Produced by Charles Keller
THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
by Ellen Key
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Edward Bok, Editor of the "Ladies' Home Journal," writes:
"Nothing finer on the wise education of the child has ever been brought
into print. To me this chapter is a perfect classic; it points the way
straight for every parent and it should find a place in every home in
America where there is a child."
THE EDUCATION OF THE CHILD
Goethe showed long ago in his Werther a clear understanding of
the significance of individualistic and psychological training, an
appreciation which will mark the century of the child. In this work he
shows how the future power of will lies hidden in the characteristics
of the child, and how along with every fault of the child an uncorrupted
germ capable of producing good is enclosed. "Always," he says, "I repeat
the golden words of the teacher of mankind, 'if ye do not become as
one of these,' and now, good friend, those who are our equals, whom we
should look upon as our models, we treat as subjects; they should have
no will of their own; do we have none? Where is our prerogative? Does it
consist in the fact that we are older and more experienced? Good God
of Heaven! Thou seest old and young children, nothing else. And in whom
Thou hast more joy, Thy Son announced ages ago. But people believe in
Him and do not hear Him--that, too, is an old trouble, and they model
their children after themselves." The same criticism might be applied to
our present educators, who constantly have on their tongues such words
as evolution, individuality, and natural tendencies, but do not heed
the new commandments in which they say they believe. They continue to
educate as if they believed still in the natural depravity of man, in
original sin, which may be bridled, tamed, suppressed, but not changed.
The new belief is really equivalent to Goethe's thoughts given above,
i.e., that almost every fault is but a hard shell enclosing the germ of
virtue. Even men of modern times still follow in education the old rule
of medicine, that evil must be driven out by evil, instead of the new
method, the system of allowing nature quietly and slowly to help itself,
taking care only that the surrounding conditions help the work of
nature. This is education.
Neither harsh nor tender parents suspect the truth expressed by Carlyle
when he said that the marks of a noble and original temperament are
wild, strong emotions, that must be controlled by a discipline as hard
as steel. People either strive to root out passions altogether, or they
abstain from teaching the child to get them under control.
To suppress the real personality of the child, and to supplant it with
another personality continues to be a pedagogical crime common to
those who announce loudly that education should only develop the real
individual nature of the child.
They are still not convinced that egoism on the part of the child is
justified. Just as little are they convinced of the possibility that
evil can be changed into good.
Education must be based on the certainty that faults cannot be atoned
for, or blotted out, but must always have their consequences. At
the same time, there is the other certainty that through progressive
evolution, by slow adaptation to the conditions of environment they may
be transformed. Only when this stage is reached will education begin to
be a science and art. We will then give up all belief in the miraculous
effects of sudden interference; we shall act in the psychological sphere
in accordance with the principle of the indestructibility of matter. We
shall never believe that a characteristic of the soul can be destroyed.
There are but two possibilities. Either it can be brought into
subjection or it can be raised up to a higher plane.
Madame de Stael's words show much insight when she says that only the
people who can play with children are able to educate them. For success
in training children the first condition is to become as a child
oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending
baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors.
What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the
child as the child himself is absorbed by his life. It means to
treat the child as really one's equal, that is, to show him the same
consideration, the same kind confidence one shows to an adult. It means
not to influence the child to be what we ourselves desire him to become
but to be influenced by the impression of what the child himself is; not
to treat the child with deception, or by the exercise of force, but with
the seriousness and sincerity proper to his own character. Somewhere
Rousseau says that all education has failed in that nature does not
fashion parents as educators nor children for the sake of education.
What would happen if we finally succeeded in following the directions of
nature, and recognised that the great secret of education lies hidden in
the maxim, "do not educate"?
Not leaving the child in peace is the greatest evil of present-day
methods of training children. Education is determined to create a
beautiful world externally and internally in which the child can grow.
To let him move about freely in this world until he comes into contact
with the permanent boundaries of another's right will be the end of
the education of the future. Only then will adults really obtain a deep
insight into the souls of children, now an almost inaccessible kingdom.
