Chapter III: The Overthrow of Coercion (3)

Six tumbrels roll along the streets. Change these back again to what
they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be
the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles,
the toilets of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not My Father's
house but dens of thieves, and huts of millions of starving peasants!

This is the most profound and most ably written exposition of the philosophy of anarchy.

"But by coercion I can make the child do right, and in this way I can form habits of doing right that will control the child when he grows up."

The habit that is really formed by coercion is the habit of submission, of passive yielding to authority, of subordination, and, in the last analysis, this means the degradation and enslavement of the soul. Two habits are thus wrought into the child's nature by coercion: the habit of doing things because ordered to do them, which is slavery; and the habit of doing things he does not like or wish to do, which is the basis of hypocrisy. The meanest products that can be made from beings created in God's image are slaves and hypocrites. One of the remarkable facts regarding coercionists is that they blame God for creating the monstrosities they have themselves produced by false methods of training.

"We should break the child's will, if it is wrong, to set it right, just as we should break a crooked leg to make it straight."

This is a statement that betrays a lack of modern surgical knowledge, and a carelessness of psychological thought. Modern treatment for the cure of deformity of body avoids harsh treatment whenever it is possible to do so. It has been found that many deformities of body may be cured by proper exercise of the undeveloped part or parts, and with wider knowledge of Nature's laws will come a wiser use of the law of self-transformation, and a smaller and smaller use of the severer methods of treatment. But no good child psychologist now doubts that a child's will possesses the power of self-development and self-adjustment under proper guidance, nor should any one be ignorant of the fact that all true will development comes from within outward.

It is only necessary that man should study the child more thoroughly, and learn how to change his interest centres from wrong to right, and how to surround him with an environment suitable to his progressive stages of development, in order to keep his own will in operation along productive lines of self-reformation and self-regulation by creative self-activity. Thus the will can be set to work truly with undiminished power. When a will is broken, however, it can never regain its full power; the breaking process blights it forever. More rational processes retain its tendency to act and its energy of action while changing the purpose and direction of its action.

One of the interesting anomalies of our language is the marvellous fact that the term "self-willed" should ever have been considered a term of reproach or a description of a defect in character. The child with strongest self-will may become the greatest champion for righteousness if properly trained. He needs a wise and sympathetic trainer, who will be reverently grateful for his strong self-will, and whose reverence will prevent him from doing anything that would weaken the strength or selfhood of the will. The attempt to break his will may make him a destroying force instead of a leader for truth and progress. If a strangled will ever regains vitality it rarely acts truly. There is perhaps no other relic of the theories of barbaric ignorance concerning child training still left that is so baneful and so illogical as the theory that justifies will breaking.

"But God punishes the child. The child who touches the fire gets burned, and therefore it is right that coercive punishment should be used by adulthood in dealing with the child."

The punishments referred to are the revelation of natural laws. There is no personal element of the punishing agency manifest to the child. God does not appear to the child as a punisher, and it is an astounding error in training to reveal such a consciousness of God to the child. Responsibility for the consequences of their acts is a law of which all children approve. This appeals to their sense of justice, and there is no other sense to which we can appeal with success so universally in children as the sense of justice. "Squareness" is the highest quality named in the lexicon of childhood. A boy would rather be deemed "square" than receive praise for any other characteristic or accomplishment. So he recognises the justice of being held accountable for the directly resulting consequences of his acts quite as readily as he accepts the fact, without blaming any one else, that he will be burned if he touches fire. There is no element of coercion in the law of consequences. It is a just and universal law in harmony with his moral responsibility; therefore he will respect it. Coercion is directly contrary to the fundamental laws of his happiness and his true growth, and therefore he naturally and properly dislikes and disapproves of it, and of the individual who outrages justice by using it.

