In recent years, discipline among students has attracted growing attention, with debate centering on whether teachers or parents should bear responsibility for it. While both viewpoints hold merit, I believe that effective discipline can only be achieved through a shared effort between the two.
Clearly, parents are responsible for their children’s actions until they reach legal age. Basic norms of behavior – namely respect for others, self-control, and obedience – are developed in childhood and instilled by the adults in the family. As a result, by the time a child enters school, they are a person with their own views, beliefs, and standards, which can be considered acceptable in a structured learning environment. Parents have to establish a strong foundation of morality so that their children’s discipline will never be questioned in a community.
However, parents lack the most important advantage teachers have: an educational background in the process of raising children. While earning their degrees, educators focus not only on topics in their field (math, philology, IT) but also on how to work with the younger generation and their psychology. It is known that discipline issues can be caused by relationships between students, and bullying often has the most influence on the problem. For this reason, spending working hours observing children’s behavior in society gives educators enough information to gain useful insights and provide professional help to students.
In conclusion, both parents and teachers are mutually responsible for students’ discipline and should be in charge of filling the gaps in the morality standards of children that the other side might have missed.
