The law courts have re-introduced flogging for criminals. To the best
of my knowledge no member of the law profession has protested. If
there is a reform movement within the law I never heard of it.
The curse of law is that it works according to precedent, and it is
therefore conservative. Our judges hand out sentences in blissful
ignorance of later psychology. Last week a boy of eleven was birched
for holding up another boy of nine on the highway and demanding
tuppence or his life. The attitude of the bench is that fear of
another flogging will prevent that boy from turning highwayman again.
I admit that fear will cure him of that special vice, but what the
bench does not know is that the boy's anti-social energy will take
another form. Every act of man is prompted by a wish, and very often
this wish is unconscious. And all the birching in the world will not
destroy a wish; the most it can do is to change its form.
Without an analysis of the boy no one can tell what unconscious wish
impelled him to turn highwayman, but speaking generally a boy expresses
his self-assertion in terms of anti-social behaviour only when his
education has been bad. I believe that all juvenile delinquency is due
to bad education. Our schools enforce passivity on the child; his
creative energy is bottled up. No boy who has tools and a bench to
work with will express himself by smashing windows. Delinquency is
merely displaced social conduct; the motive of the little boy who
turned highwayman was essentially the motive of the boy who builds a
boat.
Ah! but we have Industrial Schools for bad boys!
I spent an evening with an Industrial School boy of thirteen not long
ago. It was an unlovely tale he told me of his life in school. I got
the impression of a building half-prison, half-barracks. No one was
allowed to go out unless to football matches when the school team was
playing. Punishment was stern and frequent.
"One old guy, 'e sends you to the boss for punishment and says you gave
'im an insubordinate look, and you ain't allowed to deny wot 'e says."
"Look here, Jim," I said, "suppose I took you to a free school
to-morrow, a school where you could do what you liked, what's the first
thing you would do?"
A wild look came into his eyes.
"I'd lay out the blarsted staff," he said tensely.
"But," I laughed, "what would be the point of laying me out if I gave
you freedom? What have you got against _me_?"
"Oh," he said, "I thought you meant if I got freedom in the Industrial
School!"
That school is condemned; if a school produces one boy who hates and
fears its teachers, it is a bad school.