If not, can it be that the Maker of man has left in-
dividual men at the mercy of their fellows to deliver
them or not to deliver them from being essentially
animals? It is indeed a childish and crude view, long
outgrown alike by metaphysicist and by biologist, and
significant to us only because it reappears from time to
time in the theories of unscholarly and unscientific
writers and upon the lips of ignorant and sometimes
angry and disillusioned men.
Behind this view are indeed many instructive lessons
and some warnings of human history that will doubt-
less occur to the readers of these pages.
Within the skill-theory and practise of school control
is a philosophy that men are essentially rational, that
ideas rule, that but little of our conduct, and that only
of the baser kind of human beings and of better men in
only their baser moments, is brutish, that using the rod
reduces teacher and pupil to a lower than their natural
level, that obedience compelled by rod or threat is
worse than disobedience, which leaves the child at least
without hatred of his superiors, that the individual is
^ The Laws, Book VII. ^ The Great Didactic, Chapter I.
151
CLASS TEACHING AND MANAGEMENT
a fact and society only an abstraction, and that the
child whose will has been broken by force is certain to
make a worthless or a sullen adult.
Said Immanuel Kant: ''Horses and dogs are broken
in, and man, too, may be broken in. But it is not enough
that children should be merely broken in; it is emi-
nently important that they learn to think. According-
ly, the management of schools should depend entirely
upon the judgment of highly enlightened experts."^
According to Froebel, "a suppressed or perverted good
quality, ā a good tendency, only repressed, misunder-
stood or misdirected, ā ^lies originally at the bottom of
every shortcoming of man. Hence, the only and the
infallible remedy for counteracting any shortcoming or
even wickedness is to find the originally good source, the
originally good side of the human being that has been
repressed, disturbed or misled into the shortcoming, and
then to foster, to build up and then properly to guide
this good side. Thus the shortcoming or wickedness
will at last disappear, although it may involve a hard
struggle against habit but not against the original de-
pravity of man; and this is accomplished the more surely
and rapidly, for man at heart prefers right to wrong." ^
For myself, in sailing round many cities, upon many
adventures, I may indeed say as one. who has known
the affections and the virtues, the hatreds and the
malice of men that, to my notion, every vice is the re-
sult either of some arrest in development or of some
perversion of a good quality. It may not be philo-
sophically demonstrable that, as Socrates said, "Knowl-
edge is virtue"; but no man will ever rise higher
in his view of the sin of others than in the prayer of
* On Pedagogy. ^ On the Education of Man.
152
CONTROL OF THE CLASS AND INDIVIDUAL
Jesus on the cross, ā "Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do."
Behind the view that the true way to deal with con-
duct is intellectual and compassionate, not moral and
vindictive, are many instructive lessons and some
warnings of human history.
Witlun the school-and-home theory of class-ancl-pupil
government is a philosophy that men are essentially
domestic and social beings, that love rules, that most
of our conduct is emotional and controlled by affections
for kin and friends, that the primary social institution
is the family and its ministers are the father and the
mother, to whom the pupil belongs, that if therefore
corporal or other physical punishment is to be used,
the father or the mother is to use it, that the question
whether or not the boy or girl obeys the teacher is rela-
tively unimportant, provided that he obeys the parent
and that the parent duly punishes, reprimands or other-
wise corrects the child or youth, that for the boy or the girl
the home is the all important social institution, and the
school is merely an agency for the home, and that so
long as the home does control the boy, he is safely on
the way to make a good citizen, churchman, worker,
and otherwise fit member of adult society. "I wanted
to prove," wrote Pestalozzi, "by my experiment that
if public education is to have any real value, it must
imitate the methods that make the merit of domestic
education." '
This view also has much warrant in history, ā and
yet is not universally true.
Within the pupil self-government theory is a philos-
ophy that justice is quite as discernible and quite as
' On the Work at Stanz.