For it is a natural instinct of self-preservation which causes the child
to bar the educator from his innermost nature. There is the person who
asks rude questions; for example, what is the child thinking about? a
question which almost invariably is answered with a black or a white
lie. The child must protect himself from an educator who would master
his thoughts and inclinations, or rudely handle them, who without
consideration betrays or makes ridiculous his most sacred feelings, who
exposes faults or praises characteristics before strangers, or even uses
an open-hearted, confidential confession as an occasion for reproof at
another time.
The statement that no human being learns to understand another, or at
least to be patient with another, is true above all of the intimate
relation of child and parent in which, understanding, the deepest
characteristic of love, is almost always absent.
Parents do not see that during the whole life the need of peace is
never greater than in the years of childhood, an inner peace under all
external unrest. The child has to enter into relations with his own
infinite world, to conquer it, to make it the object of his dreams. But
what does he experience? Obstacles, interference, corrections, the whole
livelong day. The child is always required to leave something alone,
or to do something different, to find something different, or want
something different from what he does, or finds, or wants. He is
always shunted off in another direction from that towards which his
own character is leading him. All of this is caused by our tenderness,
vigilance, and zeal, in directing, advising, and helping the small
specimen of humanity to become a complete example in a model series.
I have heard a three-year-old child characterised as "trying" because
he wanted to go into the woods, whereas the nursemaid wished to drag him
into the city. Another child of six years was disciplined because she
had been naughty to a playmate and had called her a little pig,--a
natural appellation for one who was always dirty. These are typical
examples of how the sound instincts of the child are dulled. It was a
spontaneous utterance: of the childish heart when a small boy, after an
account of the heaven of good children, asked his mother whether she
did not believe that, after he had been good a whole week in heaven, he
might be allowed to go to hell on Saturday evening to play with the bad
little boys there.
The child felt in its innermost consciousness that he had a right to be
naughty, a fundamental right which is accorded to adults; and not only
to be naughty, but to be naughty in peace, to be left to the dangers and
joys of naughtiness.
To call forth from this "unvirtue" the complimentary virtue is to
overcome evil with good. Otherwise we overcome natural strength by weak
means and obtain artificial virtues which will not stand the tests which
life imposes.
It seems simple enough when we say that we must overcome evil with good,
but practically no process is more involved, or more tedious, than to
find actual means to accomplish this end. It is much easier to say what
one shall not do than what one must do to change self-will into
strength of character, slyness into prudence, the desire to please
into amiability, restlessness into personal initiative. It can only be
brought about by recognising that evil, in so far as it is not atavistic
or perverse, is as natural and indispensable as the good, and that it
becomes a permanent evil only through its one-sided supremacy.
The educator wants the child to be finished at once, and perfect. He
forces upon the child an unnatural degree of self-mastery, a devotion to
duty, a sense of honour, habits that adults get out of with astonishing
rapidity. Where the faults of children are concerned, at home and in
school, we strain at gnats, while children daily are obliged to swallow
the camels of grown people.
The art of natural education consists in ignoring the faults of children
nine times out of ten, in avoiding immediate interference, which is
usually a mistake, and devoting one's whole vigilance to the control
of the environment in which the child is growing up, to watching the
education which is allowed to go on by itself. But educators who, day in
and day out, are consciously transforming the environment and themselves
are still a rare product. Most people live on the capital and interest
of an education, which perhaps once made them model children, but has
deprived them of the desire for educating themselves. Only by keeping
oneself in constant process of growth, under the constant influence of
the best things in one's own age, does one become a companion half-way
good enough for one's children.
To bring up a child means carrying one's soul in one's hand, setting
one's feet on a narrow path, it means never placing ourselves in danger
of meeting the cold look on the part of the child that tells us without
words that he finds us insufficient and unreliable. It means the
humble realisation of the truth that the ways of injuring the child are
infinite, while the ways of being useful to him are few. How seldom does
the educator remember that the child, even at four or five years of age,
is making experiments with adults, seeing through them, with marvellous
shrewdness making his own valuations and reacting sensitively to each
impression. The slightest mistrust, the smallest unkindness, the least
act of injustice or contemptuous ridicule, leave wounds that last for
life in the finely strung soul of the child. While on the other side
unexpected friendliness, kind advances, just indignation, make quite as
deep an impression on those senses which people term as soft as wax but
treat as if they were made of cowhide.