The wonderful stories of Dickens set the world thinking by first arousing the strongest feelings of sympathy for the child and then developing sentiment and thought against every form of coercion, more especially coercion by corporal punishment. The awakening has been most satisfactory in its results. When Dickens began his writing against corporal punishment the rod was the almost universal remedy for all defects in animals or human beings. Whatever the defect, the superior in the eyes of the law used the one agency to overcome it. Mothers used the rod to subdue their children. Husbands used the rod to keep their children and wives in order. Men whipped their horses with impunity, as they did their children or wives. They owned them, and their right to punish them as they chose was unquestioned. Men trained animals to perform tricks in menageries by beating them, and they trained dancing, or performing, or learning girls and boys quite as inhumanly. Ownership or subordination justified unspeakable cruelty. The weakness of the child, the helplessness of the animal, appealed to the hardness of human nature, and not to its chivalry or sympathy. Even the poor feeble-minded and idiotic, who were confined in asylums, were terribly flogged by the most advanced philanthropists of the highest Christian civilization. They were weak. It was the duty of the authorities to control them, and "stripes and bruises" were regarded as the only true agencies for securing obedience. The rod was the highest controlling and directing force in the world.

What a change has been wrought! Horses and children and wives are protected from brutal treatment now by law. The insane are not flogged to make them sane in any well-conducted institutions. More than half the children in the schools of the civilized world are free from the terror and degradation of corporal punishment by law, or by the higher consciousness of more intelligent teachers. Parenthood everywhere is studying the child and trying to become conscious of its own higher powers of guiding character so that it may be able to train the children in truer and more productive and less dangerous ways than formerly. And Charles Dickens was the great apostle of these grand reforms.

We shudder now as we read of the outrages practised on helpless children and on the insane half a century ago not by the heathen, but by earnest, conscientious Christians. The men who live half a century hence will shudder when they read that in some schools at the close of the nineteenth century children who were partially or temporarily insane from hereditary taint, or imperfect nutrition, or cruel treatment, or anger, or from some other removable or remediable cause were whipped, and that men, some of whom occupied respectable positions, advocated the breaking of children's wills! If these "will-breaking" educators were in charge of asylums they would resurrect the straitjacket and the whipping post for the insane.

The few who advocate corporal punishment openly claim that they have the authority of the Bible for their faith in the rod. They should remember that good men have stood with Bibles in their hands misrepresenting God and attempting to stop the progress of every great movement toward freedom and reform. Galileo was imprisoned by the Church because he taught that the earth turns round. Men had no difficulty in showing that the Bible approved of slavery, or that it prohibited woman from the exercise of the right or the performance of the duties of responsible individuality. So men still quote Solomon to show that corporal punishment is approved by God, though such a conclusion would be rejected by the highest interpreters.

"Whipping makes strong characters." No, it makes hard characters, and hardness is but one element of strength, and not the best element of strength. The strength of the English character has not been developed, as is claimed by some, by the whipping done in English schools and homes. It comes partly by race heredity from the sturdiness of the Saxon and Norman founders of the race, partly from the general practice of working hard from youth up, and largely from the fact that the English playgrounds are so universally used, and are the scenes of the severest struggles for supremacy in skill and power that are witnessed in any part of the world. The winning half inch or half length, the valorous struggle for leadership on track or river--these are the things that have preserved and developed English force and bravery, in spite of the fact that England in her schools and homes has done fully her share of whipping. A boy or girl who spends as much time in free strong play as the English boy, works out the effects of a great many evils from his or her life. When men see the futility of dependence on flogging for developing energetic strength of character they will study the influence of play to the great advantage of racial vigour, and courage, and moral energy.

Corporal punishment, like all other forms of coercion, robs the child of joyousness, and joyousness is one of the most essential elements in the true growth of a child. Corporal punishment affects the nervous systems of children injuriously, and when applied to certain parts of the body it stimulates prematurely the action of the sexual nature, and leads to one of the worst forms of depravity.

Corporal punishment is ineffective as a disciplinary agency. In one American city during the generation after Dickens began his great crusade against corporal punishment it was the practice to whip with a rawhide all children who came late, but the lateness steadily increased in defiance of the rawhide. It was reduced to less than one one-hundredth part of its former proportion when whipping for lateness was entirely abolished and more rational means adopted.

