A Letter to the Viscount Palmerston, M.P. &c. &c. &c. on the Monitorial System of Harrow School — John Shaqi
A Letter to the Viscount Palmerston, M.P. &c. &c. &c. on the Monitorial System of Harrow SchoolVaughan, C. J. (Charles John)
History
A Letter to the Viscount Palmerston, M.P. &c. &c. &c. on the Monitorial System of Harrow School
Vaughan, C. J. (Charles John)
Harrow School; Monitorial system of education
PRINTED BY W. NICOL, SHAKSPEARE PRESS, PALL MALL.
FOOTNOTES.
{5} “In many points he (Dr. Arnold) took the institution (the authority
of the Sixth Form) as he found it, and as he remembered it at Winchester.
The responsibility of checking bad practices without the intervention of
the Master, the occasional settlement of difficult cases of
school-government, the triumph of order over brute force involved in the
maintenance of such an authority, had been more or less produced under
the old system both at Rugby and elsewhere. But his zeal in its defence,
and his confident reliance upon it as the keystone of his whole
government, were eminently characteristic of himself, and were brought
out the more forcibly from the fact that it was a point on which the
spirit of the age set strongly and increasingly against him, on which
there was a general tendency to yield to the popular outcry, and on which
the clamour, that at one time assailed him, was ready to fasten as a
subject where all parties could concur in their condemnation. But he was
immoveable: and though, on his first coming, he had felt himself called
upon rather to restrain the authority of the Sixth Form from abuses, than
to guard it from encroachments, yet now that the whole system was
denounced as cruel and absurd, he delighted to stand forth as its
champion; the power, which was most strongly condemned, of personal
chastisement vested in the Præpostors over those who resisted their
authority, he firmly maintained as essential to the general support of
the good order of the place; and there was no obloquy, which he would not
undergo in the protection of a boy, who had by due exercise of this
discipline made himself obnoxious to the school, the parents, or the
public.”—_Stanley’s Life and Correspondence of Dr. Arnold_, Vol. I. page
105. See also _Arnold’s Miscellaneous Works_—On the Discipline of Public
Schools: page 371, &c.
{7} “Corporal punishment, it is said, is degrading. I well know of what
feeling this is the expression; it originates in that proud notion of
personal independence which is neither reasonable nor Christian, but
essentially barbarian. It visited Europe in former times with all the
curses of the age of chivalry, and is threatening us now with those of
Jacobinism.” _Arnold’s Miscellaneous Works_, page 365.
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