Relatively most excellent was the old education which consisted solely
in keeping oneself whole, pure, and honourable. For it did not at least
depreciate personality, although it did not form it. It would be well
if but a hundredth part of the pains now taken by parents were given to
interference with the life of the child and the rest of the ninety
and nine employed in leading, without interference, in acting as an
unforeseen, an invisible providence through which the child obtains
experience, from which he may draw his own conclusions. The present
practice is to impress one's own discoveries, opinions, and principles
on the child by constantly directing his actions. The last thing to be
realised by the educator is that he really has before him an entirely
new soul, a real self whose first and chief right is to think over the
things with which he comes in contact. By a new soul he understands only
a new generation of an old humanity to be treated with a fresh dose of
the old remedy. We teach the new souls not to steal, not to lie, to save
their clothes, to learn their lessons, to economise their money, to obey
commands, not to contradict older people, say their prayers, to fight
occasionally in order to be strong. But who teaches the new souls to
choose for themselves the path they must tread? Who thinks that the
desire for this path of their own can be so profound that a hard or
even mild pressure towards uniformity can make the whole of childhood a
torment.
The child comes into life with the inheritance of the preceding members
of the race; and this inheritance is modified by adaptation to the
environment. But the child shows also individual variations from the
type of the species, and if his own character is not to disappear during
the process of adaptation, all self-determined development of energy
must be aided in every way and only indirectly influenced by the
teacher, who should understand how to combine and emphasise the results
of this development.
Interference on the part of the educator, whether by force or
persuasion, weakens this development if it does not destroy it
altogether.
The habits of the household, and the child's habits in it must be
absolutely fixed if they are to be of any value. Amiel truly says that
habits are principles which have become instincts, and have passed over
into flesh and blood. To change habits, he continues, means to attack
life in its very essence, for life is only a web of habits.
Why does everything remain essentially the same from generation to
generation? Why do highly civilised Christian people continue to plunder
one another and call it exchange, to murder one another en masse, and
call it nationalism, to oppress one another and call it statesmanship?
Because in every new generation the impulses supposed to have been
rooted out by discipline in the child, break forth again, when the
struggle for existence--of the individual in society, of the society in
the life of the state--begins. These passions are not transformed by the
prevalent education of the day, but only repressed. Practically this
is the reason why not a single savage passion has been overcome in
humanity. Perhaps man-eating may be mentioned as an exception. But what
is told of European ship companies or Siberian prisoners shows that
even this impulse, under conditions favourable to it, may be revived,
although in the majority of people a deep physical antipathy to
man-eating is innate. Conscious incest, despite similar deviations, must
also be physically contrary to the majority, and in a number of women,
modesty--the unity between body and soul in relation to love--is an
incontestable provision of nature. So too a minority would find
it physically impossible to murder or steal. With this list I have
exhausted everything which mankind, since its conscious history began,
has really so intimately acquired that the achievement is passed on
in its flesh and blood. Only this kind of conquest can really stand up
against temptation in every form.
A deep physiological truth is hidden in the use of language when one
speaks of unchained passions; the passions, under the prevailing system
of education, are really only beasts of prey imprisoned in cages.
While fine words are spoken about individual development, children are
treated as if their personality had no purpose of its own, as if they
were made only for the pleasure, pride, and comfort of their parents;
and as these aims are best advanced when children become like every one
else, people usually begin by attempting to make them respectable and
useful members of society.
But the only correct starting point, so far as a child's education in
becoming a social human being is concerned, is to treat him as such,
while strengthening his natural disposition to become an individual
human being.
The new educator will, by regularly ordered experience, teach the child
by degrees his place in the great orderly system of existence; teach him
his responsibility towards his environment. But in other respects, none
of the individual characteristics of the child expressive of his life
will be suppressed, so long as they do not injure the child himself, or
others. The right balance must be kept between Spencer's definition
of life as an adaptation to surrounding conditions, and Nietzsche's
definition of it as the will to secure power.
