Who is worried about Discipline?

Once I was driving my daughter to school and was in a long queue of vehicles along the Havelock Road. As usual, we left home early enough to get to school on time but for some unknown reason, there was this long queue.

The traffic moved only at snail’s pace. Being a disciplined child, I knew my daughter was getting quite anxious about being late to school, particularly because she was a prefect. I, too, was wondering what I could do next. It seemed that I could do nothing.

Suddenly, from nowhere, two or three vehicles whizzed past us (no, they were not any security related vehicles) and went right up to the top of the queue. Being on a straight stretch of road, I could see what was happening ahead of us.

The offenders were obviously trying to jump the queue. As far as I could see, there wasn’t a single traffic cop and the offenders seemed to have escaped any penalty.

Having gathered courage myself, I also tried to get out of the line and drive up to the top of the queue when my daughter said that she would rather get late to school than my breaking the law.

She was surprised that I was prepared to break a rule and reprimanded me in her own way. She went on to tell me that she never expected me to do such a thing, how trivial it might have been.

I felt such a joy about my daughter, our family ethics and all what we have stood for. Also, there was such great relief within me. Of recent times, discipline in society seems to have plummeted to the lowest levels.

People are not prepared to await one’s turn, be it in a bank or any other service outlet. Traffic lines seem to be experiencing it all the time. Many are the instances where public buildings are desecrated, all because we are not disciplined.

In a column that I wrote sometime ago, I wrote about implementing national service to discipline our nation. It is high time we started working on it. Discipline in our society is becoming so very important for the very survival of our nation, and generation after generation seems to be getting worse. Whom are we to blame?

Take the case of the recent incident where a young intern doctor raped and killed his patient. This is unbelievable, but it is true. It has come to a stage where a young woman cannot go to a male doctor. What a tragedy! The respect we have for doctors is such that we trust our lives with them.

That is why we can pour out whatever we have in our hearts to them, because we think they are disciplined and well natured and that their actions are bound by a noble code of ethics.

The noble profession, that is medicine, all this time commanded great respect from anyone in society. We now have to think twice before we send a young woman to a male doctor for treatment. What have we come to?

These are just two examples to show that we are fast deteriorating as a disciplined nation. I don’t intend to sound negative but there may be many more such incidents.

Is this something that happened all of a sudden or are we just seeing the manifestations of a long time illness? My understanding is that what we see today is the result of a process that has gone on for a long time. It is just that we had not remedied where it should have been. Someone, surely, must take responsibility.

Undoubtedly, schools and homes have to bear the responsibility for the breakdown in discipline in our society. Then there are the law and order enforcement authorities who seem to have turned a blind eye to all this.

Of all, home is primarily responsible for indiscipline in our society, because that is where we learn the ABC’s of discipline and fair play. If the parents indulge in wrong doings, aren’t they sowing the seeds of indiscipline in their own children? Children emulate what the parents do.

A drunken father is quite likely to pass on that habit to his sons. Secondly, schools have to take the responsibility, because for 13 long years, children are under their care and schools are supposed to instil discipline from day one.

In general, the law and order enforcement people are responsible for the deteriorating discipline in our society because they have to enforce penalties, take other corrective measures, prod the policy makers to make the laws tighter, and of course be exemplary themselves.

It is only the judiciary that seems to be cognizant of all these and doing what they can. Whatever people may say, the judiciary, by and large, have maintained discipline within itself and helped immensely to keep the society disciplined treating anyone who came before the courts fairly and equally.

We still hold in high esteem the judicial system and our courts for this reason. Go back to the education system, and you will see the cause of indiscipline.

We do not seem to be producing the material for doctors, engineers or any other professionals in our education system but ‘race horses’. There is no emphasis at all on moulding good citizens.

Part of becoming a professional is to be ethical because every profession has its own ethics. What really happens instead is that every child is being taught to overtake other students.

This overtaking has to be done at any cost. Therefore, any morality or human value system that the child should have is being fast eroded because one has to win the race. If generation after generation is in this ‘racing mode’, then, we are in great trouble.

Every parent, teacher and others who are empowered to mould our younger generation seem to have forgotten the importance of inculcating into the young minds, the basic human values of respecting one another.

Those of us in the older generations had the good fortune of being tutored by men and women of great character and high morality. Our teachers set a very high example both within and outside the school.

They were highly respected in the society; in the localities they lived, they were community leaders and exemplars. Some schools had a special teacher to oversee discipline.

Almost all the time, that teacher was the embodiment of high moral values and integrity. Although modern child psychologists have won the day and have been able to take the ‘cane’ off the school paraphernalia, in the older days, the ‘cane’ was very much a part of school discipline.

The education authorities must reconsider the use of the ‘cane’ in the schools, of course with some safe guards built into the use of it. That takes us into another important aspect - the quality of our teachers.

We cannot afford to have as teachers, ‘cheaters’. Not only should we be harping on the level of education of a potential teacher, but more importantly on his or her moral character. Otherwise, we are putting generation after generation of our students in jeopardy.

We cannot ask someone who is not disciplined himself to instil discipline in others. It will be ‘pot calling kettle black.’ The entire recruitment system of teachers must be revamped to ensure a quality intake.

This, to me and a whole lot of others, is the making or breaking of a nation. There will have to be rigid and iron discipline before we achieve anything great and enduring, and that discipline will not come by mere academic argument and appeal to reason and logic.

Discipline is learnt in the school of adversity.

Mohandas Gandhi