Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/190

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convinced that a school ought not to interfere in affairs of discipline that belong only to the family: that a school ought not to have, and does not have, the right to grant rewards and punishments; that the best police and discipline of a school is gained by intrusting the pupils with full powers to learn and to behave as they please. I am convinced of this, notwithstanding the fact that the old customs of disciplinary schools are so strong that even in the Yasnaya Polyana school we occasionally departed from this principle. During the last term, in November, there were two instances of punishments.

During the drawing class, a teacher who had not been long with us noticed that a small boy was crying without heeding the teacher, and was angrily hitting his neighbors without any reason.

Not realizing the possibility of soothing him with words, the teacher dragged him from his seat, and took him to his table. That was a punishment for him. The little lad sobbed during all the time of the lesson.

This was the very lad whom, at the beginning of the school, I refused to take, because I considered him to be a hopeless idiot.

His principal characteristics were dullness and sweetness of disposition. His comrades would never let him join their games; they made sport of him, turned him into ridicule, and at the same time they would be surprised, and say:—

"What a strange fellow Petka is! If you strike him,—and even the little fellows sometimes pick on him,—he shakes himself loose and runs away!"

"He has no courage at all," one boy said to me, in regard to him. If this boy had been brought to such a state of passion that the teacher felt it necessary to punish him for it, it was evident that some one not punished was to blame.