In adaptation, imitation certainly plays a great role, but individual
exercise of power is just as important. Through adaptation life attains
a fixed form; through exercise of power, new factors.
Thoughtful people, as I have already stated, talk a good deal about
personality. But they are, nevertheless, filled with doubts when their
children are not just like all other children; when they cannot show in
their offspring all the ready-made virtues required by society. And so
they drill their children, repressing in childhood the natural instincts
which will have freedom when they are grown. People still hardly realise
how new human beings are formed; therefore the old types constantly
repeat themselves in the same circle,--the fine young men, the sweet
girls, the respectable officials, and so on. And new types with
higher ideals,--travellers on unknown paths, thinkers of yet unthought
thoughts, people capable of the crime of inaugurating new ways,--such
types rarely come into existence among those who are well brought up.
Nature herself, it is true, repeats the main types constantly. But she
also constantly makes small deviations. In this way different species,
even of the human race, have come into existence. But man himself does
not yet see the significance of this natural law in his own higher
development. He wants the feelings, thoughts, and judgments already
stamped with approval to be reproduced by each new generation. So we get
no new individuals, but only more or less prudent, stupid, amiable, or
bad-tempered examples of the genus man. The still living instincts
of the ape, double, in the case of man, the effect of heredity.
Conservatism is for the present stronger in mankind than the effort to
produce new types. But this last characteristic is the most valuable.
The educator should do anything but advise the child to do what
everybody does. He should rather rejoice when he sees in the child
tendencies to deviation. Using other people's opinion as a standard
results in subordinating one's self to their will. So we become a part
of the great mass, led by the Superman through the strength of his will,
a will which could not have mastered strong personalities. It has been
justly remarked that individual peoples, like the English, have attained
the greatest political and social freedom, because the personal feeling
of independence is far in excess of freedom in a legal form. Accordingly
legal freedom has been constantly growing.
For the progress of the whole of the species, as well as of society, it
is essential that education shall awake the feeling of independence; it
should invigorate and favour the disposition to deviate from the type
in those cases where the rights of others are not affected, or where
deviation is not simply the result of the desire to draw attention to
oneself. The child should be given the chance to declare conscientiously
his independence of a customary usage, of an ordinary feeling, for this
is the foundation of the education of an individual, as well as the
basis of a collective conscience, which is the only kind of conscience
men now have. What does having an individual conscience mean? It means
submitting voluntarily to an external law, attested and found good by
my own conscience. It means unconditionally heeding the unwritten law,
which I lay upon myself, and following this inner law even when I must
stand alone against the whole world.
It is a frequent phenomenon, we can almost call it a regular one, that
it is original natures, particularly talented beings, who are badly
treated at home and in school. No one considers the sources of conduct
in a child who shows fear or makes a noise, or who is absorbed in
himself, or who has an impetuous nature. Mothers and teachers show in
this their pitiable incapacity for the most elementary part in the art
of education, that is, to be able to see with their own eyes, not with
pedagogical doctrines in their head.
I naturally expect in the supporters of society, with their conventional
morality, no appreciation of the significance of the child's putting
into exercise his own powers. Just as little is this to be expected of
those Christian believers who think that human nature must be brought
to repentance and humility, and that the sinful body, the unclean beast,
must be tamed with the rod,--a theory which the Bible is brought to
support.
I am only addressing people who can think new thoughts and consequently
should cease using old methods of education. This class may reply that
the new ideas in education cannot be carried out. But the obstacle is
simply that their new thoughts have not made them into new men; the old
man in them has neither repose, nor time, nor patience, to form his own
soul, and that of the child, according to the new thoughts.
Those who have "tried Spencer and failed," because Spencer's method
demands intelligence and patience, contend that the child must be taught
to obey, that truth lies in the old rule, "As the twig is bent the tree
is inclined."
BENT is the appropriate word, bent according to the old ideal which
extinguishes personality, teaches humility and obedience. But the new
ideal is that man, to stand straight and upright, must not be bent at
all only supported, and so prevented from being deformed by weakness.
