CHAPTER ONE

1.1  Introduction/Background to the Study

Discipline is defined in the dictionary of psychology as the control of conduct either by an external authority or by the individual himself (Drever, 1996).

Also Drever (1996) defined school discipline as the externally imposed or self-generated control of conduct to ensure its orderliness, social acceptability and conformity to the school regulations to guide the behaviour of the students and even the school staff.

Indiscipline is therefore presented by Adelabu (1990) as a problem behaviour or socially unacceptable behaviour which does not conform to the rules and regulations of the society or an institution.

Nwana (1975) investigated the types and intensity of offences in the Eastern State of Nigeria’s schools. He identified the following nine categories of indiscipline with percentage frequency of occurrence in parentheses:

Truancy (28.89), disobedience (15.22), drug abuse (13.95), assault and insult (12.18), dishonesty (11.6), wickedness (8.22), stealing (8.09), sex offences (1.66), strikes and mass demonstration (0.19).

Stealing, a frequent type of indiscipline carried out by students in our higher and lower institutions is like a parasite eating deep into the moral sanity of the youths. Stealing is very common among students at all educational levels be it in primary, secondary and tertiary, but more often than not such acts are treated or handled with levity as if they are normal. For example, students have pet names for stealing which tend to cover up and play down the real gravity of the offence. Such names include ‘pilfering’, ‘pick pocketing’, ‘tapping’ and so on (Olusakin, 1996).

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