The news from the world of education lately has been difficult to read. A professor in Ahmedabad caught on camera holding the collar of a student who had mocked him. An IIT Bombay student died by suicide following an examination incident involving the use of AI, raising serious questions about how academic integrity, discipline and student distress intersect. The circumstances of each case is different, and some are still being investigated, but together they leave you deeply uncomfortable about the spaces in which we are entrusted with young people.
I also think we have to acknowledge that discipline and behaviour are getting harder. The situations we once associated largely with high school are now appearing in middle school, and behaviours that we would have expected to address in middle school are showing up in primary.
Children are growing up in a world that is faster, louder and far more exposed than the one many of us experienced. Their influences are different, their access to information is different and, in many ways, their emotional worlds are more complex much earlier.
The question for us, therefore, cannot simply be, “How do we make children behave?” It has to be, “What kind of discipline are we trying to build?”
At GGIS, I have always believed that discipline must eventually become self-awareness. If a child behaves only because a teacher is watching, we have created compliance. If a student knows exactly what to say because they know which answer will keep them out of trouble, we have taught them how to navigate authority. But if I can sit across from a student, look them in the eye and have them tell me the truth about what happened, even when the truth is uncomfortable, that is discipline.
It is the same reason I think of that beautiful moment when a student forgets her speech on stage and 200 children sit quietly and wait for her to gather herself and continue. Not one giggle. Not one whisper. Not one child trying to make her moment harder.
That is discipline. No teacher needed to threaten them. No consequence was hanging over their heads. They understood what the moment required of them, and they chose to give it.
That is the discipline I want us to recognise more often. It is not always the perfectly quiet classroom or the impeccably presented child.
Discipline does not come with ponytails alone.It is what happens behind closed doors. It is whether you tell the truth when nobody can prove otherwise. Whether you can walk away when someone provokes you. Whether you can disagree without humiliating another person. Whether you can acknowledge that you were wrong. Whether you can see that your actions have affected someone else.
This is also why I believe that connection and correction cannot be separated.
We will have to correct children. We will have to hold boundaries. There will be moments when behaviour is unacceptable and consequences are necessary. But the objective cannot be to produce children who are afraid of getting caught. The objective has to be to help them develop an internal compass that eventually makes the adult standing beside them unnecessary
And perhaps this is where the responsibility becomes even greater for us as adults. We are also carrying a lot.
Last Saturday, I attended a session by a life coach at AMA, and one line she shared stayed with me: “It is a privilege to be in a space where you can make others feel heard.” I have been thinking about that line ever since. Perhaps that is one of the quiet privileges of working in a school. We get to be present while people are becoming. We get to influence not just what children know, but how they understand themselves and how they learn to treat other people.
For me, the real measure of discipline at GGIS will never be how well children obey us when we are present. It will be what they choose to do when we are not present. Behind closed doors. In the absence of an authority figure.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t have consequences. We file incident reports, call parents to school on red flag issues once in a while and counsel the child on a regular basis. Its daily grind. And something we don’t always enjoy doing.
However, we don’t give up on the child. That is the harder work. It takes longer. It requires patience from adults to bring honesty from children. But if we can build that kind of self-awareness, then perhaps we are doing something far more meaningful than simply maintaining discipline.
We are helping children learn to govern themselves.
And in a world where we cannot always be there to tell them what to do, that may be one of the most important things a school can give them.
