Role of Punishment

What is the role of punishment in inculcating discipline in children today? Well, to begin with, it is perhaps a good idea to spend some time pondering the differences in the meaning and implication of each of these terms. Although punishment and discipline are often used interchangeably, in reality they are two very different concepts. As Meera Marathe, a retired school teacher and now a guest faculty at IIIT, Hyderabad, puts it, “Discipline isn’t related to punishment except in the common social sense.” What they each hope to achieve is very different.
Punishment is something that comes from an outside source and insists on obedience even as it stresses what a child should not do. Discipline, on the other hand, emphasises what a child should do, and is something that comes (or ought to come) from within the child. Discipline is, most importantly, an ongoing process whose ultimate goal is the complete development of the individual. Punishment, however, is usually a one-time occurrence and it has a short-term goal – that of inculcating obedience or compliance to rules. While discipline places the onus of learning and improving on the child, punishments are forced on the child.
Having made this difference clear, it is a little disconcerting to find that most parents and educators use these two terms interchangeably. Not surprisingly, then, punishments are handed out with clockwork regularity at schools, and inexorably linked with the belief that these will lead to better discipline.
The generic term ‘punishment’ covers a variety of controlling measures. Anna Kurian, mother of two, suggests that the purpose of punishments is, “to make a child remember that something she did was not acceptable to the powers that be! That it caused grief to x or y and hence is not to be repeated. To help along a child in to the socially acceptable conventions/morals of the world.” The most common punishments are therefore physical, where the power of control of the adult is what is