Discipline in Schools — Where Did It Go?

“Since we are no longer allowed to discipline children in schools, everything is falling apart.”

It is an argument that surfaces often — in staffrooms, at parent meetings, and repeatedly on social media. It usually refers to the abolishment of corporal punishment in South African schools and the very real difficulties teachers face in managing behaviour, both in the classroom and across the school as a whole. Many teachers and parents believe the abolishment of corporal punishment is what caused the chaos now experienced in so many schools, and that reinstating it would solve the problem.

Sadly, that argument reveals something troubling: it suggests many teachers believe corporal punishment was the only tool they ever had for engaging children and responding to challenging behaviour. Without it, they feel they have no way of teaching discipline at all. Fortunately, that is not true.

This post is not an argument about corporal punishment, so those debates are set aside here. Instead, it offers a different lens on what may actually be happening — and leaves readers to make up their own minds.

What is happening in schools?

The physical conditions of many schools are far from ideal, particularly in historically underprivileged areas. Buildings are poorly maintained and often look bleak and shabby. Classrooms may lack proper chairs and desks, have broken windows, and doors that do not close. Lighting is inadequate. Sometimes this is simple neglect; other times it is the result of schools being broken into and ransacked, over and over again.

Overcrowding is common. Thirty to sixty children may share a single classroom — and sometimes those children are not even in the same grade, leaving one teacher to manage more than one class simultaneously. Even under ideal conditions, when sixty children are confined to a small space for hours at a time, noise and chaos are inevitable.

Many children live with learning difficulties, developmental delays or special needs, yet attend mainstream schools where they are effectively set up for repeated failure. These children lose hope. So do their teachers.

Absenteeism is widespread. In many of these cases parents are uninvolved in their children’s education, and the school’s efforts to make contact are met with silence. It is worth asking why children should take an interest in their schooling when the adults at home appear to take even less.

Drug use and dealing are common, sometimes on school grounds. Schools are largely powerless in communities where dealing happens on the streets in broad daylight and any interference invites violence from gangs.

Where poverty and unemployment are high, violence is routine. Gang conflict places children in the crossfire. They witness violence so regularly that they come to accept it as normal.

Families in these communities carry a heavier load. No family anywhere is immune to parental discord, domestic violence, substance abuse, neglect or abuse — but in high-risk communities these pressures bite harder. Children living in unsafe homes inside unsafe neighbourhoods have nowhere left to find safety, except perhaps at school.

It would be a mistake, though, to treat childhood adversity as a problem belonging only to poor communities and dysfunctional families. Poverty makes it more visible. Financial security safeguards no one from the effects of adversity and toxic stress.

What are toxic stress and childhood adversity?

A landmark study in 1997 linked adverse childhood experiences to negative health and social outcomes in later life. It demonstrated that children who grow up with adversity are likely to develop a range of health and social problems. The original research focused on ten adverse childhood experiences, commonly known as ACEs:

• physical, sexual and emotional abuse;
• physical and emotional neglect;
• growing up in a household affected by domestic violence, alcohol or substance abuse, mental illness, parental separation, or crime.

The study found that ACEs are extremely common — as many as two-thirds of people have experienced at least one during childhood. Crucially, they tend to cluster. Where there is one ACE, there are usually more. Where there is alcohol or drug abuse in a household, for instance, domestic violence, crime, and the neglect or abuse of children are far more likely to be present too.

When children are routinely exposed to ACEs, they become flooded with stress hormones, leaving them in a constant state of arousal and alertness to threat. This alarm response makes it difficult to concentrate or consolidate new memories, which makes learning harder. Sustained adversity can alter the structural development of brain networks and the functioning of the immune system, with long-term consequences for physical health. Children exposed to three or more ACEs are around three times more likely to fail a grade, six times more likely to show behavioural problems, and five times more likely to have attendance problems. They also struggle to build and maintain relationships. ACEs are further correlated with depression, suicide, teenage pregnancy, lowered immunity and a range of diseases.

Under routine adversity, the fight-or-flight response shifts from a normal, life-saving system into a maladaptive, health-damaging one. Dr Nadine Burke Harris explains it this way: imagine walking in the woods and encountering a bear. The body immediately releases adrenaline and cortisol; the heart pounds, the pupils dilate, the airways open. The body is ready to fight or to run. That is a brilliant system — if you are in the woods, and there is a bear. But what happens when the bear comes home every night?

Another way to picture it: most people understand the idea of a house alarm. When it goes off at night, it is all systems go — everything happens fast, the safety plan kicks in — and then it turns out to be a false alarm. The first time, no harm done; false alarms happen. But what happens when the alarm goes off every single night, and it can no longer be trusted to identify a real threat?

Children exposed to repeated stress activation may lose the ability to distinguish real threats from imagined ones. When the alarm sounds, they respond as though the danger is real, because to them it is. With the system now maladaptive, they perceive threat everywhere — and they answer it with flight or with fight.

Children who habitually respond with flight tend to withdraw and avoid interaction, because withdrawal feels safer. They internalise their pain, and for that reason teachers rarely identify them as “problem children”. Their pain is real, but it goes unnoticed. They are more vulnerable to depression, anxiety and psychosomatic illness, and are at greater risk of suicide.

Children who respond with fight react with aggression. They externalise their pain and are therefore the ones most often labelled “problem children”, because they are permanently on the teacher’s radar. Their conduct is better understood as pain-based behaviour — a response to perceived threat rather than a character flaw.

So what happens when that behaviour is met with punishment? What happens when school becomes yet another environment that reinforces an already-dysfunctional stress-response system? The activation is strengthened, and the child becomes less and less able to cope with learning and with relationships.

“But surely we cannot do away with discipline?”

It is the obvious objection: how should inappropriate behaviour be handled, if not this way?

Here is the thing. This behaviour is not inappropriate. It is entirely appropriate, given the context and circumstances that produce it. It only looks inappropriate when the circumstances are ignored.

When children display ordinary challenging behaviour — the product of curiosity or boundary-testing — ordinary discipline is appropriate and likely to work. But when behaviour is driven by adversity that has changed the way a developing mind and body function, ordinary discipline is unlikely to be effective on its own. Something more sophisticated is needed: an approach that helps children learn to regulate their emotions and behave appropriately, without feeding the cycle of toxic stress.

What can parents and teachers do?

Schools that adopt a trauma-informed approach to challenging behaviour help children recognise their own reactions to stress and learn to manage them. Such a school understands the link between how children feel and how they behave.

When children are equipped to understand and work with their emotions and their responses to toxic stress, they adapt far better to the school environment — and they are far more likely to succeed academically.

The tool teachers lost was never the only one they had. It was simply the one they were taught to reach for first.