Growing Without Schooling: The Complete Collection, Volume 3

JH On Discipline

GWS 37

No, the reason our schools have so much trouble with discipline is not that they don’t believe in it, but that they don’t understand it. The thing they don’t understand about it is exactly what is very well understood by any reasonably experienced and competent Army sergeant—that rules, threats, punishment, fear are not the most important but the least important part of discipline, the small tip of a very large iceberg. Of course, any functioning human organization, military or non-military, whether it be a family, a business, an orchestra, an athletic team, a hospital, or a school, has to have some rules, and some way of seeing that these are obeyed, and some kind of penalties for those who do not obey them. But the relation of these things to discipline is the relation of the crutch or the aspirin bottle to health. The crutch and aspirin bottle do not create health; we use them only when health has broken down. In the same way, rules and punishments do not create discipline, but are used only when it has temporarily broken down.

What creates discipline, as any competent sergeant, or anyone who has ever been part of any highly effective, high-morale human organization, is something altogether different, indeed almost the exact opposite. The mix includes love of and pride in one’s work; a belief in the reasons for which the work is done, what might be called the mission of the organization; affection and concern for one’s fellow members or workers; respect for one’s leaders, which does not mean fear of them, but a belief in their competency, fairness, and dedication; and a conviction that one’s own contribution to the work or the organization is noticed and valued, that one does not just see oneself but is seen by all others as a valuable member of the team. There may be other ingredients, but these are essential. Simply to name them is to see how little of them exists in most schools, where the work is dull, meaningless, useless; where the most important mission of the school is keeping kids out of the adults’ hair; where many students will do anything, including cheat, to get ahead; where many of the teachers are contemptuous, unfair, and often visibly incompetent; where one earns success (if at all) by faking knowledge and hiding one’s strongest feelings and convictions.

Then there is the all-important matter of courtesy. In the mid-60s I taught for two summers at the Urban School, a small, private, evening high school, most of whose students were inner-city kids. The mother of one of these students told us this story. One day, half-teasing, she was challenging her son to explain to her what he liked so much about the school. For a while he could not find reasons that would stand up to her questioning. Finally he blurted out, “Listen, Mom, I’ve been going to school for eleven years now, and this is the first time anyone has ever said, ‘Please’ to me!” Many teachers would defend their “appalling incivility” by saying that if they were courteous to their students, it would undermine their authority. On the contrary, it would strengthen it. But since, in their own lives as students and as teachers they have probably never experienced much courtesy, there is little reason for them to understand how it works.

The Changing World Economy

The Boston Globe of 9/26/83 published a story about industrial workers around the world that, though few paid it much attention, seemed to me as important as any news story I have seen in years. They showed a table of “Total hourly compensation for production workers in manufacturing. These figures include fringe benefits, bonuses, medical coverage and employer social welfare contributions.” The figures:

United States—$11.79 Canada—$10.77 Sweden—$10.33 France—$8.15 Italy—$7.39 United Kingdom—$6.67 Japan—$5.82 Israel—$4.67 Venezuela—$3.98 Brazil—$2.43 Mexico—$1.97 Singapore—$1.77 Taiwan—$1.57 Hong Kong—$1.55 South Korea—$1.22 India (1979)—$0.37 Sri Lanka (1981)—$.21

We can easily see why Atari recently moved most of its production facilities from California to Hong Kong, and why a factory worker in Hong Kong was quoted in this same Globe story as saying that she knew it was only a matter of time before her job disappeared into Sri Lanka.

One of the countries missing from these tables is the most significant of all—China. I would guess that China’s average hourly industrial wage was somewhat above India’s 37 cents, but probably well below South Korea’s $1.22 and probably well below $1.00. With India’s more than 600 million people and China’s more than a billion, there is in the world a virtually inexhaustible supply of industrial workers ready to work for less than, probably much less than $1 per hour.

The economic future of the rich industrial nations of the West, and probably even of Japan itself (which has already lost most of its shipbuilding industry to South Korea), is written in these figures. For about two decades these nations were able to employ, at high wages, just about everyone who wanted to do industrial work. For the first time in history, factory workers could think of owning cars, a home, sending children to college, joining the true middle class. That day is gone, probably forever. The industrial, money economies of these nations have already dropped out many of their workers, and in the next decade or two are sure to drop out a great many more.

“High-tech” will not save us. Atari, like many companies, as we know, is already doing its manufacturing in Hong Kong. Anything a company can train a $10-an-hour worker to do today, it can train a $1-an-hour worker to do tomorrow—and will. Homesteader’s News, Mother Earth News, and others tell us about people who have chosen to learn how to live outside the money economy. Millions of others won’t get the choice; they are going to have to learn the same thing, whether they like it or not.

Those with a taste for irony may perhaps enjoy the thought that what a century or so of Socialism and Communism have not been able to do—reduce the gap between the poor and the rich peoples of the world—may be done in a decade or two, is in fact being done right now, by profit-seeking multinational corporations.

What is the point of all of this for homeschoolers? Just this: that this country as a whole is going to have to begin to give some serious thought to some things that already interest many homeschoolers but have so far not been of the slightest interest to schools—economy, efficiency, thrift. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Things like that. No child can be said any more to go into the world and the future even moderately prepared who has not learned, perhaps among many other things, how to live healthily, productively, and happily on very little money, how to do for herself or himself a great many things that most of us now only think of paying others to do. (Incidentally, there was a plumbing disaster in my apartment not long ago, and out of necessity—to keep my apartment from being flooded out—I played some part in helping to get it fixed.)—JH