128 VII. THE SCHOOL ROOM, ITS DISCIPLINE AND MANAGEMENT. REPROVE GENTLY. He who checks a child with terror, Stops its play and stills its song, Not alone commits an error, But a grievous moral wrong. Would you stop the flowing river, Better teach it where to go. I. DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOLS. In reply to many inquiries addressed to the Educational Department on the subject of Discipline in Schools, we insert the following extracts from the Law and Regulations on the subject. The second clause of the sixteenth section of the School Act of 1850, makes it the duty of every teacher of a Common School "To maintain proper order and discipline in the School, according to the forms and regulations which shall be provided according to law." These regulations make it the duty of the teacher 7. "To evince a regard for the improvement and general welfare of his pupils, to treat them with kindness combined with firmness; and to aim at governing them by their affections and reason, rather than by harshness and severity. 8. "To cultivate kindly and affectionate feelings among his pupils; to discountenance quarrelling, cruelty to animals, and every approach to vice. 10. "To practice such discipline in his school as would be exercised by a judicious parent in his family; avoiding corporal punishment, except when it shall appear to him to be imperatively necessary; and in all such cases he shall keep a record of the offences and punishments, for the inspection of the trustees, at or before the next public examination, when said record shall be destroyed. 11. "For gross misconduct, or a violent or wilful opposition to his authority, the master may suspend a pupil from attending at the school, forthwith informing the parent or guardian of the fact, and the reason of it, and communicating the same to the trustees, through the chairman or secretary. But no pupil shall be expelled without the authority of the trustees. 12. "When the example of any pupil is very hurtful to the school, and in all cases where reformation appears hopeless, it shall be the duty of the master, with the approbation of the trustees, to expel such pupil from the school. But any pupil under the public censure, who shall express to the master his regret for such course of conduct, as openly and as explicitly as the case may require, shall, with the approbation of the trus tees and master, be re-admitted to the school." "The discipline of the school, and therefore the authority of the teacher, extends to all pupils from the time they leave their parents and guardians until their return to them. Pupils are as responsible to the authority of the school for wrongs they do their fellow pupils, or other improprieties they commit, on their way to and from school, as if they did such things on the school premises, or in the school. If pupils were not responsible to the school authorities for their conduct going to and from school, endless irregularities might be committed with impunity by pupils, neighbour would be set against neighbour by the alleged improprieties of each others' children, and school discipline could not be maintained. Of course the responsibility of a teacher is as extensive as his authority." These regulations apply alike to Grammar and Common Schools; and are sufficiently explicit to make teachers effectively to perform a delicate and difficult duty. NOTE. The following articles on the School-Room, its Discipline and Management, have been selected from successive volumes of the Journal of Education for Upper Canada, and from other sources. They contain suggestions and hints on almost every subject connected with the daily routine of school duty. II. THE THEORY OF SCHOOL GOVERNMENT ANALYSED. In order to become a moral trainer, the first step a teacher must take is to see what are the present expedients of his school government. Does he rule his little empire by the law of love or of fear? Does he secure order, obedience, and industry, by infusing the spirit of work from a lawful desire to please others, or honest love of approbation, and for the principle of duty; or does he force results, if not by a rod of iron, by the rod of hard and elastic wood? I am no advocate for weak discipline, properly so called; but I do not call that discipline which subdues the spirit of a child, instead of forming his pliant character. There are a thousand arguments against the rod. It is a very easy expedient-an irresistible argument-which the worst master who has but a man's strength can employ. I cannot but think, however, that it is occasionally placed upon the wrong pair of shoulders, when I see a boy punished for indolence or indifference, for which the want of tact and skill in the master is alone to be blamed. The master cannot interest his class-the boy is inattentive. The master is the cause, the boy is the effect; the effect is punished, and the cause escapes. Depend upon it that the teacher who avails himself of all the moral means of discipline which he could find, if he only looked for them where they are to be found-in the sympathies of our common naturewill produce a better condition of discipline, and with far less trouble to himself. School government built upon these sympathies, and backed by public opinion, will be far safer, far pleasanter, and far more productive of fruits, than one enforced by violence and fear. I know that it may be said that universal practice seems to show that the rod must have had its origin in some principle of our nature. This argument I grant; but that princi ple may be the unfitness and the inertness of the master's nature, and not the want of response to a higher appeal, which will be found in the boy's nature, until it has perished for want of exercise. An ignorant man, and an unskilful man, of whom accident, and not nature or cultivation, has made a schoolmaster, will find opposed to him the whole sympathy-the public opinion-of his scholars, and he has no alternative but rebellion or the use of his wooden rod; and, as in all stimulus, the dose must be increased, he has no limit to the extent of the employment of it, until a boy too big or too brave for him shall measure his animal strength with his own. There are innumerable objections to the indiscriminate use of this weapon at least, if not its use altogether.