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School Discipline and it’s Affects on Character Education

The two main goals of school discipline are to ensure safety of all people within the school, both the staff and the students, and to create an environment that is advantageous to learning. Schools that are committed to the development of character education encourage the ethical values that most people share, including, but not limited to: honesty, responsibility, and respect for self and others. When a school is having issues with their school discipline strategies, research has shown that the probable cause was that the rules are perceived as unfair, that they were not clear to all of the educators within the school, and that the rules were inconsistently enforced. Many parents are concerned that how discipline occurs in schools will have an adverse effect on character education. Additional research on discipline in the school system has shown that compliant schools have rules that are effectively communicated among all staff members of the school, and that discipline is enforced with an ambiance of concern for students as individuals.

If you are a parent torn between homeschooling your child or sending/keeping them in school, be sure to include the policy of the school discipline program in your research process, and how they relate it to the development of character education. Effective discipline is necessary so that children learn how to conduct themselves, and to maintain an environment within the school setting where students are given the opportunity to learn and grow. Unfortunately, if the discipline strategies used by the school are ineffective, or maybe even inappropriate in accordance with your own beliefs, not only will the learning environment be disrupted for all the children involved, these discipline strategies can have adverse effects in the coaching and guidance of the children’s character development.