One often finds, in the modern system of training, the crude desire for
mastery still alive and breaking out when the child is obstinate. "You
won't!" say father and mother; "I will teach you whether you have a
will. I will soon drive self-will out of you." But nothing can be driven
out of the child; on the other hand, much can be scourged into it which
should be kept far away.
Only during the first few years of life is a kind of drill necessary, as
a pre-condition to a higher training. The child is then in such a high
degree controlled by sensation, that a slight physical pain or pleasure
is often the only language he fully understands. Consequently for some
children discipline is an indispensable means of enforcing the practice
of certain habits. For other children, the stricter methods are entirely
unnecessary even at this early age, and as soon as the child can
remember a blow, he is too old to receive one.
The child must certainly learn obedience, and, besides, this obedience
must be absolute. If such obedience has become habitual from the
tenderest age, a look, a word, an intonation is enough to keep the child
straight. The dissatisfaction of those who are bringing him up can
only be made effective when it falls as a shadow in the usual sunny
atmosphere of home. And if people refrain from laying the foundations of
obedience while the child is small, and his naughtiness is entertaining,
Spencer's method undoubtedly will be found unsuitable after the child is
older and his caprice disagreeable.
With a very small child, one should not argue, but act consistently
and immediately. The effort of training should be directed at an early
period to arrange the experiences in a consistent whole of impressions
according to Rousseau and Spencer's recommendation. So certain habits
will become impressed in the flesh and blood of the child.
Constant crying on the part of small children must be corrected when it
has become clear that the crying is not caused by illness or some
other discomfort,--discomforts against which crying is the child's only
weapon. Crying is now ordinarily corrected by blows. But this does not
master the will of the child, and only produces in his soul the idea
that older people strike small children, when small children cry.
This is not an ethical idea. But when the crying child is immediately
isolated, and it is explained to him at the same time that whoever
annoys others must not be with them; if this isolation is the absolute
result, and cannot be avoided, in the child's mind a basis is laid for
the experience that one must be alone when one makes oneself unpleasant
or disagreeable. In both cases the child is silenced by interfering with
his comfort; but one type of discomfort is the exercise of force on
his will; the other produces slowly the self-mastery of the will,
and accomplishes this by a good motive. One method encourages a base
emotion, fear. The other corrects the will in a way that combines it
with one of the most important experiences of life. The one punishment
keeps the child on the level of the animal. The other impresses upon him
the great principle of human social life, that when our pleasure
causes displeasure to others, other people hinder us from following our
pleasures; or withdraw themselves from the exercise of our self-will.
It is necessary that small children should accustom themselves to
good behaviour at table, etc. If every time an act of naughtiness is
repeated, the child is immediately taken away, he will soon learn
that whoever is disagreeable to others must remain alone. Thus a right
application is made of a right principle. Small children, too, must
learn not to touch what belongs to other people. If every time anything
is touched without permission, children lose their freedom of action one
way or another, they soon learn that a condition of their free action is
not to injure others.
It is quite true, as a young mother remarked, that empty Japanese rooms
are ideal places in which to bring up children. Our modern crowded rooms
are, so far as children are concerned, to be condemned. During the year
in which the real education of the child is proceeding by touching,
tasting, biting, feeling, and so on, every moment he is hearing the
cry, "Let it alone." For the temperament of the child as well as for
the development of his powers, the best thing is a large, light nursery,
adorned with handsome lithographs, wood-cuts, and so on, provided
with some simple furniture, where he may enjoy the fullest freedom of
movement. But if the child is there with his parents and is disobedient,
a momentary reprimand is the best means to teach him to reverence the
greater world in which the will of others prevails, the world in which
the child certainly can make a place for himself but must also learn
that every place occupied by him has its limits.
If it is a case of a danger, which it is desirable that the child
should really dread, we must allow the thing itself to have an alarming
influence. When a mother strikes a child because he touches the light,
the result is that he does this again when the mother is away. But let
him burn himself with the light, then he is certain to leave it alone.