153
CLASS TEACHING AND MANAGEMENT
authoritative among children and youth as among
adults; that the true preparation for life as a demo-
cratic self-governed man or woman consists in a demo-
cratic school life. This theory asserts that boys and
girls in a modern American school are quite as fit as
are most voters and office-holders to make and to exe-
cute laws. Speaking practically, the men and women
who as teachers establish self-government plans in
their schools say that just as adult society sets up
in the State as judges and in the Church as bishops
learned and wise and well-matured men, so the school
sets up the teachers as the final court of appeal, ā the
forum of last resort, ā in the pupil self-government
scheme of social organization and operation. Let the
boys and girls err, if they must, upon some occasions;
they are getting the best of educations thereby. The
one way to learn judgment and righteousness, to care
for truth and for order and the other social virtues, is
to exercise these qualities in school. \^The boy, who is
told what is right and railroaded therein by either force
or persuasion, becomes the dependent man. Self-
reliance must begin as early in life as the power to
choose one's course and to persist therein begins.
This is a new, a generally non-historical, a brilliantly
philosophical \dew, yet one not without confirmation
at least in some instances in the experience of the
race.
Before passing in detail upon these theories and prac-
tises, it is expedient to note a few statistical facts.
First: The force- theory still prevails in over forty
States of the Union and in most towns and cities.
Second: It was once the universal view.
Third: Even in these States and cities, many teachers
154
CONTROL OF THE CLASS AND INDIVIDUAL
no longer "wield the rod" or otherwise "cow their
pupils " into submission.
Fourth: The best American teachers are not expo-
nents of this theor3\ It is, however, universal in
monarchical Germany, where nearly all the teachers
are men.
Fifth: The skill-theory is the law of the entire State of
New Jersey and of the largest city of the nation, New
York. It is universal in republican France, whereas in re-
publican America a majority of the teachers are women.
Sixth: It is the theory of most of those who reject
the force-theory.
Seventh: It is the practice of most of the best-
trained teachers and of the most successful teachers.
Eighth: The home-and-school theory works well in
many schools, especially in private and endowed schools
and in the public schools of small communities.
Ninth: Though scarcely gaining ground, it disputes
its losses every inch of the way and shows a vitality
that suggests possible recovery. It was never the uni-
versal view; but it had greater vogue a century ago
than the skill-theory and was the first theory to break
the omnipotent universality of the force-theory.
Tenth: The pupil self-government theory is new, is
aggressive, sometimes succeeds in practice, and has
much fascination for several different kinds of en-
thusiasts: ā for those who are of philosophical, of pliilan-
thropic, of empirical, of radical frames of mind.
Eleventh: It introduces an elaborate machinery into
school affairs.
Twelfth: These four theories will all survive our own
generation, and must be reckoned with accordingly.
Each of these theories fits perfectly one and only
155
CLASS TEACHING AND MANAGEMENT
one of the four masculine temperaments, ā the force-
theory fits the muscular motor individual's views of
life and conduct, the skill-theory the nervous motor, the
school-and-home theory the vital sympathetic, and the
self-government the speculative. From the fact that
most teachers belong to the second kind of humanity,
it is fairly safe to predict that the skill-theory will gen-
erally displace the force-theory and finally be recog-
nized as the standard of American practice in school
discipline. This, however, does not prove that it is
the best theory. It may indeed be true that American
schools are too largely controlled and taught by persons
of the nervous motor temperament.
With these general and perhaps fairly comprehensive
propositions before us, it becomes possible to deal with
these theories in detail, not so much for the purpose of
choosing between them as for the purpose of showing
how to supply their deficiencies and to ameliorate their
severities in actual practice. It is, indeed, seldom pos-
sible for class teachers themselves really to choose be-
tween these methods.
The teacher who is to rule his class (or hers) because
the children or youth fear his (or her) power to inflict
corporal punislmaent upon them is thereby relieved of
a certain kind of effort, ā wliich is to discover a way to
resolve the difficulties in the character and ability of
the mischievous, of the disobedient, of the restless and
inattentive by causing internal changes in their views
of life and in their dispositions toward others through
discovery and realization of new ideals. Such a teacher
has a short cut to this end, ā ^in the rural school, he whips
the boy or shuts him up in a closet, fastens clothes-
pins upon his fingers, perhaps knocks liim down. In
156
CONTROL OF THE CLASS AND INDIVIDUAL
the city school, he sends the boy to the principal for
any one of several kinds of whipping, ā on the hands
with a ruler, on the legs with a rattan or a rod or a
switch. (jThe pain sets up an intellectual and moral
reaction."^ How severe the corporal punishment is de-
^ pends. partly upon the seriousness of the offence, the
previous record of the offender, his size and age, his
social standing, and upon the temperament, health,
and judgment of the one who punishes.
