Does discipline have an educational role? A controversial point of educational theories

Abstract

This essay examines the educational role attributed to discipline by educational theories. Contrary to the conception of discipline offered by Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, and conceiving it as a controlling and vigilant power apparatus, it seeks to show that discipline plays, for Immanuel Kant and Johann Friedrich Herbart, an indispensable role in the inexhaustible quest for the education of human self-government. Inspired by instructio latina, these two authors conceive of discipline as the main form of exercise of the self over itself, undertaken by the educational subject in order to reach the ethical domain of the self. Interpreted in this perspective, Kant and Herbart thus anticipate the nuclear traits of human education as an exercise of the self, developed later by Foucault, in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, with recourse to ancient stoicism.