The following is a description of a scene witnessed at school by one of the county superintendents in his periodical visitation: two girls, about twelve years of age, were out of order, and the teacher, without any warning, sprang across the room and severely flogged both. A little boy, tired of sitting on his hard seat, leaned over on his elbow; he was caught by the head, dragged over the desk to the floor, and ordered to study. A little girl of seven, after one or two admonitions to “tend her book,” was caught by the arm, dragged on to the floor, rudely shaken, cuffed on both sides of her head, and then whipped. “I looked around,” says the superintendent, “to learn the effect upon the other scholars. I saw no happy faces. There seemed to settle upon the countenances of nearly all, a cloud of gloom and terror. The school closed soon after, and the teacher remarked to me, that he did not punish near as much now as he formerly did.”
Moral Injuries inflicted on Children at School.
One teacher writes thus: “Where the plastering remains, it is covered with coal marks, and numerous holes are cut through the writing desks, while vulgarities and obscenities are not only written, but deeply cut in the desks and doors.” Of another house he says, “Within and without are manifest evidences of a polluted imagination. Several lewd representations are deep cut in the clapboards in front of the house, in the entry, and even on the girls’ desks, so as to be constantly before their eyes.” “These things,” he adds, “are but specimens selected from scores.”
Another writes thus: “I have alluded to the representations of vulgarity and obscenity that meet the eye in every direction. I am constrained to add that, during intermissions, ‘certain lewd fellows of the baser sort’ sometimes lecture boys and girls, large and small, illustrating their subject by these vile delineations. Many of our schoolhouses are nurseries of disorder, vulgarity, profanity, and obscenity—nay, more, in some cases, they are the very hothouses of licentiousness.”
One single statement, made up from these reports of the county superintendents, and presented by the head superintendent in his report, speaks volumes on the neglect of modesty, decency, neatness, and purity. In the whole state there are six thousand schoolhouses destitute of any kind of woodhouse or privy; and of the whole number, only about one thousand have privies provided with separate accommodations for children of different sexes.
It appears, also, that though the schools and teachers are fast rising in character, and that many now are of uncommon excellence, yet that many of the teachers are notoriously depraved, while intellectual training, in the majority of cases, is deplorably low, and the moral training still more defective.
One superintendent remarks, “Gloomy, indeed, are the impressions made by our schoolhouses. The lessons of immorality and indecency often taught there would cause a shudder to thrill every sensitive mind.” Another says, “There are, I regret to say, many teachers whose morals, manners, and daily example wholly unfit them for their duties.” Another says, “In some instances, moral qualifications have been wholly disregarded, and teachers notoriously intemperate employed.” Says another, “I have found a number whose language was low, obscene, and sensual, still employed in teaching.”
Says another, “If the tastes, associations, and moral sentiments of the teacher lack elevation and dignity, what literary progress will atone for examples so pernicious? And yet such are the moral influences shed about them by many licensed to teach.”