring to our jobs,
or how welcome any comments would be that questioned authority or challenged the
status quo.) There existed a generally undisputed “should” or “for-your-own-good”
mentality in these workplaces and in society in general, as well as a belief that control
and punishment were essential and ultimately effective, particularly with regard to
raising and educating children.

It’s doubtful that parents, teachers, or employers of this era were deliberately abusive;
more likely, they had simply bought into the values and structures of the times and
probably believed themselves to be short on options. Whether or not they actually liked
the model, most people accepted it and followed the precedents set by their own
parents, teachers, and bosses, probably without giving it much thought. In this context,
it’s easy to see how information-age priorities, such as individuality, independence,
intrinsic motivation, and self-control would pose quite a threat to any autocratic,
conformity-oriented value system or institution.

Regardless of the models we grew up with, the behaviors we observed are the ones we
tend to adopt. As society changes, however, the needs of society also change, which is
why so many of the old ways, which characterized the factory economy, cannot work in
today’s information age. However, when we rely on industrial-age techniques for
educating children, we interfere with our students’ ability to develop the skills they will
need in an economy structured on a different set of needs and values—often the very
skills we claim we’re trying to inspire. Therein lies the confusion and frustration.

When everything is going along well, we have no need to fear the demons of our
upbringing. It is the con ict situation that elicits the words and behaviors we had sworn
to avoid. And con ict situations are inevitable when we attempt to motivate or teach
information-age children with industrial-age strategies. Yet discrepancies often exist
between what we are want and what we know best. The world has gotten considerably
larger for children than it was even a few years ago. No longer do kids depend on a
handful of signi cant adults to let them know what’s going on. Simply regretting the
simplicity of the typically idealized “good old days” will not help kids rise to the demands
of contemporary realities. What worked for our teachers not only may not work for us, it
may actually work against us. We need a new game plan.

21st century discipline means examining attitudes, beliefs, and behavior patterns that are
generally automatic and solidly entrenched in our educational structures, demanding
that we bring a greater degree of deliberate awareness and mindfulness to our work than
perhaps has ever been asked of us before. It means rethinking goals and priorities and, in
some instances, letting go of long-cherished values that no longer serve us. It involves
reframing the concept of discipline from a set of punitive behaviors which emphasize
reactions to what kids are doing wrong, to a set of preventative behaviors which
emphasize relationship building to avoid con icts and disruptions in the rst place. It
calls for taking time to learn new techniques to teach responsible learning skills, to
prevent con ict and to even restructure entire relationships in order to achieve desired
results.

Fortunately, the means to reaching these goals are speci c, learnable skills that work in
and outside the classroom, and with children or adults. You probably already know many
of these skills and use them in successful adult relationships. Now, with the 21st century
well upon us, we have a context for applying them in the classroom.

This is an excerpt from The Win-Win Classroom, by Dr. Jane Bluestein, © 2008, Corwin Publishing,
Thousand Oaks, CA.

Related resources:
Understanding Schools in Context
What’s so Hard About Win-Win?
Brave New World: The Changing Role of Schools
Positive Consequences

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