Dickens As an Educator

by James L. Hughes

The punishments referred to are the revelation of natural laws. There is no personal element of the punishing agency manifest to the child. God does not appear to the child as a punisher, and it is an astounding error in training to reveal such a consciousness of God to the child. Responsibility for the consequences of their acts is a law of which all children approve. This appeals to their sense of justice, and there is no other sense to which we can appeal with success so universally in children as the sense of justice. “Squareness” is the highest quality named in the lexicon of childhood. A boy would rather be deemed “square” than receive praise for any other characteristic or accomplishment. So he recognises the justice of being held accountable for the directly resulting consequences of his acts quite as readily as he accepts the fact, without blaming any one else, that he will be burned if he touches fire. There is no element of coercion in the law of consequences. It is a just and universal law in harmony with his moral responsibility; therefore he will respect it. Coercion is directly contrary to the fundamental laws of his happiness and his true growth, and therefore he naturally and properly dislikes and disapproves of it, and of the individual who outrages justice by using it.

The wonderful stories of Dickens set the world thinking by first arousing the strongest feelings of sympathy for the child and then developing sentiment and thought against every form of coercion, more especially coercion by corporal punishment. The awakening has been most satisfactory in its results. When Dickens began his writing against corporal punishment the rod was the almost universal remedy for all defects in animals or human beings. Whatever the defect, the superior in the eyes of the law used the one agency to overcome it. Mothers used the rod to subdue their children. Husbands used the rod to keep their children and wives in order. Men whipped their horses with impunity, as they did their children or wives. They owned them, and their right to punish them as they chose was unquestioned. Men trained animals to perform tricks in menageries by beating them, and they trained dancing, or performing, or learning girls and boys quite as inhumanly. Ownership or subordination justified unspeakable cruelty. The weakness of the child, the helplessness of the animal, appealed to the hardness of human nature, and not to its chivalry or sympathy. Even the poor feeble-minded and idiotic, who were confined in asylums, were terribly flogged by the most advanced philanthropists of the highest Christian civilization. They were weak. It was the duty of the authorities to control them, and “stripes and bruises” were regarded as the only true agencies for securing obedience. The rod was the highest controlling and directing force in the world.

What a change has been wrought! Horses and children and wives are protected from brutal treatment now by law. The insane are not flogged to make them sane in any well-conducted institutions. More than half the children in the schools of the civilized world are free from the terror and degradation of corporal punishment by law, or by the higher consciousness of more intelligent teachers. Parenthood everywhere is studying the child and trying to become conscious of its own higher powers of guiding character so that it may be able to train the children in truer and more productive and less dangerous ways than formerly. And Charles Dickens was the great apostle of these grand reforms.

We shudder now as we read of the outrages practised on helpless children and on the insane half a century ago not by the heathen, but by earnest, conscientious Christians. The men who live half a century hence will shudder when they read that in some schools at the close of the nineteenth century children who were partially or temporarily insane from hereditary taint, or imperfect nutrition, or cruel treatment, or anger, or from some other removable or remediable cause were whipped, and that men, some of whom occupied respectable positions, advocated the breaking of children’s wills! If these “will-breaking” educators were in charge of asylums they would resurrect the straitjacket and the whipping post for the insane.

The few who advocate corporal punishment openly claim that they have the authority of the Bible for their faith in the rod. They should remember that good men have stood with Bibles in their hands misrepresenting God and attempting to stop the progress of every great movement toward freedom and reform. Galileo was imprisoned by the Church because he taught that the earth turns round. Men had no difficulty in showing that the Bible approved of slavery, or that it prohibited woman from the exercise of the right or the performance of the duties of responsible individuality. So men still quote Solomon to show that corporal punishment is approved by God, though such a conclusion would be rejected by the highest interpreters.

“Whipping makes strong characters.” No, it makes hard characters, and hardness is but one element of strength, and not the best element of strength. The strength of the English character has not been developed, as is claimed by some, by the whipping done in English schools and homes. It comes partly by race heredity from the sturdiness of the Saxon and Norman founders of the race, partly from the general practice of working hard from youth up, and largely from the fact that the English playgrounds are so universally used, and are the scenes of the severest struggles for supremacy in skill and power that are witnessed in any part of the world. The winning half inch or half length, the valorous struggle for leadership on track or river—these are the things that have preserved and developed English force and bravery, in spite of the fact that England in her schools and homes has done fully her share of whipping. A boy or girl who spends as much time in free strong play as the English boy, works out the effects of a great many evils from his or her life. When men see the futility of dependence on flogging for developing energetic strength of character they will study the influence of play to the great advantage of racial vigour, and courage, and moral energy.

Corporal punishment, like all other forms of coercion, robs the child of joyousness, and joyousness is one of the most essential elements in the true growth of a child. Corporal punishment affects the nervous systems of children injuriously, and when applied to certain parts of the body it stimulates prematurely the action of the sexual nature, and leads to one of the worst forms of depravity.

Corporal punishment is ineffective as a disciplinary agency. In one American city during the generation after Dickens began his great crusade against corporal punishment it was the practice to whip with a rawhide all children who came late, but the lateness steadily increased in defiance of the rawhide. It was reduced to less than one one-hundredth part of its former proportion when whipping for lateness was entirely abolished and more rational means adopted.

The order and co-operation of pupils is best in those schools in which no corporal punishment is used. If in any school only one teacher relies on the rod as a stimulator to work and a restrainer of evil, her class is sure to be the most disorderly, the least co-operative, and the most defective in original power in the school. As the children throughout the school come from the same homes, play with the same companions, attend the same churches, and are subject to the same general influences, it is perfectly clear that the whipping is the distinctive feature of character training that deforms the children. They will become normal, reasonable children when they reach the next room. This illustration assumes that all the teachers are possessed of good natural ability to direct the child properly. The one who uses corporal punishment fails because she has been dwarfed by her faith in corporal punishment. She has believed in it so fully that she has not sought to understand higher and better means. She has studied neither the child nor her own powers of child guidance.

Dickens taught the inefficiency of coercion to accomplish what men hoped to accomplish by it in his criticism of the revolting use of capital punishment in former times. In A Tale of Two Cities he says: