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
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