The Positive, Educational Purpose of Discipline

Connections: Winter 2008 -- Sometimes education rests on premises so fundamental that we’re barely conscious of them. When we differ on such unexamined premises, our disagreements can be all the more frustrating. We can’t imagine the other person’s logic, so we may begin to question motivation, sincerity, or competence. The possibility of moral change is one such premise, and it is fundamental to Hackley’s disciplinary curriculum.
Connections: Winter 2008 -- Sometimes education rests on premises so fundamental that we’re barely conscious of them. When we differ on such unexamined premises, our disagreements can be all the more frustrating. We can’t imagine the other person’s logic, so we may begin to question motivation, sincerity, or competence. The possibility of moral change is one such premise, and it is fundamental to Hackley’s disciplinary curriculum.

We believe that students can grow and change academically, that their knowledge and intellectual skills progress. Because of those assumptions, we see a disappointing grade as a milestone in that progress, a useful indicator that more effort is needed, or more guidance. We wouldn’t think of telling the teacher that giving that disappointing grade is unacceptable. We understand that academic consequences are part of that positive educa­tional guidance. In contrast, when a student’s behavior requires consequences as part of our disciplinary curriculum, we may think those consequences purport to label something unchang­ing in a student’s fundamental character. If the student is our child, whom we know to be a good person who has made a mistake from which she can learn, we may regard that label as unfair; if it is someone else’s child, we may regard that label as a warning sign that she is someone to be avoided. But the point is that both academic consequences and disciplinary consequences are just signposts, educational indicators intended to support positive change.

I recently watched the film The Lives of Others, which bears on this point. It begins in communist East Germany in 1984, where secret police (Stasi) Captain Gerd Wiesler spies on people and conducts exhausting interrogations of those who violate the smallest precepts of the regime. He’s assigned by Anton Grubitz, an old colleague and now superior officer, to spy on a playwright named Georg Dreyman, whose girlfriend is a famous actress coveted by a government minister, Bruno Hempf. By the end of the film, Wiesler, a true puritanistic be­liever in East German socialism, betrays that allegiance to save Dreyman from the Stasi.

I thought the acting superb and was moved by the ending. On first reflection, though, I found one aspect of this chillingly realistic film unconvincingly sentimental — I doubted the real­ism of the central character’s change of mind and heart. At a crucial moment in the film, the contemptible Hempf patronizes Dreyman, noting that his plays are popular because they show people changing. “Menschen verändern sich nicht,” says Hempf – “People don’t change.” Was I allying myself with Hempf?

Director Florian von Donnersmarck has noted that history does provide such instances. Stasi Captain Werner Teske, for instance, was executed in 1981 for such a change of heart. But one swallow does not make a spring, nor one factual instance a realistic work of fiction. The question is, rather, is this change rendered credible in the texture of the film?

Von Donnersmarck offers such texture in Wiesler’s empathet­ic connection to Dreyman’s observed life, in his revulsion from the corruption of Grubitz and Hempf, and in the awakening influence of art (he steals Dreyman’s copy of Brecht which he reads in a soulful voiceover and listens in to Dreyman’s playing the piano “Sonata for a Good Man,” composed for the film by Gabriel Yared). Can art transform us? Here Hempf might cyni­cally quote Hemingway, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Von Don­nersmarck counters with another swallow – East German poet Wolf Biermann was so admired by his Stasi surveillers that they took up poetry under his (to him unknown) influence. Their poetry, von Donnersmarck admits, wasn’t good. Another swallow mentioned by Dreyman is the story of Lenin’s remark to Gorky:

Beethoven’s Appassionata is my favorite piece of music but I’m not going to listen to it anymore because, if I do, it makes me want to stroke people’s heads and tell them nice, stupid things, and I have to smash in those heads, smash them in without mercy, to bring my revolution to an end. So I’m just not going to listen to it anymore.

So, more Beethoven means less totalitarianism? As Wolf Biermann said, “We are all addicted to evidence of people’s ability to change for the good.” And that is what it comes down to – we either believe that people can change or we do not. We side with Hempf and cynicism or with Dreyman and art.

I do believe that people can change for the good. Those of us in education have devoted our lives to that belief, and parents seek an education that can offer such beneficent guided change to their children. If we’re able to imagine a Stasi Captain or a brutal dictator subject to change, how much more must we allow that possibility of moral change to children, who are changing physically and intellectually every day?

We all have the potential for darkness within us; we all can be Stasi, and we all can choose not to be. As a teacher of moral philosophy, I believe that every good action makes the next good action easier, and every bad action makes the good harder to achieve. And yet, the most depraved of us can be changed, can make the choice of change, and sometimes it seems a mystery how that can be so. To believe that possible may simply be a matter of faith, a belief in the potential of humanity. As von Donnersmarck wrote, “More than anything else, The Lives of Others is a human drama about the ability of human beings to do the right thing, no matter how far they have gone down the wrong path....It can be within the confines of a school, or a hierarchical business organization, or whatever, that we will have the chance to display a similar kind of heroism...as [Wiesler] is displaying.”

In our Handbooks, we present our disciplinary processes as a moral curriculum. “We know that students on occasion will make poor moral choices; when they do so, they need to be held accountable for such bad behavior if they are to be free of its influence in shaping their future identity. That is the positive, educational purpose of discipline.” The fundamental premise is our belief in the possibility that moral change can be provoked and supported, most importantly, by our belief that it is possible, not just for ourselves and our own chil­dren, but for others.

Walter C. Johnson
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