With all these various resources ingeniously plied—emulation, praise, censure, forms of disgrace, confinement, impositions—the necessity for corporal punishments should be nearly done away with. In any well-regulated school, where all the motives are carefully graded, through a long series of increasing privations and penalties, there should be no cases but what are sufficiently met. The presence of pupils that are not amenable to such means is a discord and anomaly; and the direct remedy would consist in removing them to some place where the lower natures are grouped together. Inequality of moral tone is as much to be deprecated in a class as inequality of intellectual advancement. There should be reformatories, or special institutions, for those that cannot be governed like the majority.
Where corporal punishment is kept up, it should be at the far end of the list of penalties; its slightest application should be accounted the worst disgrace, and should be accompanied with stigmatizing forms. It should be regarded as a deep injury to the person that inflicts it, and to those that have to witness it—as the height of shame and infamy. It ought not to be repeated with the same pupil; if two or three applications are not enough, removal is the proper course.
The misfortune is, that in the national schools the worst and most neglected natures have to be introduced; yet they should not brutalize a whole school. Even when children are habituated to blows at home, it does not follow that these are necessary at school; parents are often unskillful, as well as hampered in all their circumstances, and emergencies are pressing; the treatment at school may easily rise above the conduct of the family. In many instances the school will be a welcome haven to the children of troubled homes, and lead to the generous response of good behavior.
In point of fact, however, the children of wretchedness are not always those that give trouble, nor is it the schools where these are found that are most given to corporal punishments. The schoolmaster's most wayward subjects come often from good families; and they are found in schools of the highest grade. There should be no difficulty in sending away from superior schools all such as could not be disciplined without the degradation of flogging.[1]
- ↑ Testimonials are adduced from very distinguished men, to the effect that without flogging they would have done nothing. Melanchthon, Johnson, Goldsmith, are all quoted for a sentiment of this kind. We must, however, interpret the fact on a wider basis. There was no intermediate course in those days between spoiling and corporal punishment: he that spared the rod hated the child. Many ways can now be found of spurring young and capable minds to application; and corporal punishment would take an inferior position in the mere point of efficiency.
It is not to be held that corporal punishment, to such extent as is permissible, is the severest form of punishment that may be administered in connection with the school. For mere pain, a whipping would often be chosen in preference to the intolerable irksomeness of confinement during play or after hours, and of impositions in the way of drill-tasks; while the language of censure may be so cutting as to be far worse than blows.
