Discipline

Discipline commonly refers to rule-following behavior, regulation, order, control, and authority. It may also refer to the science of operant conditioning that studies how ideas and behavior are guided and managed with consequences that increase a behavior (reinforcements) or decrease a behavior (punishment). Discipline is used to reinforce good behavior in habits, athletic performances, insights, and obedience. Self-discipline involves self-restraint and deferred gratification that discourages emotional impulses in favor of one's desires. All associations have disciplinarians that enforce, modify, and enact rules (contingencies of reinforcement). The role and functions of the disciplinarian may be informal and even unconscious in every day social settings. Disciplinarians enforce a set of rules that aim at developing children in accordance with theories of order and discipline. They have been linked to child abuse in numerous cases and biographies. In the Victorian era, disciplinarian governance over children was popular. King Edward VIII ( January - December 1936) had a disciplinarian father, and the English paralleled the royal families during the Victorian era. Edward's great-grandmother, Queen Victoria (1837-1901), championed the role of the family unit during her reign. Historically, task-driven discipline in sailing ships where the failure of crews to work together promptly can have swift adverse consequences due to wind and weather, slave plantations facing the fear of slave revolt, and the regimentation of the Industrial Revolution's factory system are examples with heavy reliance on punishment. Education, business, therapy, insurance, and most areas of modern society are replacing punishment (harm) with managed discipline (reinforcements without harm). Time management uses time as the regulator and the observer of time as the governor. The requirement is for time to be used efficiently. This technique maximizes the result of a set of activities by marking each activity within a boundary of time.