Even paternal example is not without its influence on the keenly observing mind of youth. The seventeen-year-old son of a neighbor was detected smoking a cigarette the day following the direct injunction of his father that he should not do so. When reproved by his father for disobedience, the son retorted: “Well, dad, why don’t you obey the law? You shot ducks out of season.”
The delinquent children who flow in a steady stream through our juvenile courts are undisciplined, self-willed, and rebellious against authority and are governed only by impulse which is as spasmodic as their conduct is abnormal. Obedience has never found a place in the poor moral equipment with which they are endowed. Practically every moral derelict stranded on the human scrap-pile can trace his failure in life to his disobedience in childhood; and the fault is not wholly his own but rests largely on the shoulders of parents who failed to compel obedience in the early years when compulsion was possible through firm and just regulation.
The boy who is early indoctrinated in obedience becomes plastic material ready to be shaped, through training, in the stature of a man of fine moral quality.
CHAPTER VII
THE REPRESSIVE METHOD OF TRAINING
THE training of the child should begin as soon as it is able to comprehend spoken language. A venerable mother who had reared eleven children and had seen them attain successful and honorable positions in life was asked the question: “At what time should the training of a child begin?” Her answer was: “In the cradle.” And, it is needless to add, it should be continued to maturity. There are, broadly speaking, two general plans of training which may be termed respectively the repressive method and the suggestive method.
The repressive method of training is founded on the principle of negation. It seeks to make the boy do right by constant admonition not to do wrong. It proceeds on the theory that elimination of the bad will, leave the good. It is indirect in its methods as well as its results.
The negative system of training manifests itself in such commands as, “Don’t make that noise;” “Don’t bother me, I’m busy;” “Don’t slide down the cellar door;” “Don’t talk so loud;” “Don’t play in the house;” “Don’t tease sister;” “Don’t eat so much;” “Don’t soil your clothes;” “Don’t bring those boys into the house;” “Don’t scuff out your shoes;” “Don’t get your hands dirty;” “Don’t be tardy at school;” “Don’t wear out the seat of your pants;” and so on without end.
No boy ever thrived on an indigestible diet of don’ts.
Jacob Riis, writing in the Outlook, says: “Write the one word ‘Don’t’ there, and only that, and the boy if he has any spirit will take to the jungle. Every father knows it; every teacher has learned it, if he has learned anything.”
While this system has a modicum of worth in certain of its applications, it lacks the comprehensiveness and directness necessary to accomplish the best results.