Classroom Discipline and Eric Sloane’s Little Red Schoolhouse
by Eric Sloane
In early days, the word discipline did not refer to punishment as it now does, and it seems a pity that a respected word has become ugly and dreaded. Classroom discipline meant classroom rules, order, instruction, education and knowledge. Coming from the word “disciple,” which meant “a scholar, one who receives instruction from another,” the old-time school was full of disciples who respected discipline.
Back in the 1700s a Franklin Almanack said, “Discipline in the classroom is as necessary as discipline on the highway.” And as traffic increases and classrooms enlarge, it seems to me that discipline becomes more and more important. The early American philosopher Jonathan Edwards summed it up: “Education is what is given and gotten in college, discipline for life’s duties, discipline to life’s natural moral laws, discipline in the rule of life’s Great Exemplar.” They seemed to know exactly what they went to school for in those days, and it was much more than reading and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic. It was also to understand discipline.
A recent Vice-President of the United States said that “a man with a college degree will earn a hundred thousand dollars more during his lifetime than a man without a degree.” And so, many children are being sent to college with the inspiration that they might get the best jobs and earn the most money; they are told that the dropout is destined to be a financial failure. It must be confusing when they learn that most of the richest men of our time had the least education, and the poorest paid are sometimes the teachers.
The old-time school was at least honest and specific in its aim to mold a better person with no thought about what money he might earn; I suppose that is one reason why so many lessons involved the Bible. Faith, hope, charity, love, decency, honesty, patience and humility were subjects for English composition and penmanship. Morality was an issue and a serious study.
