Surely it is not reasonable for parents to leave the disciplining of their school-going children entirely up to them. A child typically spends six to ten hours in school, five days a week. This is a huge amount of time away from home. As child psychologists have rightly pointed out, there is a great need for rules and consequences to be enforced in a consistent manner in order for them to be effective. Consequently, children should not be subject to one set of expectations about their behaviour in school and a different set of expectations back at home. Ideally, the school and parents should work together to come up with a common set of expectations about student behaviour such that it minimises confusion on the part of the child.

Discipline a Quandry

DISCIPLINE - A QUANDARY
Many parents do not deal with this issue on a regular basis, unless their child is a recalcitrant. Hence, once teachers mete out punishments and disciplinary consequences on their precious babes, they are not prepared to deal with such an intensely personal affront to their sensibilities and loss of face. They may therefore inadvertently react in retaliation, and launch scathing criticism and rebukes on the school authorities. This behaviour may not be their normal behavioural mode, and what I posit here is that schools should proactively build sufficient emotional currency with both parents and their children to lay up positive reserves, so that one day when they need to make withdrawals, they can.

Discipline

Parents should not leave the discipline of their children to teachers. To do so is to take away their parenting responsibilities. Despite the fact that parents are busy at work, to leave the responsibilities to teachers is to pervert the role of parents.  Students themselves will also become confused if teachers take over the place of parents.

Discipline

It would be nice to be able to leave discipline entirely to parents but, given that children spend SO much time in school, it is inevitable that situations will arise that require some action on the part of the teacher. The teacher, of course, needs to handle these situations sensitively, and follow up with the parents.

Dichotomy between Education and Discipline?

Dear Mrs Teoh,

Isn't discipline a large aspect of what teaching entails?  Education is not just imparting academic knowledge, it is also about character development.  Teachers also do not like to discipline students. As much as they can avoid it, they would!

Discipline

With regard to discipline, I am of the opinion that we should tackle the issue in two ways.  While the parent may be right, to a certain extent, that only he has the right to discipline his child, we should also be cognizant of the fact that the school can partner the parent in the successful parenting of the child.  The concern here could be how much the school should dip its fingers into the pie and help the parent to discipline the child.  At the end of the day, the child belongs to the parents and we, the school, should just do our best to help the parent.