Page:The physical training of children (IA 39002011126464.med.yale.edu).pdf/315



"Pooh! pooh! my good sir. Don't tell me. Never saw flogging in the navy do good. Kept down brutes; never made a man yet."—Dr. Norman Macleod in Good Words.

If school-masters must flog, let them flog their own sons. If they must ruin the tempers, the dispositions, and the constitutions of boys, they have more right to practice upon their own than on other people's children! Oh that parents would raise—and that without any uncertain sound—their voices against such abominations, and the detestable cane would soon be banished the school-room! "I am confident that no boy," says Addison, "who will not be allured by letters without blows, will never be brought to anything with them. A great or good mind must necessarily be the worst for such indignities; and it is a sad change to lose of its virtue for the improvement of its knowledge. No one has gone through what they call a great school, but must have remembered to have seen children of excellent and ingenuous natures (as have afterward appeared in their manhood). I say, no man has passed through this way of education but must have seen an ingenuous creature expiring with shame, with pale looks, beseeching sorrow, and silent tears, throw up its honest eyes, and kneel on its tender knees to an inexorable blockhead, to be forgiven the false quantity of a word in making a Latin verse. The child is punished, and the next day he commits a like crime, and so a third, with the same consequence. I would fain ask any reasonable man whether this lad, in the simplicity of his native innocence, full of shame, and capable of any impressions from that grace of soul, was not fitted for any purpose in this life than after that spark of virtue is extinguished in him, though he is able to write twenty verses in an evening?"

How often is corporal punishment resorted to at school because the master is in a passion, and he vents his rage upon the poor school-boy's unfortunate back!