Occasionally, even girls and those of twelve or fifteen
years of age are the subjects of corporal punishment.
It is true that in New Jersey and in New York City,
most of the schoolmasters and mistresses say that all ne-
cessity for corporal punisliment has entirely passed away.
But though human nature either in the teacher or in
the children does not differ in New Jersey or in New York
City from human natiu'e as exliibited in (say) Connecti-
cut or Ohio or Texas, most schoolmasters and mistresses
of our country say that the necessity for corporal pun-
ishment does exist and will exist always. As one who
has managed city school systems in New Jersey and
taught in New York some fifteen years, ā as well as in
the District of Columbia where corporal punishment
even of negro children almost never occurs, ā I happen
to know as a matter of fact that the school-atmosphere
in these regions is rather better than anywhere that
corporal punishment prevails. As one who has visited
schools in forty different States, however, I know that
corporal punishment is a necessity in nearly all of them.
What is the answer to the riddle? School organization
and administration.
In order to govern boys and girls of various races,
nationalities, languages, and religions, without resort
157
CLASS TEACHING AND MANAGEMENT
to force, it is necessary to have the following features
in the schools ā viz.:
First: Teachers of adequate scholarship, training and
natural ability. They must be professionally selected
for, and not politically introduced into, the schools.
Second: They must have tenure of office. (In New
Jersey, a teacher is removable only upon proof of in-
competence in a regular law-court.) With such tenure,
what the teacher says to the pupil is said without fear
of loss of position through offending some politician.
The teacher, not some lay board member or the boss
behind the member, is the school ; and every boy and
parent and citizen knows the fact. There is no need of
the blow of a rod to demonstrate it upon the palms or
the thighs of a small boy.
Third: For incorrigibles and habitual truants, there
must be in large cities special individual help classes;
and throughout the State, reform schools or homes to
which the teachers may directly commit these boys and
girls. (The intervention of a prosecuting attorney often
completely foils the effort of teachers to put naturally
bad boys where they belong.)
Fourth: There is required a system of what are
usually called "manual training" courses, ā e. g., mat-
weaving, basketry, bent-iron work, kiiife-work in wood,
carpentry, mechanical drawing, freehand drawing, color
work, outdoor sketching, sewing, dressmaking, millinery,
cooking, household sanitation, personal hygiene (partly
through physical labor), gardening. This system lays
the foundations for agriculture, metallurgy, household
management, woodworking, and clothes-making. In
respect to discipline, it helps realize three purposes:
1st. It uses the surplus physical energy of boys and
158
CONTROL OF THE CLASS AND INDIVIDUAL
girls that otherwise goes into ''restlessness," mischief-
making, and defiance of authority. 2d. It develops
psychical energy for use in the so-called ''scholastic"
or "intellectual" studies and thereby overcomes in-
attention, indolence, and similar offences against proper
school-behavior. 3d. It affords a perfect means of dis-
cipline in two ways: ā I. A certain kind of bad boy or
girl may be given double and triple amounts of manual
work to do, being thereby deprived of Iris or her scholas-
tic work. II. The opposite kind of bad boy may be de-
prived of the privilege of his or her manual work until
reform is evident. These punislmients operate partly
because among boys and among girls it is a social dis-
grace to a boy or to a girl to be treated as an individual
case, to be isolated from the mass, as it were to be con-
sidered an Ishmaelite.
Fifth: In cities, there must be, as a matter of general
school administration, a process by which occasional
ofTenders may discover that the way of the transgressor
is long, if not hard, by sending him first to the principal's
office, next, if necessary, to that of a district superin-
tendent, then, if still necessary, to one of the associate
or assistant superintendents, and last to the city super-
intendent, in each instance, invariably accompanied by
parent or guardian. (In two years' experience in a
city organized as above, with sixty thousand pupils,
not one pupU ever actually came as far as the superin-
tendent's office. In -every case, those started thither
either disappeared in some incorrigible class or reformed
in the course of this process.)
In all towns and cities, it should be customary to try
boys who fail of good conduct in another school, with
another teacher and other comrades. The walk out-
159
CLASS TEACHING AND MANAGEMENT
side the ward or district, the contact with strangers, the
new personaHty of the teacher, in my experience, cures
the boy in nine cases out of ten. The method, of course,
is one of self-estrangement, and is both philosophically
valid and practically useful.
But where one (or more) of these features of a correctly
administered school system, ā State or city, ā is wanting,
corporal punishment may be necessary.
There are two kinds of teachers in our schools to-day,
ā those who get their good recitations from their pupils
by enforcing order among them, and those who have
order by getting from their pupils good recitations. The
first kind of teachers get interest, study, lessons via
management, the second kind get the results of manage-
ment via instruction. Teachers of the first kind are
entirely at home, ā at ease, ā in schools where corporal
punishments and threats of corporal punisliment are
in evidence or just behind the scenes. Teachers of the
second kind are not interested in the matter for them-
selves. This is one of the conditions whereby the cor-
poral punishment system lasts so long and continues
so general. Its defenders are ardent, the rest care but
little. Not teachers but public opinion put the system
out of the State of New Jersey, the City of New York,
and the District of Colmnbia.
Where, however, there is no authority in the teacher
as such, where the teacher is not adequately equipped
by nature, by general scholarsliip and by professional
training for the whole work of educating boys and
youth, where there are no classes for incorrigibles
and no reform schools or homes, where there is no
outlet for boyish energy in manual training and the
arts and crafts, where pupils can appeal immediately
160
I
CONTROL OF THE CLASS AND INDIVIDUAL
to politician, newspaper or board member when a
postponed punishment is threatened as on the way,
there corporal punishment, prompt, effective, and duly
apportioned to the offence is for the teacher who be-
heves in it the only course. In all such places, corporal
punisliment as a next-to-last recourse is right; and for
two reasons: ā 1st. No boy should grow up assuming
that he can xdolate the order of a superior or the laws
or conventions of polite society, and go scot-free. It
is a great wrong to him. The rod or its equivalent de-
scending upon liim promptly before some master of
his schoolmaster or mistress can intervene saves
him from contempt for teacher and school. For
tliis reason, the German philosopher Hegel asserted
that the sole valid reason for punishment is to
assert the moral law.^ 2d. Since most children go
to school to learn, the presence of noisy or mis-
cliievous outlaws, unrebuked, in their class is an injury
to them. To say tliis is not to assume that whipping
or other corporal punishment always immediately and
entirely cures school-boy outlawry. It seldom does so
cure the offender. If it cured one offender in two, ā if on
the average two wliippings made the bad boy good, ā the
force-theory w^ould be the universal, unchallenged prac-
tice. But it has no such record. Corporal punishment
sometimes causes obedience that lasts for a day or two;
sometimes it tides over for a season. In a few instances,
in schools employing it as the panacea for incorrigibility,
insubordination, disobedience, truancy, neglected home-
lessons, class-room inattention, school-yard "fights,"
street rowdyism, failure to pass tests, low marks, cor-
^ By the penalty, society solemnly affirms the violated principle.
ā Outlines of the Philosophy of Right.
161
CLASS TEACHING AND MANAGEMENT
poral punishment effects cures. But to speak of an
experience, on a considerable scale in one fairly large
school, I have found in fact that save in a few unusual
and easily recognizable cases, the remedy is worse than
the disease. In this elementary school of a thousand
pupils, the average number of all kinds of whippings by
one principal in his last year of service was sixty a
month, and the average nimiber by the teachers was
twenty per class-room each month, ā running as high as
ten daily in some of the intermediate grade rooms. The
next principal completely overturned the practice; and
for the next two years the total number, with far better
order as the result, was eighteen cases, ā an average of
nine a year as over against an average of three to four
thousand a year. Of course, it will be at once said that
the earlier practice was a reign of brutality ā which is
true, for in many instances the whippings were severe
and cruel. But the noteworthy facts were two: 1st, that
not having a proper tenure of office, properly trained
teachers, manual training courses, a class-room for in-
corrigibles, and an hierarchical system of school organiza-
tion, the second principal was forced to occasional severe
corporal punishments; and, 2d, that by an entirely dif-
ferent approach to the problem of order, with the same
corps of teachers, nearly all of them habituated to the
immediate use of the ferule upon the least suggestion of
disorder, the second principal secured far better order
than did the first.
