CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN SCHOOLS.
THE Southern Italians are wholly indifferent to human life when it is a question of taking it in a quarrel, yet they think it shocking that it should be taken by way of penalty. Murder, in their eyes, involves anything between very little guilt and none at all ; they reserve all their repugnance for capital punishment. To English- men, this seems a strange inconsistency. They cannot believe that this horror of death inflicted by law can be genuine in men who are ready for an ill-turn or an in- sulting word to stab their friend or their mistress. Yet in one large class of Englishmen there is a precisely similar inconsistency. The records of the police-courts show that a section of the poor are by no means indis- posed to treat their children with severity. Their blows are readily given, and not infrequently they are given in very real earnest. Two conditions, however, seem to be required to justify this treatment in their own eyes or in those of their fellows. The child must be con- nected with them by blood or marriage, and the blows must be designed for their own gratification, and not for the child's benefit. If the relationship is that of teacher and scholar, and if the blows are given to cure the child of some fault or habit, the parent is at once in arms. Nothing will then satisfy him but a summons for assault. Ordinarily, he is shy of appealing to a Magistrate, and regards the police-court as a place to be avoided, except when he is taken there against his will. But in defence of a child who, after being beaten most of one week at home with any weapon that came handy, has in the course of the next week received six cuts with a cane at a Board school, he will even venture into this else abhorred precinct. As a father or step-father, he claims a right to do what he will with his own; but he will not recognise any right whatever, however qualified, on the part of the teacher who is charged with the child's education. This dislike to corporal punishment by the teacher has apparently in- creased with the recent extension of elementary educa- tion. The reason of this is not far to seek. So long as the parent sent his child to school of his own free will, he was naturally anxious for him to do well. Otherwise, the fee that had to be paid and the wages that had to be foregone were both wasted. But under a system of compulsion, the worst kind of parent feels no interest whatever in his child's progress. He would have kept him away from school had it been possible, and he is angry that the child should first be made to attend, and then be punished for behaving ill. It shocks his sense of justice. The school authorities need not, he feels, have taken him, if all they can do when they have got him is to cane him.
This same extension of elementary education has placed the Managers of Board schools in a difficulty. The necessity of resorting to corporal punishment has increased along with the difficulty of inflicting it. Formerly, if a boy proved incorrigible, he might be expelled from the school ; but with compulsory education boys cannot be expelled. School and church are the two places where they have most right to be. What is to be done with a vicious boy who can be neither expelled nor caned ? The only penalty that he really dreads is forbidden, and the culprit is master of the situation. Absurd as this state of things may seem, the folly of parents, aided by the folly of Magistrates, promises soon to make it general. In the Standard of Wednesday, there is a letter on this subject from Mr. Girling, an elementary teacher of high standing, which draws a melancholy picture of the straits to which schoolmasters are now reduced by the joint operation of these two causes. "Children," he says, "of all kinds are compelled to enter our schools," and a certain per-centage will enter them "with the most vicious tendencies." The only way in which these tendencies can be checked is by a judicious use of the cane. But for a teacher to use the cane is to subject himself to prosecution for assault, and there are, unfortunately, some Magistrates "whose apparent dislike of our present educational system" leads them to assume that the teacher is always wrong and the boy right. The consequence is, that "there is a strong tendency to pass over many things in children which, for the good of the community, should be sternly checked." They are not checked, because to check them in the only effectual way involves the risk of being prosecuted and heavily fined, and that is a risk to which a teacher is naturally unwilling to expose himself. Mr. Girling gives some pertinent instances of the kind of offences which are now in too many cases passed over by the teacher. Obscenity is one of them. It is terribly prevalent among the lowest section of our town population, and the only way to put it down is by appealing to the one feeling which is stronger in this class of children, —the dislike to bodily pain. Rowdyism and bullying is another. We know the trouble that these tendencies give us when the boy has grown into the man,— there are the Trafalgar Square riots by way of ex- ample ; but the best way to check them in the man is to prevent them from getting possession of the boy. How can we hope to do this when "teachers have been fined for inflicting moderate punishment, in some cases only one stroke," when "they have been fined for inflicting punishment at the request of the parents," when "it is not unusual for a child who is mutinous to threaten a teacher in open school with prosecution "? Magistrates who paralyse the teachers' influence in the school in this wanton fashion cannot be aware of the mischief they are doing. The child in whose supposed interest they interfere will come before them in later life in a different character. He will then be not the prosecutor, but the criminal; and for all the wrong he has done to himself and the community, these Magistrates will be responsible. They protected him from proper punishment when punish- ment would probably have been effectual, and by so doing they deprived him of his one chance of coming to a better mind.
Magistrates of this type, however, are probably too wrong-headed to make it of any avail to reason with them. It is more profitable to consider what can be done to deprive them of the power they now use to such bad purpose. In the first instance, the remedy lies with School Managers and School Boards. There are two things which they may do, and ought to do, to put the system of school punishments on a better footing. The first is to draw up a set of plain rules by which the infliction of corporal punishment shall be regulated. It will be something for a ,teacher to have such rules to appeal to when he is prosecuted for obeying them. With some Magistrates, it may avail him nothing that he is directed by his employers to inflict certain penalties for certain offences, and that the precise measure and time of these penalties has been carefully considered. But with others, the dislike of corporal punishment may spring from thoughtlessness, or be a hasty generalisation from some case in which it has been excessive, or indiscriminate, or passionate. If so, the fact that its administration is protected against dangers of this kind by careful regulation will naturally influence the Magistrate's decision. It will not be enough, however, for School Managers or School Boards to enact such a code of punishment. They must also sustain the teacher in carrying it out. They must assure him, that is, that if he is fined for obeying it, they will hold him harmless both in purse and in status. If this were done judiciously and universally, and Magistrates found that they had to deal with School Boards, and not with individual teachers, they would pro- bably see the wisdom of infusing a little common-sense into their administration of justice.
It would still, of course, remain to be seen how far School Boards and. School Managers were willing to take this reasonable view of their duties. If it should turn out that only a minority of them were disposed to do this of their own accord, it might be expedient for the Education Department to issue a model set of rules for corporal punishment, and to recommend its adoption in all schools which had not already one of their own. The instances in which school authorities would refuse to comply with this recommendation would probably be few, and if so, they might perhaps be left to enjoy their discreditable distinction in peace. If they proved more numerous, it would be expedient to insert this model set of rules in the Code, and to make its adoption a condition of sharing in the Parliamentary grant. In addition to these expedients, every opportunity should be taken to impress on all respectable parents that it is of the utmost moment to them that their children should not be corrupted by the unchecked vice of degraded companions. An elementary school cannot any longer be select, and unless more stringent discipline is made to do the work which was once done by exclusion, a decent working man will be brought by degrees to feel that in con- forming to the law and sending his child to school, he is really exposing him to the chance of moral and social ruin. There is no necessary connection between this contingency and elementary education, and it ought not to be created by a perverse administration of the law.
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