Beyond Discipline

By Alfie Kohn

Assertive Discipline, after all, is essentially a collection of bribes and threats.

A few years ago, I received a letter from a woman who was working on a book about a progressive educator. She said she was considering devoting a chapter of her manuscript to a discussion of a program called Assertive Discipline, which was at best only indirectly related to her subject. But she knew my stomach reacted the same way hers did to the sight of marbles in a jar, or a hierarchical list of punishments on a classroom wall, and she wanted to know whether I thought she should bother with this digression.

It didn't seem a particularly complicated question, and yet the more I thought about it, the more I found my response shifting. At first, I was simply going to say "Hell, yes! Help the hundreds of thousands of teachers who have been exposed to this program to reflect on how pernicious it really is." Assertive Discipline, after all, is essentially a collection of bribes and threats whose purpose is to enforce rules that the teacher alone devises and imposes. The point is to get the trains to run on time in the classroom, never mind whom they run over. Everything, including the feelings of students, must be sacrificed to...