To be specific: In the latter days of the former
regime, school- yard fights were so common, ā being sev-
eral every day, ā that neighbors often had to interfere.
In the second year of the corporal-punisliment-only-in-
cxceptional - cases regime, the total number of fights
1G2
CONTROL OF THE CLASS AND INDIVIDUAL
in a school population of five hundred boys, rep-
resenting thirty -seven different nationalities, was
seven.
In short, in poorly organized schools, occasional cor-
poral punishment is a sheer necessity; but even in such
schools, frequent punishment sets an example of force
that both boys and girls imitate on their playgrounds,
causes fierce hatreds of the teachers by many boys and
girls, prevents that reverence for, even worship of,
teachers which is the true ''mother" of intellectual and
moral progress in children, and destroys the natural
foundation of order through rational self-control in
later instruction in the secondary school.
Upon the assumption that a given school-system
cannot be reformed, ā which is usually true, ā the
principles that should govern the infliction of corporal
punishment are these ā viz.:
NEGATIVE PRINCIPLES
First: No mode of corporal punishment should ever
be exercised for trivial offences.
Second: Or should ever be employed in the presence
of other pupils unless they are joint offenders.
Third: Or should ever be applied unequally to equal
offenders.
Fourth : Or should ever be applied to sick or anaemic
or crippled or neurasthenic boys.
Fifth: (Or should be resorted to in the cases of any
girls of any age whatsoever either by women teachers
or by men.J
Sixth: Or should be tried when any other available
remedy would serve equally or nearly as well.
12 ' 163
CLASS TEACHING AND MANAGEMENT
AFFIRMATIVE PRINCIPLES
First: Corporal punishment should bo visited upon
healthy, maUcious boys. I. For direct defiance of
teachers. 11. For persistent and intentional disobedi-
ence of school rules. III. For maltreatment of other
and smaller boys. IV. For such playground offences
as fighting, playing marbles (against orders) for money
or any other gambling games, and blocking school-lines
in fire-drills, or otherwise imperilling lives."
Second: In those communities where schools are
"looked down upon" and teachers as such are con-
temned, corporal punishment should be visited upon
any healthy boys who, because of tliis disposition of
adults and of the consequent social atmosphere in
their conduct or remarks, assume that teachers are
not worthy of respect and act accordingly to the
defeat of conscientious efforts to educate them. In
other words, though it is higlily desirable for teachers
to rule through the willing and spontaneous obedience
of their pupils, wanting such obedience, it is neces-
sary for them to rule by force promptly exercised.
The approved forms of corporal punishment are (1)
blows on the hands by ruler or strap or switch; (2) blows
on the thighs or legs; and (3) in the. case of resistance
to these modes, spanking bj'' hand. When in a com-
munity whose conditions necessitate corporal punish-
ment, even tliis "last resort" fails, the next and really
last move, suspension by teacher or principal or even
superintendent, fails, and the lay-authorities, whether
committee or board or school visitors, refuse to expel a
really incorrigible offender, and such an offender returns
to school a victor, there is but one thing for a self-
164
CONTROL OF THE CLASS AND INDIVIDUAL
respecting teacher to do, ā immediately resign and de-
part. Such a refusal to expel is the plainest and ugliest
form of request to the teacher or principal or superin-
tendent to resign; and it springs from an absolute con-
tempt either for the personal occupant of the teaching
office or for the office itself, or for both.
It may perhaps be profitable to consider what the
most successful educator of ancient days had to say
about corporal punishment in dealing with Roman
youth. Quintilian wrote, ''But that boys should suffer
corporal punishment, though it be a received custom, I