Goodbye Mr Chips, Hello Dr Phil?

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Abstract

The call for the disciplining of troubled and troubling students is a constant theme in western education texts, although approaches to dealing with disruptive student behaviour have changed over time. We see shifts from overtly punitive responses where the mechanisms of control take the form of corporal punishment, detention, in-school and out-of-school suspension, and exclusion, to more benign pastoral and psychological approaches in the late twentieth century. More recently, aberrant student behaviour has been described and treated as pathological dysfunction according to symptomologies catalogued in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. While these changes may seem profound, they share a common thread. The problem resides within the student and that dysfunctional individual should be controlled. The school, the teacher, the organisation of curriculum, the form of pedagogy and assessment, and institutional culture all slip from the diagnostic frame. Analysis has been slight and has followed institutional imperatives. This chapter calls for a rigorous interrogation that helps us to overcome the reduction of discipline to control. As an educational concept discipline speaks to the relational connections between the student, school and learning.

Keywords

Grand Unify Theory Sluggish Cognitive Tempo Student Behaviour Inclusive Education School Discipline 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.School of EducationUniversity of South AustraliaAdelaideAustralia

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