Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community
By Alfie Kohn
Can you think of a classroom with no discipline problems? What role does the teacher play in that? Concentrate on being an effective disciplinarian? These, and numerous questions like these might have been bothering Alfie Kohn, a North American teacher and writer, when he decided to observe the extraordinary classrooms to find out what teachers did to keep their classrooms disciplined. He was struck by noticing that the teachers were actually, most of times, not concentrating on being effective disciplinarians.
Alfie Kohn is one of the few educationists who have challenged the traditional educational practices. The Time Magazine describes him as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades and test scores.” His criticism has helped a significant number of people including teachers, administrators and parents in reshaping their thinking. Kohn widely speaks on human behavior, education and parenting. He has written 14 books and several articles including Punished by rewards (1993), What does it mean to be well educated (2004) and Unconditional Parenting (2005).
Beyond Discipline is Kohn’s 5th book. It consists of an introduction, eight chapters, an afterword, two appendixes and a notes section. In this book Kohn tries to explain that discipline, which means compliance to what the teachers/administrators say, actually interferes with the learning process of the class and rather increases the discipline problems.
The first chapter concludes that our treatment to the children relies upon the way we understand their nature. Kohn starts with quoting statements from a variety of discipline programs and books and tries to explain how they are based on negative assumptions about the nature of children.
The next three chapters give brief description of the discipline programs offered as alternatives to the traditional carrot and stick policy of maintaining discipline, but they all eventually prove to be based on the same notion of punishment and rewards. He claims that these practices not only increase the discipline problems but also make the long term goals of raising responsible children, unattainable.
In the last four chapters the author gradually presents his approach in classroom management which he summarizes as “compliance to community”. It is based on the idea that students should not be demanded just to comply with teachers’ commands and follow the school rules, instead they should be given choice to solve their problems themselves as a community where the teacher’s role is no more than an elder community member. After discussing in detail, Kohn presents 10 explicit suggestions in the end of the book to help the teachers practically implement the community approach and includes a case study which he used in workshops to generate a discussion among teachers as a practice on how to solve problems of classroom management.
The 10th anniversary edition of the book is published with an afterword by the author in which he shares the feedback of the readers. In addition to the 10 possible questions answered in the Appendix 1, he includes some more questions which were actually asked, in the afterword.
The first part of the book appears to have some repetition as the author uses some classroom discipline packages as the target of criticism. The reader might lose interest because of this repetition. The second part where the author eventually explains his alternative to the traditional classroom management techniques, hooks the reader again till the end of the book leaving the reader wanting to know more about his new approach. The book is written in a quite abstruse language and a polemical writing style. Every teacher who wants his pupils to become a warm, caring and responsible community, must read this book. All the other books of the author will also help reinforcing the concept of a meaningful education system where teachers and students work together to form an ideal learning environment.