A Dominie's Log

by Alexander Sutherland Neill

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When I speak kindly to a bairn I sometimes ask myself what I mean (for I try to find out my motives). Do I want the child to think kindly of me? Do I try to be popular? Am I after the delightful joy of being loved? Am I merely being humanly brotherly and kind?

I have tried to analyse my motives, and I really think that there is little of each motive. I want to be loved; I want the bairn to think kindly of me. But in the main I think that my chief desire is to make the bairn happy. No man, no woman, has the right to make the skies cloudy for a bairn; it is the sin against the Holy Ghost.

I once had an experience in teaching. A boy was dour and unlovable and rebellious and disobedient. I tried all ways—I regret to say I tried the tawse. I was inexperienced at the time yet I hit upon the right way. One day I found he had a decided talent for drawing. I brought down some of my pen-and-ink sketches and showed him them. I gave him pictures to copy, and his interest in art grew. I won him over by interesting myself in him. He discovered that I was only human after all.

Only human!... when our scholars discover that we are only human, then they like us, and then they listen to us.

I see the fingers of my tawse hanging out of my desk. They seem to be two accusing fingers. My ideals are all right, but.... I whacked Tom Wilkie to-night. At three o'clock he bled Dave Tosh's nose, and because Dave was the smaller, I whacked Tom. Yet I did not feel angry; I regret to say that I whacked Tom because I could see that Dave expected me to do it, and I hate to disappoint a bairn. If Dave had been his size, I know that I should have ignored their battle.

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I have not used the strap all this week, and if my liver keeps well, I hope to abolish it altogether.

To-day I have been thinking about punishment. What is the idea of punishment? A few months ago a poor devil of an engine-driver ran his express into a goods, and half-a-dozen people were killed. He got nine months. Why? Is his punishment meant to act as a deterrent? Will another driver say to himself: "By Jove, I'll better not wreck my train or I'll get nine months." Nine months is not punishment, but the lifelong thought: "I did it," is hell.

I am trying to think why I punished Lizzie Smith for talking last Friday. Bad habit, I expect. Yet it acted as a deterrent; it showed that I was in earnest about what I was saying—I was reading the war news from the Scotsman.