In riper years when a boy misuses a knife, a toy, or something similar,
the loss of the object for the time being must be the punishment. Most
boys would prefer corporal punishment to the loss of their favourite
possession. But only the loss of it will be a real education through
experience of one of the inevitable rules of life, an experience which
cannot be too strongly impressed.
We hear parents who have begun with Spencer and then have taken to
corporal punishment declare that when children are too small to repair
the clothing which they have torn there must be some other kind of
punishment. But at that age they should not be punished at all for such
things. They should have such simple and strong clothes that they can
play freely in them. Later on, when they can be really careful, the
natural punishment would be to have the child remain at home if he is
careless, has spotted his clothes, or torn them. He must be shown that
he must help to put his clothes in good condition again, or that he will
be compelled to buy what he has destroyed carelessly with money earned
by himself. If the child is not careful, he must stay at home, when
ordinarily allowed to go out, or eat alone if he is too late for meals.
It may be said that there are simple means by which all the important
habits of social life may become a second nature. But it is not possible
in all cases to apply Spencer's method. The natural consequences
occasionally endanger the health of the child, or sometimes are too
slow in their action. If it seems necessary to interfere directly, such
action must be consistent, quick, and immutable. How is it that the
child learns very soon that fire burns? Because fire does so always.
But the mother who at one time strikes, at another threatens, at another
bribes the child, first forbids and then immediately after permits some
action; who does not carry out her threat, does not compel obedience,
but constantly gabbles and scolds; who sometimes acts in one way and
just as often in another, has not learned the effective educational
methods of the fire.
The old-fashioned strict training that in its crude way gave to the
character a fixed type rested on its consistent qualities. It was
consistently strict, not as at present a lax hesitation between all
kinds of pedagogical methods and psychological opinions, in which the
child is thrown about here and there like a ball, in the hands of grown
people; at one time pushed forward, then laughed at, then pushed aside,
only to be brought back again, kissed till it, is disgusted, first
ordered about, and then coaxed. A grown man would become insane if
joking Titans treated him for a single day as a child is treated for
a year. A child should not be ordered about, but should be just as
courteously addressed as a grown person in order that he may learn
courtesy. A child should never be pushed into notice, never compelled to
endure caresses, never overwhelmed with kisses, which ordinarily torment
him and are often the cause of sexual hyperaesthesia. The child's
demonstrations of affection should be reciprocated when they are
sincere, but one's own demonstrations should be reserved for special
occasions. This is one of the many excellent maxims of training that are
disregarded. Nor should the child be forced to express regret in begging
pardon and the like. This is excellent training for hypocrisy. A small
child once had been rude to his elder brother and was placed upon a
chair to repent his fault. When the mother after a time asked if he
was sorry, he answered, "Yes," with emphasis, but as the mother saw a
mutinous sparkle in his eyes she felt impelled to ask, "Sorry for what?"
and the youngster broke out, "Sorry that I did not call him a liar
besides." The mother was wise enough on this occasion, and ever after,
to give up insisting on repentance.
Spontaneous penitence is full of significance, it is a deeply felt
desire for pardon. But an artificial emotion is always and everywhere
worthless. Are you not sorry? Does it make no difference to you that
your mother is ill, your brother dead, your father away from home? Such
expressions are often used as an appeal to the emotions of children. But
children have a right to have feelings, or not have them, and to have
them as undisturbed as grown people. The same holds good of their
sympathies and antipathies. The sensitive feelings of children are
constantly injured by lack of consideration on the part of grown people,
their easily stimulated aversions are constantly being brought out. But
the sufferings of children through the crudeness of their elders belong
to an unwritten chapter of child psychology. Just as there are few
better methods of training than to ask children, when they have behaved
unjustly to others, to consider whether it would be pleasant for them to
be treated in that way, so there is no better corrective for the trainer
of children than the habit of asking oneself, in question small and
great,--Would I consent to be treated as I have just treated my child?
If it were only remembered that the child generally suffers double as
much as the adult, parents would perhaps learn physical and psychical
tenderness without which a child's life is a constant torment.