—(1) It is seldom applied without passion. (2) A blow inflicted, if it afterwards be proved in error, cannot be recalled. (3) It takes no cognizance of the temper or animus of the culprit. (4) It draws out a direct and hating antagonism among the children. (5) A fault so punished is regarded by the culprit as expiated as soon as the atonement is made. (6) It hardens the sensibilities of a boy's moral nature. Corporal punishment, when anything good is left in a boy, breeds a reckless temper that defies the pain in the bold, and tends to press and to extinguish that becoming self-esteem, and spoils the very spirit of the more gentle boy. As war is the last appeal of kings, death is the last appeal of the law, so the rod should be that of the school-master. I know, as well as any one here, that there must be punishment; but it should consist in the moral sense of disgrace, and not in the animal sense of pain. What a bad master calls a bad boy, may be the bravest and finest boy in the school. The master has never courted his affections, or challenged his confidence, and now he despises pain without flinching, for it is the price at which he buys the secret admiration and the sympathy of all his peers. If a master would secure a high state of discipline without the rod, he must begin to organize the school better, to prepare lessons of deeper interest, and adapt them to boy-nature more skilfully-he must claim their sympathies, condescend to play with them, to become a boy with a boy, a child with a child—he must listen to their tales of woe-every school has its own laws of morality-he must be himself an invisible party to their fabrication-he must seek to secure public opinion, or what is called the "sympathy of numbers" on his side, and then the stoutest heart of his most obdurate boy, robbed of the admiration of his equals, will not need his strong arm any more, he will wince before the very look of his displeasure. Severity either begets defiance, or it begets terror. If defiance, the whole discipline fails, unless you can pass from rods to scorpions, and from scorpions to thumb-screws. If it begets terror, terror will take its coward refuge in cunning or falsehood; and, as all the blossoms of nobility of character drop off one by one, instead of a man, you have made a very slave of a boy. We have tried the rod long enough, and if a voice from our prisons-if a voice from our reformatories-tells us that the words of human kindness alone can touch a string, the only string left that will vibrate within the broken instrument of an outcast's heart, surely we are doing a crying injustice to our comparatively innocent children whose natures are not utterly unstrung. Last winter, I wandered into the Sessions House in Hull, and I witnessed the trial of a boy of tender years. The Recorder was affected with emotion when he found that he was a hardened and oft-condemned criminal, though young. He had behaved throughout his trial with the most sullen indifference. In passing sentence, the Recorder followed a new track. "My boy," he said, "I can find none to say a word for you, but I can pity you from my heart; you even know not who your father is, and your other unnatural parent deserted you while a child; you have had no friend to guard you, no monitor to warn you; you have never known a tender mother's love, and were never taught by her to think of God and to pray to Him." The boy, who could hear of former committals and endless thefts without an emotion, began to lower his head when the Recorder used the first tone of compassion; lower and lower it went; but at the name of mother-though one worth the name of mother he had never known-the dry channels of his eyes became filled, until at last the boy sobbed as if his heart would break for the very unwontedness of his emotions. So taught the Saviour of mankind the outcast, the publican, and the sinner, and shall we fall back upon terror and fear with the tender children of our daily schools? III. OBJECTIONS TO CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN SCHOOLS. It is a striking fact that, for upwards of two thousand years, all the illustrious promoters and reformers of education have strongly deprecated Corporal Punishment. It is true, in Sparta, the Pædonomos, or master, was always followed by the Mastigophoroi, or lash bearers,—these latter being selected from young men, and charged with the castigation of the offenders of the various classes. In refined Athens, however, school discipline seems to have been very mild ;-in the period after Alexander, so mild, that the sophist philologer was decried as a man of extraordinary violence, because-a thing unheard of before!