In Bulgaria we are talking about discipline in schools again. The Ministry of Education is proposing more prevention, earlier support, rewards and sanctions, while parliament is debating the introduction of a subject called „Virtues and Religions“.
I spent about an hour turning over what I could write that would not be “complete nonsense”.
Then I decided there is something far more important that nobody is focusing on: how do we help a young person gradually learn to manage themselves when there is no one standing beside them to keep them in line? That is the discipline that matters in the 21st century. Not obedience, but self-regulation.
Discipline is really self-regulation
“Discipline” is rather hard to define. It does not seem to be one single thing. We gather a great many processes into that one term: setting goals, managing attention, controlling impulses, regulating emotions, persevering, monitoring progress, changing strategy, and the ability to return to an important task after failing at it.
The closest scientific concept is self-regulation — the ability to steer our thoughts, emotions, attention and behaviour towards goals we have chosen. And that, it seems, is the whole art of living. Many people, especially those whose pedagogical training is thin and who have spent zero hours in a classroom, would object: where is the spontaneity in this, where is the joy of life? It turns out, though, that discipline is the foundation of both spontaneity and joy.
And this idea of discipline has almost nothing to do with the discussion we are currently having. If discipline is obedience, then the teacher controls, monitors, reminds and sanctions, and the student has to behave properly for as long as someone is watching.
If discipline is self-regulation, the school’s task is to hand control over to the student step by step, until they begin to plan, monitor, correct and manage their own behaviour. The real goal is not for the child to be convenient in the classroom, but for them to be able to manage themselves in real life years later.
Discipline of thinking, of emotion and of effort
The first form of discipline I believe school needs to develop is the discipline of thinking. Today a student can have a first answer within seconds from Google, TikTok or AI, and that makes the ability to stay with the question more important still. Who is the source? What is the evidence? Is there another point of view? What would make me change my mind? Critical thinking demands self-regulation, because sometimes we have to bear the discomfort of discovering that our friends, our parents, our teacher — or we ourselves — are wrong.
The same holds for emotions. If a student feels a surge of anger and immediately hits, shouts or insults someone, we can punish them, but that means we step in only after the behaviour. The more important question is how we gradually build the capacity for a choice to appear between the emotion and the reaction.
Emotional self-regulation does not mean suppressing anger; it means being able to feel it without being automatically governed by it. Adolescence is precisely when social context, immediate rewards and strong emotions carry particular weight, which makes practising self-regulation all the more important.
The third form is our relationship with difficulty. A student tries, it does not work, they receive feedback, and they have to decide what comes next. This is not the popular “never give up”, because mature perseverance does not mean endlessly repeating a strategy that is not working and making the same mistake over and over.
It means being able to carry on, but also to analyse, to change the approach, to ask for help or, if necessary, to reconsider the goal itself. The evidence on grit also gives us reason to be more careful with the idea that we simply need to build “tougher” children.
Discipline also means being able to pursue a goal
Most young people can tell you what they want. Turning that wish into concrete behaviour is far harder, and harder still is keeping going when the reward is distant and the distraction is immediate. This is exactly why research on goal setting draws attention to specific plans of the kind “When X happens, I will do Y” — they help translate an intention into an action.
There is a large difference between “I will study more” and “when I get home on Tuesday, I will leave my phone in the kitchen and work on the project for 25 minutes”. In the second case the student begins to understand their own behaviour, to anticipate the obstacles and to build an environment that supports their goal. That is discipline, arrived at through skill rather than through punishment.
I do not believe character can be taught as a school subject
We can talk to students about perseverance, responsibility, kindness and values. We can even examine them on what those words mean. But if for the rest of the week they make no meaningful choices, carry no responsibility for their decisions, work on no difficult tasks, never analyse their failures and never manage goals of their own, then we have given them information about the virtues without necessarily having built anything.
This, to my mind, is where the central mistake in the whole conversation lies. We are trying to teach qualities that have to be practised. Research on self-regulated learning points to precisely that: strategies should be taught explicitly and modelled, and then practised inside real academic tasks, with more and more of the responsibility gradually handed over to the student.
The design of the learning process is decisive here: what happens in the lesson, whether there is continuity between lessons, whether there are real projects and real difficulties, whether we give feedback that supports growth. And something else, just as important: whether we adults model that discipline ourselves.
What this discipline looks like in practice
A history teacher can ask students not simply to find information, but to compare sources and defend why they trust one more than another. A first draft in the Bulgarian language class need not be the finished product, but the beginning of editing and improvement.
On a project, students can break the work into stages themselves, track whether their plan is working and change it if it is not. After a failure, instead of “Why didn’t you try harder?” we can ask: “What exactly did not work, and what will you do differently next time?”
These seemingly small changes actually shift the focus from the student’s character to the processes the student can learn to manage. And the more such situations the school creates, the less discipline depends on whether an adult happens to be nearby.
“My Career Path” as a laboratory for life skills
Even while we were creating “My Career Path”, it became clear that it is more than a career guidance programme — it is a laboratory for life skills.
We wanted students to get to know their interests and their strengths, to explore professions, to think critically about the possibilities in front of them and to arrive, step by step, at goals and actions. To put in effort in a direction they had chosen themselves.
The programme uses a game-based format and puts the teacher in the role of a guide to the process rather than the person who hands out the ready answers.
The more I work on the subject of discipline, the more clearly I see that “My Career Path” is a wonderful opportunity to train self-regulation. The student has to tell their own wishes apart from other people’s expectations, to look for information and check it, to compare different options, to make a decision under uncertainty and, in the end, to turn their direction into a concrete goal and a concrete action.
That is exactly what modern education should be doing: not telling students who to be, but placing them in processes through which they gradually learn to think, to choose, to regulate themselves and to act.
In the end, discipline is freedom
We usually think of discipline as a restriction on freedom, but to my mind the mature version is exactly the opposite. If every notification on my phone can interrupt what I have decided to do, if my anger automatically dictates my behaviour, if I give up at the first difficulty or cannot tell my own goals apart from other people’s expectations, then I can hardly say that I am running my own life. Or that I am free.
We do not need a school that produces obedient children. Nor do we need a school that removes every boundary and every demand. We need a school with high standards and high support – because that is the only way self-regulation develops.
A school in which a young person gradually learns to choose what matters, to regulate themselves in the service of that direction, to bear the difficulty when it is worth bearing, to change strategy when it is not working, and to come back to the goal after a failure.
That is the discipline worth talking about.