As to presents, the same principle holds good as with emotions and marks
of tenderness. Only by example can generous instincts be provoked. Above
all the child should not be allowed to have things which he immediately
gives away. Gifts to a child should always imply a personal requital
for work or sacrifice. In order to secure for children the pleasure of
giving and the opportunity of obtaining small pleasures and enjoyments,
as well as of replacing property of their own or of others which they
may have destroyed, they should at an early age be accustomed to perform
seriously certain household duties for which they receive some small
remuneration. But small occasional services, whether volunteered or
asked for by others, should never be rewarded. Only readiness to serve,
without payment, develops the joy of generosity. When the child wants to
give away something, people should not make a presence of receiving
it. This produces the false conception in his mind that the pleasure of
being generous can be had for nothing. At every step the child should be
allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be
plucked from his roses. This is what is least understood in present-day
training. Thus we see reasonable methods constantly failing. People find
themselves forced to "afflictive" methods which stand in no relation
with the realities of life. I mean, above all, what are still called
means of education, instead of means of torture,--blows.
Many people of to-day defend blows, maintaining that they are milder
means of punishment than the natural consequences of an act; that blows
have the strongest effect on the memory, which effect becomes permanent
through association of ideas.
But what kinds of association? Is it not with physical pain and shame?
Gradually, step by step, this method of training and discipline has
been superseded in all its forms. The movement to abolish torture,
imprisonment, and corporal punishment failed for a long time owing to
the conviction that they were indispensable as methods of discipline.
But the child, people answer, is still an animal, he must be brought up
as an animal. Those who talk in this way know nothing of children nor of
animals. Even animals can be trained without striking them, but they can
only be trained by men who have become men themselves.
Others come forward with the doctrine that terror and pain have been the
best means of educating mankind, so the child must pursue the same road
as humanity. This is an utter absurdity. We should also, on this theory,
teach our children, as a natural introduction to religion, to practice
fetish worship. If the child is to reproduce all the lower development
stages of the race, he would be practically depressed beneath the level
which he has reached physiologically and psychologically through the
common inheritance of the race. If we have abandoned torture and painful
punishments for adults, while they are retained for children, it is
because we have not yet seen that their soul life so far as a greater
and more subtle capacity for suffering is concerned has made the same
progress as that of adult mankind. The numerous cases of child suicide
in the last decade were often the result of fear of corporal punishment;
or have taken place after its administration. Both soul and body are
equally affected by this practice. Where this is not the result, blows
have even more dangerous consequences. They tend to dull still further
the feeling of shame, to increase the brutality or cowardice of the
person punished. I once heard a child pointed out in a school as being
so unruly that it was generally agreed he would be benefited by a
flogging. Then it was discovered that his father's flogging at home had
made him what he was. If statistics were prepared of ruined sons, those
who had been flogged would certainly be more numerous than those who had
been pampered.
Society has gradually given up employing retributive punishments because
people have seen that they neither awaken the feeling of guilt, nor
act as a deterrent, but on the contrary retribution applied by equal to
equal brutalises the ideas of right, hardens the temper, and stimulates
the victim to exercise the same violence towards others that has been
endured by himself. But other rules are applied to the psychological
processes of the child. 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 to tell God," and prayed with deep
earnestness, "Dear God, tear mamma's arms out so that she cannot beat me
any more."
Nothing would more effectively further the development of education than
for all flogging pedagogues to meet this fate. They would then learn
to educate with the head instead of with the hand. And as to public
educators, the teachers, their position could be no better raised than
by legally forbidding a blow to be administered in any school under
penalty of final loss of position.
That people who are in other respects intelligent and sensitive continue
to defend flogging, is due to the fact that most educators have only a
very elementary conception of their work. They should constantly keep
before them the feelings and impressions of their own childhood in
dealing with children. The most frequent as well as the most dangerous
of the numerous mistakes made in handling children is that people do
not remember how they felt themselves at a similar age, that they do
not regard and comprehend the feelings of the child from their own past
point of view. The adult laughs or smiles in remembering the punishments
and other things which caused him in his childhood anxious days or
nights, which produced the silent torture of the child's heart, infinite
despondency, burning indignation, lonely fears, outraged sense of
justice, the terrible creations of his imagination, his absurd shame,
his unsatisfied thirst for joy, freedom, and tenderness. Lacking these
beneficent memories, adults constantly repeat the crime of destroying
the childhood of the new generation,--the only time in life in which the
guardian of education can really be a kindly providence. So strongly do
I feel that the unnecessary sufferings of children are unnatural as well
as ignoble that I experience physical disgust in touching the hand of a
human being that I know has struck a child; and I cannot close my
eyes after I have heard a child in the street threatened with corporal
punishment.
