A study of the effect of discipline and reward in education
There are many forms of training based on both conscious and subconscious perceptions. Of course, among the various pedagogical methods, the principle of encouragement and punishment, which has been known from the ancient times, stands in the first place. It will be discussed in this article.
Discipline
Without the use of any form of punishment, it is practically impossible to raise a child, except in purely theoretical terms. On the other hand, although some disciplinary measures provide the desired result, they can cause serious damage to a child's personality.
All types of punishment can be divided into two groups:
- The first combines the methods based on deprivation of parental (teacher’s) love.
- Punishments of the second type are based on a painful feeling (not only physical but also moral). More precisely, the fear of pain does not allow a child to repeatedly commit undesirable actions.
Let's consider the first form of punishment, based on the fear of losing love. To implement such disciplinary measures, it's necessary to create trusting relationships between educators and children. The student must feel that he has something to lose. Thus, such an approach may be practiced only by that caregiver who deserved the child’s love, whose respect a child wants to preserve, as its loss can cause serious pain and frustration. If such mutual love is absent, punishment of this kind will be ineffective.
When it comes to painful sensations, we cannot talk about direct physical impact in the context of schools and universities. A teacher who beats pupils will be quickly dismissed or even brought to justice. However, many pedagogues find legitimate ways to humiliate students, for example, openly ridicule them in front of peers, assign huge amounts of work, lower the marks.
What are the consequences of strict disciplinary measures? They often provoke the development of unwanted character traits in a child, can break his will, turn him into a submissive person unable to work out an independent position and make one’s own decisions.
But the result may be quite different. A teenager can be compared with a spring. It can be squeezed, but it still strives to slip out of your hands. Therefore, the protests may appear in the behavior of a child who was controlled by constant punishments. In other words, the spring will break out of the hands, and this will lead to a pronounced negative behavior.
In such situations, a child comes into conflict with everything that was an integral part of his life before, above all, with parents and teachers. They become a negative model. Each of their actions is perceived as "bad" just because it was done by those adults. Positive values are reborn in a child's mind into negative ones, and, conversely, negative values and character traits can be imitated.
To achieve a positive effect, it is desirable to supplement soft punishment with a certain alternative. Usually, children are forbidden to do the things which attract them. But if pedagogues impose a ban on these actions, they should also direct a child's energy to a permissible path which, to some extent, looks like forbidden things.
For example, if in a kindergarten, a child cuts someone's dress with scissors, trying to sew clothes for a doll, a mentor should not only forbid to do it and punish a child, but also teach him to handle scissors, give material with which one could work calmly and diligently.
If a student does not have time to perform all assignments because of the intensive workload, parents should not only blame him for poor academic performance. It is also worth looking for the professionals providing college homework help. This is the principle "soft punishment plus an alternative" in action.
Reward
Two forms of behavior are usually encouraged:
- Right actions. A child can do something well and be praised for it. In school life, a praise of parents is usually associated with high marks or a positive teacher's feedback.
- Moral behavior, that is, the form of behavior expected of a child by the parents, mainly in critical situations.
Why is it necessary to distinguish these two forms of behavior? First of all, because every action may lead to one result - a sense of success, which is also a kind of reward. If a child succeeds in the earliest childhood, good results will give him such a strong sense of satisfaction that it can be regarded as an innate, automatic encouragement.
On the contrary, the moral behavior is not born with a child, because every society and epoch have their own morality which should be learned. Therefore, the encouragement of proper moral behavior is the work of the educator.
If successive actions or intelligent behavior are connected with an innate encouragement, the question arises: should teachers and parents use any other, additional prizes? A matter is complicated by the fact that such incentives can be the cause of severe psychological problems which are hardly noticeable at first. A reaction of parents and educators is often untimely, and as a result, these problems can become quite dangerous for a child's personality.
For example, a student makes efforts at school not to gain knowledge. He is more interested in a praise of a teacher or a bicycle that his parents promised to buy him in exchange for high marks. Venal incentives replace the pleasure of personal victory. That is why the rewards should be applied very carefully, especially when they are related to the manipulative or intellectual actions of the child and do not reinforce his moral behavior.
Rewards really serve the purposes of upbringing, but this remedy can be truly effective only if it is applied consciously, if adults support the stimulating influence of an innate feeling of success in a child, back it up with their own joy and satisfaction.
The specifics of a relationship between the parents and a child, his dependent position excludes a possibility that the student's positive attitude towards learning will be vividly pronounced if the parents do not sympathize with his actions and share the joy of success with him.