The order and co-operation of pupils is best in those schools in which no corporal punishment is used. If in any school only one teacher relies on the rod as a stimulator to work and a restrainer of evil, her class is sure to be the most disorderly, the least co-operative, and the most defective in original power in the school. As the children throughout the school come from the same homes, play with the same companions, attend the same churches, and are subject to the same general influences, it is perfectly clear that the whipping is the distinctive feature of character training that deforms the children. They will become normal, reasonable children when they reach the next room. This illustration assumes that all the teachers are possessed of good natural ability to direct the child properly. The one who uses corporal punishment fails because she has been dwarfed by her faith in corporal punishment. She has believed in it so fully that she has not sought to understand higher and better means. She has studied neither the child nor her own powers of child guidance.

Dickens taught the inefficiency of coercion to accomplish what men hoped to accomplish by it in his criticism of the revolting use of capital punishment in former times. In A Tale of Two Cities he says:

Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note
was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death;
the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the
holder of a horse at Tellson's door, who made off with it, was put to
Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of
three fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of crime were put to
Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention--it
might always have been worth remarking that the fact was _exactly the
reverse_.

The great prophets of modern education--Pestalozzi, Froebel, Barnard, and Mann--strongly condemned corporal punishment. These were men of clear insight and correct judgment. The opinion of one such man is worth more than the views of ten thousand ordinary men in regard to the subject of their special study. They were prophet souls who saw the higher truth toward which the race had been slowly growing, and revealed it.

Their revelations have been appreciated and adopted more and more fully as they have been understood more and more clearly. In the case of corporal punishment and all forms of coercion Dickens has been the John the Baptist and the Paul of the revelation of the gospel of sympathy for the child.

Not one blow in a thousand is given to a child now as compared with the time of Dickens's childhood. Corporal punishment is prohibited in the schools of France, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, Brazil, New Jersey, and in the following cities: New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Albany, Syracuse, Toledo, and Savannah. In Washington and Philadelphia teachers voluntarily gave up the practice of whipping. This is true of the majority of individual teachers in the cities of America, and the number of those who do without all forms of coercive discipline is rapidly increasing.

The whipping of girls is prohibited in Saxony, Hessen, Oldenburg, and in many cities. Few girls are now whipped in schools anywhere. Corporal punishment has been abolished for the higher grades in Norway and in the lower grades in Saxony, Hessen, Bremen, and Hamburg. In the last-named city the cane is kept under lock and key. In some places the consent of parents must be obtained before children may be whipped, in some places the number of strokes is limited; in other places a record is kept of every case of corporal punishment and reports made monthly to the school boards. Everywhere action has been taken to prohibit or restrict the use of the once universally respected and universally dominant rod.

All wise trainers of children recognise the value of obedience, but truly wise trainers no longer aim to make children merely submissively obedient, nor even willingly responsive in their obedience. They try to make them independently, co-operatively, and reverently obedient; independent in free development of will, co-operative in unity of effort with their fellows and their adult guides, and reverent in their attitude to law. The substitution of independence for subserviency, of co-operation for formal, responsive obedience, and of reverence for law for fear of law are the most important development in child training.

In Dickens's ideal school, Doctor Strong's, there was "plenty of liberty."

Gladstone's criticism, when over seventy, of his own teachers was that they were afraid of freedom. He said: "I did not learn to set a due value on the imperishable and inestimable principles of human liberty. The temper which I think prevailed among them was that liberty was regarded with jealousy, and fear could not be wholly dispensed with." The true teacher is not afraid of freedom, but makes it the dominant element in his training and in his educational theory.

May the profounder truth in regard to child training spread to the ends of the earth! May the time soon come when there shall be no disciples of Susan Nipper's doctrine, "that childhood, like money, must be shaken and rattled and jostled about a good deal to keep it bright"! May Christian civilization soon be free from such memories as the remembrance of Mr. Obenreizer, in No Thoroughfare, had of his parents: "I was a famished naked little wretch of two or three years when they were men and women with hard hands to beat me"! May Christ's teaching soon be so fully understood that there will be no child anywhere like the shivering little boy in The Haunted Man, who was "used already to be worried and hunted like a beast, who crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow, and threatened to bite if he was hit"! May teachers and all trainers of children learn the underlying philosophy of the statement made by Dickens, in connection with the schools of the Stepney Union, in The Uncommercial Traveller: "In the moral health of these schools--where corporal punishment is unknown--truthfulness stands high"!