Blows call forth the virtues of slaves, not those of freemen. As early
as Walther von der Vogelweide, it was known that the honourable man
respects a word more than a blow. The exercise of physical force
delivers the weak and unprotected into the hands of the strong. A child
never believes in his heart, though he may be brought to acknowledge
verbally, that the blows were due to love, that they were administered
because they were necessary. The child is too keen not to know that such
a "must" does not exist, and that love can express itself in a better
way.
Lack of self-discipline, of intelligence, of patience, of personal
effort--these are the corner-stones on which corporal punishment rests.
I do not now refer to the system of flogging employed by miserable
people year in and year out at home, or, particularly in schools, that
of beating children outrageously, or to the limits of brutality. I
do not mean even the less brutal blows administered by undisciplined
teachers and parents, who avenge themselves in excesses of passion or
fatigue or disgust,--blows which are simply the active expression of a
tension of nerves, a detestable evidence of the want of self-discipline
and selfculture. Still less do I refer to the cruelties committed by
monsters, sexual perverts, whose brutal tendencies are stimulated
by their disciplinary power and who use it to force their victims to
silence, as certain criminal trials have shown.
I am only speaking of conscientious, amiable parents and teachers who,
with pain to themselves, fulfil what they regard as their duty to the
child. These are accustomed to adduce the good effects of corporal
discipline as a proof that it cannot be dispensed with. The child by
being whipped is, they say, not only made good but freed from his evil
character, and shows by his whole being that this quick and summary
method of punishment has done more than talks, and patience, and the
slowly working penalties of experience. Examples are adduced to prove
that only this kind of punishment breaks down obstinacy, cures the habit
of lying and the like. Those who adopt this system do not perceive that
they have only succeeded, through this momentarily effective means,
in repressing the external expression of an evil will. They have
not succeeded in transforming the will itself. It requires constant
vigilance, daily self-discipline, to create an ever higher capacity for
the discovery of intelligent methods. The fault that is repressed is
certain to appear on every occasion when the child dares to show it.
The educator who finds in corporal punishment a short way to get rid
of trouble, leads the child a long way round, if we have the only real
development in view, namely that which gradually strengthens the child's
capacity for self-control.
I have never heard a child over three years old threatened with corporal
punishment without noticing that this wonderfully moral method had an
equally bad influence on parents and children. The same can be said of
milder kinds of folly, coaxing children by external rewards. I have seen
some children coaxed to take baths and others compelled by threats. But
in neither case was their courage, or self-control, or strength of will
increased. Only when one is able to make the bath itself attractive is
that energy of will developed that gains a victory over the feeling of
fear or discomfort and produces a real ethical impression, viz., that
virtue is its own reward. Wherever a child is deterred from a bad habit
or fault by corporal punishment, a real ethical result is not reached.
The child has only learnt to fear an unpleasant consequence, which lacks
real connection with the thing itself, a consequence it well knows
could have been absent. Such fear is as far removed as heaven from the
conviction that the good is better than the bad. The child soon becomes
convinced that the disagreeable accompaniment is no necessary result of
the action, that by greater cleverness the punishment might have been
avoided. Thus the physical punishment increases deception not morality.
In the history of humanity the effect of the teaching about hell and
fear of hell illustrates the sort of morality produced in children's
souls by corporal punishment, that inferno of childhood. Only with the
greatest trouble, slowly and unconsciously, is the conviction of the
superiority of the good established. The good comes to be seen as more
productive of happiness to the individual himself and his environment.
So the child learns to love the good. By teaching the child that
punishment is a consequence drawn upon oneself he learns to avoid the
cause of punishment.