The biographic charts of the reformatories give no evidence that this educative movement has as yet been understood. They show that punishments are still regarded as possessing a corrective efficacy, because the conception that the so-called delinquent children may be a pathological product and a result of disastrous family and social conditions, has not yet penetrated with sufficient clearness.

But progress along this path is surely bound to come as a result of the experience which this principle of reform has made possible.

The biographic charts have unquestionably laid the foundations of a new edifice in pedagogy.

Scientific Pedagogical Advantages of Biographic Histories:

  1. The biographic chart takes the place of the report cards and records of the relative marks of merit and demerit; for while these records and reports constituted a statement of effects, altogether empirical, the biographic chart investigates the causes and in this way furnishes pedagogy with a scientific basis. There is no need of further demonstration. The principal consequences of the above indicated progress are two in number.
  2. The biographic chart, replacing the earlier classifications, raises the teacher's standard of culture by directing him along a scientific path, associates the teacher's work with that of the physician, and makes the teacher a far-sighted director of the development and perfectioning of the new generations.
  3. The biographic chart includes a new educative movement which abolishes rewards and punishments.

On this third point much might be said, since it touches upon one of the fundamental doctrines of pedagogical progress. But since this is not a treatise upon scientific pedagogy, it is necessary to limit the exposition to a few fundamental points.

In fact, it will be sufficient to speak of cases in which education is most difficult and where the rewards and punishments are unavailing—for these will include all simpler cases. A luminous example is furnished by the education of new-born infants. Of all human beings they used to be the most troublesome because of the impossibility of educating them by the old-fashioned methods. They cried at all hours of the day and night, making a slave of the mother or whoever took her place.

To-day, babies are quiet; it is marvelous to go through the infant ward in the Obstetrical Clinic of Rome; absolute silence reigns there, and yet if we lift up the white curtains of the cribs, we see the little ones lying with their eyes wide open. A deeper knowledge than was formerly had of the hygiene of the child has enabled us to interpret his needs, and when these are satisfied, the child is tranquil. Bodily cleanliness, liberty of movement, prolonged repose in the crib, and rational feeding have obtained this remarkable result of silencing the baby, of rendering it more robust and of liberating the mother from the slavery of her mission. The classic cry of the child in swaddling bands was a protest against the suffering which ignorance imposed upon him. To-day the little one, lying tranquilly in his crib, begins to exercise his senses earlier and more easily, a ray of light strikes him and attracts his attention, and with this his education has begun, while formerly the suffering due to indigestion kept him for a much longer time a stranger to the external world.

The same thing may be repeated for every year of childhood. Often what we call naughtiness on the part of the individual child is rebellion against our own mistakes in educating him. The coercive means which we adopt toward children are what destroy their natural tranquility. A healthy child, in his moments of freedom, succeeds in escaping from the toys inflicted upon him by his parents, and in securing some object which arouses the investigating instinct of his mind; a worm, an insect, some pebbles, etc.; he is silent, tranquil and attentive. If the child is not well, or if his mother obliges him to remain seated in a chair, playing with a doll, he becomes restless, cries, or gives way to convulsive outbursts ("bad temper"). The mother believes that educating her child means forcing him to do what is pleasing to her, however far she may be from knowing what the child's real needs are, and unfortunately we must make the same statement regarding the school-teachers! Then, in order to make him yield to coercion, she punishes the child when he rebels and rewards him when he is obedient. By this method we drive a child by force along paths that are not natural to him. In the same way, absolute governments employed public entertainments and the gallows, in order to compel the people to act and think according to the will of their sovereign; indeed, they were considered as indispensable means of good government. To-day we have come to realise that such means are more or less adapted to the successful crushing of a people's spirit, but not to governing them well. The reign of liberty, which leaves men the opportunity to give expression to their own powers and above all to their own thoughts, is doing away with festivals and executions; and it is not until this is accomplished that men can be really well governed.

Something similar is going to take place in the schools. But here, since the children are incapable of understanding what they ought to do for their own best good, science studies them in order to assist their natural needs.