selves; not to make a noise while eating (swinishly smacking their lips), not to put out the tongue, etc.; also how to drink without greediness, without lapping, and without splattering themselves. Similar cleanliness and neatness may be exacted in their dress: not to sweep the ground with their clothes, and not designedly to stain and soil them, which is usual with children by reason of their want of prudence; and yet parents, through remarkable stupidity, connive at such things.
10. They will easily learn to respect superiors, provided their elders take diligent care of them, and attend to themselves; therefore if you admonish, or frequently rebuke and chastise a child, you need not fear that it will not respect you. But if you allow everything to children, a practice followed by many who excessively love them, nothing is more certain than that such children will become froward and obstinate. “To love children is natural, to disguise that love is prudence.” Not without prudence has Ben Sirach left it on record, “that an untamed horse will become unmanageable; a son neglected will become headstrong. Humor a son and he will cause you fear; play with him and he will make you sad; do not laugh with him lest you also grieve with him, and in the end your teeth gnash.” It is better, therefore, to restrain children by discipline and fear than to reveal to them the overflowing of your love, and thus open as it were a window to frowardness and disobedience.[1] It is also useful to grant even to others the power of rebuking children, so that not only under the
- ↑ Herbart, in the Science of Education (Boston, 1895), remarks: “Supervision, prohibition, restraint, checking by threats, are only the negative measures of education. The old pedagogy betrayed its weakness in nothing so much as in its dependence on compulsion, the modern in nothing so much as the value it places on supervision. Hindrance of offense is only good when a new activity continually takes the place of that which is restrained.”
