Celestin Freinet: work as a source of discipline

This is a translation of an article by Guy Lebas

http://www.icem-pedagogie-freinet.org

Should discipline be considered as a prerequisite for work?

Doesn’t discipline in itself induce work?

This is what Célestin Freinet speaks about in his writings.

Celestin Freinet thinks that class is in opposition to that of the traditional school, so it is not surprising that his conception of the discipline is different from that traditionally recognized applied in school.

For him, it is a direct consequence of the pedagogy used. He writes very little, especially, on this subject which, despite everything, remains the backdrop of his thoughts. Wanting to abolish certain manifestations of authority, specific to the traditional school, he is very aware that “order and discipline are necessary in the classroom. It is too often believed that Freinet techniques are readily suited to an anarchic lack of organization, and that free expression is synonymous with license and laissez-aller. The reality is exactly the opposite: a complex class, which must simultaneously practice various techniques, and where one tries to avoid brutal authority, needs much more order and discipline than a traditional class, where textbooks and lessons are the essential tools.   Freinet thought that the child is naturally curious and that this vital impulse is the source to which the construction of his knowledge will be fed.

But child often has this opportunity, … except in traditional school. The educator, there, is more willing to instill pre-established and pre-constructed knowledge from textbooks than to listen and accompany the impetuousness of curiosity that boils in children’s souls.  This soul then fades, , and the child, at best takes this evil in patience, at worst he revolts. Discipline boils down to a brutal confrontation where the master thinks he is all-powerful, but only strength and cunning speak. It is a question of bending the whole group of children to the desire of the adult, or to be more just, to those of the program and therefore of the textbooks.

Freinet thought, and we agree with him, that it is possible to do otherwise. Let us organize the educational environment, the classroom and also the school to be a place where everyone’s desires, fears, joys, finds and hesitations can be expressed. A place where every child can quench his thirst for knowledge through his curiosity, his research and his discoveries. A place where he will be allowed to grope, to be wrong, to start over, to find, to express himself, to communicate, to actually work.

For it is the work that disciplines the group, Freinet does not stop saying it throughout his writings. Work, yes, but not any job, not the dead work that the traditional school imposes too often. It is the freely consented and eagerly desired work that allows the miracle of a self-disciplined group, entirely focused on the success of its companies. There is no longer any question of brutal confrontation and the imposition of the will of the adult.

Some symbols of the authority Freinet speak of are no longer physically present. Does this mean that they are no longer relevant? How many teachers, school teachers and teachers from colleges and high schools have not yet come down from their stands? Freinet notes that, as a whole, the traditional school obeys scholasticity, that is, “a particular rule of work and life at school and which is not valid outside the school, in the various circumstances of life to which it cannot therefore prepare.” – he must passively obey external orders; – he is forced into a job he cannot choose; – he does school exercises whose purposes are not his own, learns by heart texts that he does not understand, writes others whose only reader will be the master and who do not meet any of the imperatives naturals of expression and communication; – the master constantly reproaches him for his failures; – its only avenues of acquisition are the explanation, the demonstration, the study of rules and laws; – he must listen to ex-cathedra lessons which he has not asked for and which do not meet any living needs; – its functions of understanding, its intelligence, its creativity, its inventiveness, its artistic, scientific, historical sense are minimized; – it is controlled and sanctioned; – it is rated and therefore classified; – he is silent, more often than not, and listens to the master speak; “A school where the master does his lessons from the pulpit, gives homework, corrects, monitors, interrogates – without blowing – notes, punishes and rewards. This is the function that has always been assigned to the schoolmaster, and whose tradition has marked us with an inhuman tare, dangerously inscribed in the almost natural reflexes of anyone who claims to rule children.” 3

WHY IS THIS TRADITION PERPETUATED?

It does not meet the needs of children, but the desire for narcissistic self-satisfaction of the adult who finds in the classroom a privileged place to satisfy him. “School is far from being for the child. It is a question of precedence and prestige rather than understanding. The presumptuous adult likes to command too much and be considered. It is sometimes said in a learned word that the child is self-centred. Alas, adults may be even more so than children. Apparently, in words, they manifest generous ideas that imply a certain detachment from their natural selfishness and the projection on others of their constant concern. Practically, and with happy exceptions that honour our species, the behaviour of the common man remains terribly self-centred.”

