Tacit Discipline in Early Childhood Education

This chapter highlights and problematizes tacit discipline in early childhood education. Based on findings from a Nordic project about values and values education, two issues concerning discipline are outlined and discussed. The first issue refers to the findings that discipline is negatively viewed and also neglected in the educators’ talk about values education. This is discussed in relation to what this might mean for the communication of discipline in educational practice. The second issue is related to the finding that the communication of discipline is often of a friendly and implicit character, in which children are treated as rational subjects. This raises questions about the relationship between discipline and democracy, which is discussed from the perspective of Habermas’ theory about communicative action. The discussion covers both the need of discipline in a democratic society and the risk of a colonization of the life world if discipline gets too much space. By highlighting both the opportunities and the limitations of tacit discipline in early childhood education, the chapter contributes to a nuanced and multifaceted picture of how discipline and power structures between educators and children can take place in early childhood education.