-he had awakened by a blow one of his sleeping pupils. In Rome, discipline was for a considerable time very severe. The ferula, or rod, was the usual instrument of chastisement with which children, in inferior schools, were beaten on their hands. The flagellum was more rarely used, and almost only against slaves. But the more civilization and true humane principles spread among the Romans, the more the application of Corporal Punishment was opposed by powerful voices. Quinctilianus and Plutarch, the oracles of educational wisdom in their age, have put forth in this respect opinions which are well worth quoting here more amply. Opinion of Quinctilianus (1. I. c. 4.): "There is one thing I cannot patiently bear, although custom authorises it, that is— to whip children. This chastisement appears to me low and servile; and certainly, at another age, it would be a cruel outrage. Moreover, an ill-natured child, that is not touched by censure and reproof, will soon be hardened by blows, like the vilest slave ......If you have no other means of reducing a child to obedience, what shall you do when your pupil is grown up? For then he has nothing more to fear in this direction, and yet he will enter upon a career far more difficult." Opinion of Plutarch (de Puerorum Educat.): "One ought to induce children to do their duty, not by cruel and humiliating punishment, which is more proper for slaves than for freemen, but by mildness and persuasion. Bad treatment renders them obstinate, stupifies them, and converts to them study into an object of horror." To these opinions I add that of Terence (Adelphi, Act. I. Sc. 2.):— "In my opinion it is a woful mistake, to believe that authority, supported by fear, is more solid and more durable than that founded on esteem....He who does his duty, only forced by chastisement, keeps to his work only so long as he believes himself to be observed; as soon as he thinks himself out of the reach of observation, he returns to his old inclination. He, whom you attach by acts of kindness, fulfils his duties heartily. He endeavours to show his gratitude for your tenderness; and whether you be present or absent, he will be the same. It becomes a father to accustom his son to behave well, more from his own impulse than from fear for another....He who is not able to bring about such a result should avow that he does not know how to govern children." Quinctilianus, Plutarch, and Terence, assuredly never thought that so many centuries afterwards, their noble and generous views would be quoted against a system which they had to combat in their days. During the dark epoch of the middle ages, and the period immediately following them, Corporal Punishment became once more the rule. The barbarian principle of those times, that human nature is radically wicked, greatly contributed to keep this mode of correcting in practice. Luther relates how he and his fellow pupils trembled when their master spoke to them. His words seemed to them always pregnant with blows. Erasmus (De pueris stat. et liberal. instit.) expresses his feelings on the school dis cipline of his times in the following rather strong words:— "Now imagine, worthy Sir, how many of the most splendid talents are destroyed by these executioners, who, themselves uncultivated, are yet puffed up with the conceit of their learning. These morose, violent, abominable men deal out blows even for their mere pleasure, for they are of such a mean character that it is a sport to them to torment others. This kind of men ought to be butchers and flayers, but not the tutors of youth. And certainly nobody torments boys in a more cruel manner than those who possess nothing that can enlarge the knowledge of the pupil. Of course what else should such men do in the school, but pass the day in beating and scolding ?" Montaigne describes, in his Essays, a School of his time in the following words:"Approach the threshold of a schoolroom, and you hear nothing but cries of tortured children, and of masters excited with rage. What an idea, to awaken in those tender and timid creatures delight for their lessons by means of brutal force! Away with this pernicious and damnable theory of the rod !" The modern Reformers in Education on the Continent everywhere substitute for the method of teaching with cane and rod, the more scientific, and at the same time more humane, methods of correction. Corporal Punishment is strictly prohibited in the schools of France, as well as in the greater part of Germany. Even in the few districts of Germany, where it still exists (although it is rarely applied, and never against pupils above the age of fourteen), the public feeling is much opposed to the practice. The schools in these countries are very large: nevertheless discipline is strict and effectual,-even more effectual than in English schools, notwithstanding the more turbulent and excitable temper of French boys. It may also not be amiss to remark that, both in France and Germany, the master is not only more esteemed by society in general, but also more loved and respected by his pupils; and this their feeling of respect is genuine-not influenced by the cane. I do not think that, in such schools as Eton, and with almost grown up youths, Corporal Punishment is used in any part of Europe, nor even in Russia, But in England also it becomes more and more rare, and will at length disappear with another torture, with which it is intimately connected, viz., with the terrible art of cramming, of which a French author says,-"If I think of the manner I was taught, it seems to me that they put my head into a bag, and made me march by means of the rod, chastising me whenever I did not see my way." There are at present many excellent schools in England where the cane is never used; however, they bear out triumphantly any comparison with other educational establishments. I trust the time will come at last when England is to give up a practise more Chinese than English in its character. China, in fact, may boast of using the bamboo, not only as the great mainstay of government, but also as the prop of the educational system. The Chinese pupil who does not know his lesson, is placed on a small bench, and receives from eight to ten blows with the stick. This procedure is very frequent. The graduates have the privilege of being whipped, not by the public Mandarins, but by special ones, who have the rank of their masters. Often at an examination, when both the father and the son contend for office, the former receives Corporal Punishment as a corrective of his ignorance, whilst the latter, the son, is rewarded. There is equality before the bamboo, no partiality being shown to class, rank, or age; and we must give the Chinese the credit of being consequent. After having thus described, in a few words, the use of this kind of punishment of |