Discipline

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 183-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan S. Turner

There are broadly five interconnected meanings of the noun ‘discipline’. Disciplinawere instructions to disciples, and hence a branch of instruction or department of knowledge. This religious context provided the modern educational notion of a ‘body of knowledge’, or a discipline such as sociology or economics. We can define discipline as a body of knowledge and knowledge for the body, because the training of the mind has inevitably involved a training of the body. Second, it signified a method of training or instruction in a body of knowledge. Discipline had an important military connection involving drill, practice in the use of weapons. Third, there is an ecclesiastical meaning referring to a system of rules by which order is maintained in a church. It included the use of penal methods to achieve obedience. To discipline is to chastise. Fourth, to discipline is to bring about obedience through various forms of punishment; it is a means of correction. Finally there is a rare use of the term to describe a medical regimen in which ‘doctor's orders’ brings about a discipline of the patient. In contemporary society, there is, following the work of Michel Foucault, the notion of increasing personal regulation resulting in a ‘disciplinary society’ or a society based upon carceral institutions.


Author(s):  
Alistair Graeme Fox

This essay explores how Ben Okri’s most recent novel, In Arcadia(2002), attempts to reconstruct the possibility of utopia in the face of a fragmentation of identity and destruction of determinate certainties affecting contemporary society in the aftermath of postmodernism. By tracing the intertextual relations existing between this work and earlier works in an intellectual/literary tradition that extends from Theocritus and Virgil through Dante, More, Milton, Sannazzaro, Sidney and others, Fox shows how Okri develops the proposition that men and women confronting an ‘empty universe where the mind spins in uncertainty and repressed terror’ can recover sanity through art. Even though, in Okri’s vision, the world may be ‘a labyrinth without an exit’, presided over by Death without any hint of transcendence, men and women, he concludes, can recover paradise through the ‘painting of the mind’ which can creative complete forms that can be fed into ‘spirit’s factory for the production of reality’. This generative activity, which is at the heart of the Arcadian vision, in Okri’s view, has the power to make life a place of ‘secular miracles’, despite the limitations imposed upon it by the realities of finitude and death. The essay concludes by suggesting that Okri’s concept of utopia is very close to Kant’s idea of Aufklärung as expounded by Michel Foucault –– that is, neither a world era, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment, but rather a process of which men and women are at once elements and agents, and which occurs to the extent that they decide to be its voluntary actors. While in some respects Okri’s vision is strikingly similar to certain of its antecedents, it is thus nevertheless distinctively postmodern in the ways in which it is inflected.



Author(s):  
Alice Stephanie Tapia Sartori ◽  
Claudia Glavam Duarte

ResumoEste artigo tem como objetivo discutir e problematizar o ensino de matemática pautado nas práticas de memorização que, juntamente com a repetição e a recitação, mesmo que questionadas, ainda hoje, fazem parte desta disciplina escolar. O presente estudo parte das reflexões realizadas em uma Tese de Doutorado e tem como material empírico exemplares da Revista Nova Escola publicados entre os anos 1986 e 2015. A partir do referencial teórico e metodológico elaborado pelo filósofo Michel Foucault, buscamos dar visibilidade ao entrelaçamento de alguns enunciados que se configuram na análise das Revistas. Dentre os resultados da pesquisa, destacamos que: algumas práticas de memorização estavam, no passado, ligadas aos castigos físicos e, posteriormente, foram sendo reconfiguradas e adequadas às penalidades do espírito; o uso do corpo no ensino de matemática, para além das penalidades, estava ligado aos exercícios da mente, que incluem os treinos de memória ligados aos exercícios repetitivos; repetição constante estava alinhada ao ensino mecanizado desta disciplina; a recitação buscava transformar os mínimos gestos do corpo em força útil; e, por fim, a apreensão do tempo dos estudantes, visando ao seu máximo aproveitamento de forma linear e contínua, era um dos aspectos que perpassavam as práticas de memorização. Portanto, o estudo nos aponta para uma forma de poder, a qual Foucault denominou poder disciplinar, que atua na produção de corpos dóceis pela maquinaria escolar. Palavras-chave: Memorização. Educação Matemática. Poder disciplinar. AbstractThis paper aims to discuss and problematize the teaching of mathematics based on memorization practices, which together with repetition and recitation, even if questioned, are still part of this school discipline. This study, which parts of the reflections made in a Doctoral Thesis, has as empirical material Revista Nova Escola examples, published between 1986 and 2015. From the theoretical and methodological framework elaborated by the philosopher Michel Foucault, we seek to give visibility to the intertwining of some statements that are configured in the analysis of the Magazines. Among the research results, we highlight that: Some memorization practices were, in the past, linked to physical punishments, and were later reconfigured and appropriate to the penalties of the spirit; The use of the body in the teaching of mathematics, besides penalties, was linked to the exercises of the mind, which include memory training; this notion of body would be linked to repetitive math exercises; constant repetition would be in line with the mechanized teaching of this discipline; The recitation sought to transform the minimum gestures of the body into useful force; and, finally, the apprehension of the students' time, aiming at its maximum use in a linear and continuous way, is one of the aspects that pervade the memorization practices. Therefore, the study points us to a form of power, which Foucault called the disciplinary power that acts in the production of docile bodies by school machinery. Keywords: Memorization. Mathematics education. Disciplinary Power.



2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Traunmüller ◽  
Kerstin Gaisbachgrabner ◽  
Helmut Karl Lackner ◽  
Andreas R. Schwerdtfeger

Abstract. In the present paper we investigate whether patients with a clinical diagnosis of burnout show physiological signs of burden across multiple physiological systems referred to as allostatic load (AL). Measures of the sympathetic-adrenergic-medullary (SAM) axis and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis were assessed. We examined patients who had been diagnosed with burnout by their physicians (n = 32) and were also identified as burnout patients based on their score in the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS) and compared them with a nonclinical control group (n = 19) with regard to indicators of allostatic load (i.e., ambulatory ECG, nocturnal urinary catecholamines, salivary morning cortisol secretion, blood pressure, and waist-to-hip ratio [WHR]). Contrary to expectations, a higher AL index suggesting elevated load in several of the parameters of the HPA and SAM axes was found in the control group but not in the burnout group. The control group showed higher norepinephrine values, higher blood pressure, higher WHR, higher sympathovagal balance, and lower percentage of cortisol increase within the first hour after awakening as compared to the patient group. Burnout was not associated with AL. Results seem to indicate a discrepancy between self-reported burnout symptoms and psychobiological load.



1908 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Dubois
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  






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