Initial or continuing training provides teachers with, at best, reflexive and technical tools that improve, refine and challenge the scholastism. Then, inevitably, the new teacher, dropped alone, unaided, in a complex class situation that he cannot master at first, confronted with institutional models that have become so only by the force of the years, turns to the security of what he has experienced as a student; traditional school. At the same time, he shows that Freinet was right: we only know what we went through. – Adults want to mark their authority over the child and “these authoritarian habits are, alas, so ingrained in the lives of parents and teachers that, in almost all classes and families, children remain essentially minors and subject to the unquestionable authority of adults.”

Many adults do not see the child as a person in their own right, of the same nature as them, able and willing to choose his learning according to his aspirations and needs. For many, the child must be coerced and corrected because, not knowing, he cannot know what is good for him. “It is readily said that this is a necessary evil and that it must be ordered and controlled: the reaction always increases when, in the face of revolutionary initiatives, it intends to defend tradition and its privileges. And yet, if we found the possibility of removing these disruptive practices, pedagogy would take an encouraging step. It is not so much the corrections themselves that we must abandon, but rather change the attitude of the master towards the child’s work. In traditional school, the child is, in principle, always at fault. The teacher tends to see in the work of his students, not what is good but what is, in his opinion, reprehensible. It is similar to the gendarmes who are always looking for offenders. This situation of inferiority and fault is essentially demeaning. It is certainly one of the main causes of school failures and the child’s early aversion to the things of school. But, he will say, we must correct his flaws and weaknesses otherwise he will never make an effort to improve himself. The mother never scolds her child because he mispronounced a word or fell in his first steps. She knows, intuitively, that the child by nature, does everything possible to succeed because failure imbalances. If he made a mistake, it was because he could not do otherwise. Our role as an educator is similar: not correcting, but helping to succeed and overcome mistakes. A helping attitude is the only valid one in pedagogy.  The school, to which the vast majority refers to having known only it, is a traditional school. 

Many parents are anxious to see their child take paths they do not know, even if school has not been an opening for them towards social success. They do not want or cannot see that it is part of the reproduction of social patterns, that it denies cultures other than those institutionally recognized. “What is the point,” you will be advised, “What is the point of persisting in preparing your children for a world that will not be theirs? Is it useful, and even prudent, to give them today in our classrooms initiatives and freedoms that will be forbidden to them in the schools they will attend tomorrow? Isn’t it better to get them used now to obey and comply with the demands of a society that is always a cause of the “maladjusted” worker? »

“For those who hold intellectual, political and economic power, the traditional school is the expression of the dominant culture that encourages those who suckle from the cradle, whilst pushing the vast majority of others to abandon it.  This is the best way to guarantee their children a place that seems to be their due.” And, if by chance you asked for an education that takes into account the cultural milieu from which your child came, “Those who command will overwhelm you saying that forgetting correct and formal hierarchies, together with the respect that is due to idols and gods.”

This explains that “the opposition of the pedagogical reaction, element of the social and political reaction” is also an invariant with which we will have to count without being able to avoid or correct it ourselves.”

Educators reproduce a pedagogy where everyone does the same thing at the same time, turns the same pages, repeats the same words, emits the same signs and this, because they themselves, educators, can no longer steal. They are cast in psychological, cultural and social representations that prevent them from imagining the freedom to undertake and think, which, in contrast, forbids them to offer it to those in their educational care: “They have tried to cut off their victims wings. The saddest thing is that they have partially succeeded, that they have waged the often victorious war on activity, joy, momentum; that they have persuaded the sons of men that they must be wise, measured, humble, docile to duty; that they held them at the edge of the nest where they were preparing to take flight and that they unlearned them, in the name of their science, the physical and intellectual audacity they carried in their generous nature.”

Freinet asks, “Have you ever wondered why the captured fox withers and dies in his prison, no matter how much science and care is given to him for the food that is usually specific to him? … You conclude philosophically: “They don’t live in cages… we can’t tame them!” Did you think that the same was true for children, at least for those – the proportion is higher than one thinks – that dressage or atavism have not been able to designate obedience and passivity: they always hear distractedly the words you utter and look with their vague eyes, beyond the bars… of the window, the free world of which they keep forever nostalgic. You say, “They’re in the moon…” They are in reality, in the reality of their lives and it is you who miss out with your flickering lamp. … You accuse them of a lack of will, reduced intelligence, a congenital distraction whose causes and remedies are studied by psychologists and psychiatrists. They simply wither like captured beasts. … Of course, there is the success of those who have “tamed”. Is it so much more spectacular than that of the men and women who did not accept prison, even when flowered and who, in life, proved to be attacking in front of the elements? So, should we leave them in the jungle of ignorance and give up this school culture that they refuse to accept?

