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Article Title: Managing Indiscipline and Increasing Delinquent Behaviors among Adolescents: The Need to Strike Balance between Discipline Prohibitory Policy and Traditional Disciplinary Measures in the African Schools
by Grace Iyinoluwa Olaitan and Segun Michael Ojetunde

Abstract:
Increased antisocial behaviours, moral decay and loss of societal values suggest that the child upbringing system in society has been compromised. Parents, peers, schools, religious institutions and media that constitute this system share vastly documented culpabilities in their individual roles as advertent and/or inadvertent actors. Documented analyses and reviews of available empirical studies show that the observed behaviors among youth and adolescents are traceable to parents� neglect of their wards� upbringing responsibilities along with other agents of socialization. The proliferation of antisocial behaviours was also discovered to have been accelerated by the corruptive and renegade operational modes ofsome schools expected to be the microcosm of larger society, coupled with the obnoxious prohibition of discipline in the schools by the government.This has driven contemporary adolescents and youth into usurping disciplinaryrights from parents and teachers and consequently found themselves emboldened by the power to behave as they please without being reigned in through effective curtailing measures. Consequently, society finds itself bedeviled by the widespread shocking realization that institutionalized discipline belongs in the past. The reminder that unfavourable government policies have activated children�s excesses through the right to determine mode and pattern by which they will realize their aspiration and prospect remains a complicating issue in education. This study is an attempt to reevaluate the existing system with a view to realigning stakeholders�interests to their responsibilities. Along with the need for government to contextualize disciplinary measures rather than bureaucratic approach, the study suggests a crucial rallying of teachers and parents to embrace possible alternative means to discipline.

Keywords: Indiscipline, Prohibitory Policy, Antisocial Behaviours, Policies, Adolescent, Delinquency

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