The Education of the Child [9]
When a child strikes his small sister the mother strikes him and believes that he will see and understand the difference between the blows he gets and those he gives, that he will see that the one is a just punishment and the other vicious conduct. But the child is a sharp logician and feels that the action is just the same, although the mother gives it a different name.
Corporal punishment was long ago admirably described by Comenius, who compared an educator using this method with a musician striking a badly tuned instrument with his fist, instead of using his ears and his hands to put it into tune.
These brutal attacks work on the active sensitive feelings, lacerating and confusing them. They have no educative power on all the innumerable fine processes in the life of the child's soul, on their obscurely related combinations.
In order to give real training, the first thing after the second or third year is to abandon the very thought of a blow among the possibilities of education. It is best if parents, as soon as the child is born, agree never to strike him, for if they once begin with this convenient and easy method, they continue to use corporal discipline even contrary to their first intention, because they have failed while using such punishment to develop the child's intelligence.
If people do not see this it is no more use to speak to them of education than it would be to talk to a cannibal about the world's peace.
But as these savages in educational matters are often civilised human beings in other respects, I should like to request them to think over the development of marriage from the time when man wooed with a club and when woman was regarded as the soulless property of man, only to be kept in order by blows, a view which continued to be held until modern times. Through a thousand daily secret influences, our feelings and ideas have been so transformed that these crude conceptions have disappeared, to the great advantage of society and the individual. But it may be hard to awaken a pedagogical savage to the conviction that, in quite the same way, a thousand new secret and mighty influences will change our crude methods of education, when parents once come to see that parenthood must go through the same transformation as marriage, before it attains to a noble and complete development.
Only when men realise that whipping a child belongs to the same low stage of civilisation as beating a woman, or a servant, or as the corporal punishment of soldiers and criminals, will the first real preparation begin of the material from which perhaps later an educator may be formed.
Corporal punishment was natural in rough times. The body is tangible; what affects it has an immediate and perceptible result. The heat of passion is cooled by the blows it administers; in a certain stage of development blows are the natural expression of moral indignation, the direct method by which the moral will impresses itself on beings of lower capacities. But it has since been discovered that the soul may be impressed by spiritual means, and that blows are just as demoralising for the one who gives them as for the one who receives them.
The educator, too, is apt to forget that the child in many cases has as few moral conceptions as the animal or the savage. To punish for this--is only a cruelty, and to punish by brutal methods is a piece of stupidity. It works against the possibility of elevating the child beyond the level of the beast or the savage. The educator to whose mind flogging never presents itself, even as an occasional resource, will naturally direct his whole thought to finding psychological methods of education. Administering corporal punishment demoralises and stupefies the educator, for it increases his thoughtlessness, not his patience, his brutality, not his intelligence.
A small boy friend of mine when four years old received his first punishment of this kind; happily it was his only one. As his nurse reminded him in the evening to say his prayers he broke out, "Yes, to-night I really have something
Corporal punishment was long ago admirably described by Comenius, who compared an educator using this method with a musician striking a badly tuned instrument with his fist, instead of using his ears and his hands to put it into tune.
These brutal attacks work on the active sensitive feelings, lacerating and confusing them. They have no educative power on all the innumerable fine processes in the life of the child's soul, on their obscurely related combinations.
In order to give real training, the first thing after the second or third year is to abandon the very thought of a blow among the possibilities of education. It is best if parents, as soon as the child is born, agree never to strike him, for if they once begin with this convenient and easy method, they continue to use corporal discipline even contrary to their first intention, because they have failed while using such punishment to develop the child's intelligence.
If people do not see this it is no more use to speak to them of education than it would be to talk to a cannibal about the world's peace.
But as these savages in educational matters are often civilised human beings in other respects, I should like to request them to think over the development of marriage from the time when man wooed with a club and when woman was regarded as the soulless property of man, only to be kept in order by blows, a view which continued to be held until modern times. Through a thousand daily secret influences, our feelings and ideas have been so transformed that these crude conceptions have disappeared, to the great advantage of society and the individual. But it may be hard to awaken a pedagogical savage to the conviction that, in quite the same way, a thousand new secret and mighty influences will change our crude methods of education, when parents once come to see that parenthood must go through the same transformation as marriage, before it attains to a noble and complete development.
Only when men realise that whipping a child belongs to the same low stage of civilisation as beating a woman, or a servant, or as the corporal punishment of soldiers and criminals, will the first real preparation begin of the material from which perhaps later an educator may be formed.
Corporal punishment was natural in rough times. The body is tangible; what affects it has an immediate and perceptible result. The heat of passion is cooled by the blows it administers; in a certain stage of development blows are the natural expression of moral indignation, the direct method by which the moral will impresses itself on beings of lower capacities. But it has since been discovered that the soul may be impressed by spiritual means, and that blows are just as demoralising for the one who gives them as for the one who receives them.
The educator, too, is apt to forget that the child in many cases has as few moral conceptions as the animal or the savage. To punish for this--is only a cruelty, and to punish by brutal methods is a piece of stupidity. It works against the possibility of elevating the child beyond the level of the beast or the savage. The educator to whose mind flogging never presents itself, even as an occasional resource, will naturally direct his whole thought to finding psychological methods of education. Administering corporal punishment demoralises and stupefies the educator, for it increases his thoughtlessness, not his patience, his brutality, not his intelligence.
A small boy friend of mine when four years old received his first punishment of this kind; happily it was his only one. As his nurse reminded him in the evening to say his prayers he broke out, "Yes, to-night I really have something