The dilemma is wrong: between the wild state and training there is, by intermediary, the creation of a climate, an atmosphere, norms of organization, life and work together, an education from which lie and cunning will be excluded, and this instinctive fear and unbearable obsession of wild beasts and children to see the doors of light and freedom close behind them”

So , “to use textbooks, to do doctrinal lessons, to correct mistakes, to punish or reward, causing boredom, the teacher quickly and invariably acquires a spirit of autocrat who believes to create life and lead the world with his learned wand.”

Now, like any autocrat, he is obliged to apply, in order to retain his authority, a coercive discipline made of obligations, of a static order, denunciations, lies, inertia, silences, punishments. “It’s certainly a way of thinking about discipline and education.

We say only that it corresponds to the now outdated image of an autocratic society where the master commands subjects who obey. It is still practiced in the army and the police, but with improvements and mitigations that the school would do well to emulate. We add that no adult, including a teacher, would accept for him the regime of suspicion, command and bullying that is still commonly that of the vast majority of our schools.”

WHAT DOES FREINET PROPOSE?

“School education has always been a showdown. […] Teachers first see the child as the enemy who will dominate them if they do not dominate him. Because we have all been trained in this showdown, we assume it natural and inevitable. Moreover, is it not official, and do not the regulations that exclude corporal punishment allow an infinite variety of disciplinary practices, the least of which can be said to be that they do not enhance our prestige and that we are not proud of them? We do not pretend that discipline is not a necessity, especially in the overcrowded classrooms, alas! We only ask the question: is the showdown in education a valid solution, or even just acceptable? Or is it regrettable, so to be replaced as soon as possible? […] By what discipline?

Be aware first of all that if you engage in the showdown with the children, you have lost in advance. You will save face, get silence and obedience, provided you are still on your guard to avoid nose feet and fangs-in-leg. In depth, you will not have done any constructive work because, at best, you will have only given habits of passivity and bondage, always coupled with hypocrisy and resentment. Fortunately, the child escapes, by all the resources of his overflowing life and by his ability to overcome the obstacles he encounters on his way. I am not exaggerating. All you have to draw, as I do, from the loyal and sincere memories of the school you have endured. And you were the head of class! No, the showdown can only be a worst-case scenario. And there is one to complain about, the educator who is condemned to face it during the forty years of his career. Fortunately, we see a solution: cooperative labour discipline. Have you noticed how wise and easy to bear when they are busy with an activity they are passionate about? The problem of discipline no longer arises: it is enough to organize the exciting work.

Watch children compose or print their daily text, decorate their classrooms, make pottery, complete their worktops, cut out or mount electrically. You then feel well how and how the notion of discipline changes meaning. There may still be excessive disorder, too much noise, little battles. They always have a technical cause: a device does not work, or we put too much ink, it lacks this or that part. More often than not, poorly trained in our new role of technical assistance, we lack worksheets and instructions. We are witnessing the accidental disorder of the workshop that is not yet sufficiently organized But the successes we pride ourselves on prove that, in our classrooms, the showdown is now over. We are gaining democratic discipline, the discipline that prepares the child to forge the democratic society that will be what he will do with it. If you let your bosses cram into your classrooms a mass of children whose moral mastery you will no longer have, and who do not find the food they feel they need, you too will be forced to return to the school of soldiers, strengthen discipline and walk in step.

 Thus, for Freinet, discipline is intimately linked to work. The educator, who is working to organize an environment that presents rich and inspiring work opportunities, will no longer have to worry about policing through repressive discipline, but he will have to ensure that he maintains cohesion in his material organization and responds to the questions and expectations of children so that self-discipline, inherent to any group organizing itself in its activity, be it possible. A double revolution!

The educator should no longer consider work as the acquisition of a sum of abstract knowledge cut off from life, but as the dissemination of activities that originate in the vital needs of the child and answer his ever-increasing questions. He must no longer be the talkative provider of knowledge, which he alone would measure, in advance, the merits of the child. He becomes the organizer of an environment rich enough in vital educational situations for the child to be built through his work and his own personality.