No considerations, no extenuating circumstances will be allowed to mitigate the punishment. Family conditions, the mother ... nothing can avail against the canceling of an examination. Even in the case of great criminals extenuating circumstances are admitted in mitigation of punishment. But school is another matter; here we have to deal with definite facts: there has been an infiltration of one mind into another, and we are no longer able to judge the children individually by their work. Moreover, the examination is the individual test. If the canceling occurs at the final examination, the culprit must go through the year again, and when a year is repeated it is the entire year. It is not as with convicts, where months and weeks are taken into account. Here the unit of measurement is the school year. And then there is another point to consider in the case of convicts: their crimes may have been induced by irresistible forces and conditions, driving them to do evil.... But who is there who cannot refrain from doing good? To do good is certainly not an irresistible impulse!
However, to obviate such inconvenient impulses, school educates children to refrain from mutual aid throughout the year. It goes even farther: it directly prevents the children from communicating one with another. What a chase it is! The clever, practical teacher adopts regular strategic tactics, and is familiar with all the child's devices in this covert and deceitful contest. Children are "capable of anything" to support one another and communicate one with another. If "prompting" when one child is repeating a lesson might reach the teacher's ear, we find a companion sitting in front of him with the open book fastened to his shoulders, where the other is able to read it. Or if the wily teacher makes the patient come out from among the desks in order to prevent him from receiving any help, his companions may make signs to him, perhaps by means of the deaf-and-dumb alphabet. Then we find the teacher using the blackboard as a pretext for turning the pupil with his face to the wall, the while she keeps her burning eyes fixed on the class. Thus the patient is isolated. "Nothing escapes" a clever teacher; she is capable of surprising a rolled-up note slipped by one child under the desk of another; and of confiscating a piece of blotting-paper which two children interchange on the pretext of using it, when they have written upon it.
For this reason properly constructed desks should be open in front, because otherwise it is so easy to pass things under them; whereas with desks which are not only hygienic but "moral," such subterfuges would be difficult to carry out.
"Indeed, these desks which are open in front also facilitate surveillance of the scholars from the moral point of view; because, always seated, placed side by side without any possibility of spiritual communion, their heads dazed by the continuous vociferation of the teacher, these children very often contract vicious habits, such as onanism, which originate in the school itself. These are less openly discussed than spinal curvature, myopia, and exhaustion from overwork, but the evil has long been recognized, even before science entered upon the scene to make a study of the maladies engendered by school conditions. The sedentary habit impedes circulation in the pelvic basin, and induces stagnation of the blood; moreover, what other outlet is provided for the nervous energies? And the evil spreads in an alarming manner.
"But open desks make subterfuges impossible. All moral devices for combating abuses flourish in the school. In the schools in Rome, for example, order and surveillance are so perfect that children are not even allowed to go to the lavatory. It is well known what disorder was caused by this 'question of the lavatory.' If a child became tired of sitting still or listening to the teacher, he asked leave to go out: he was capable of remaining shut up in the lavatory for a considerable time, in order to raise his spirits a little in a place he preferred to that he had just left, for pupils are not allowed to linger in the corridors; the attendants are always on the watch. But these visits to the lavatory had become such an abuse that it was decided to take remedial measures. To-day the physiological time is reckoned more or less exactly, and at a stated hour the whole of the pupils, accompanied by the teacher, marching in line two by two, like soldiers drilling, proceed to the lavatories. The children of the first file enter in succession and the others halt, but continue to mark time; as by degrees the children come out of the lavatory, they form in file again, and begin once more to mark time together with their companions. The movement seems, indeed, appropriate to the occasion. We will say nothing of the state in which the last children in the file of forty or fifty (who did not go in as a pretence, since the 'physiological time' had been reckoned) will find the lavatory; nor will we ask what has become of hygiene. Let us look at the exterior of the lavatories; they have little doors with a large space above and a large space below; thus modesty, and at the same time morality, are safeguarded; within, nothing but the proper duty can be performed. The more modern lavatories in schools, however, are made without seats; with an aperture in the ground to obviate contact and ensure hygiene: the uncomfortable position prevents a longer sojourn than is necessary. It appears that this is the best practical method for installations of this kind in common lodging-houses, casual wards, and schools."
School is the place where the "social sentiment" is developed; it is the child's society. As a fact, it is not the school in itself, nor the intercourse of the scholars, but the education given in the manner described above which is designed to develop this sentiment. Hence when my method became known, although I had spoken therein of places where children live together agreeably and work, I was asked in a critical tone: "And how will the social sentiment be developed if each child works independently?" We must therefore conclude that this system of regimentation in which the children do everything at the same moment, even to visiting the lavatory, is supposed to develop the social sentiment. The society of the child is therefore the antithesis of adult society, where sociability implies a free and well-bred interchange of courtesies and mutual aid, although each individual attends to his own business; in the society of the child it implies identity of physical attitudes and uniformity of collective actions, together with a total disregard of all pleasant and courteous relations; mutual help which is a virtue in adult society, is here considered the gravest fault, the worst offense against discipline.
Modern methods of instruction recommend the teacher to conclude every lesson with a moral, like the classic fables. Whether the lesson treats of birds, butter, or triangles, it must always end by pointing a moral. "The teacher must miss no opportunity," says the pedagogist; "moralization is the true aim of the school."
"Mutual aid" is the burden of the pedagogistic refrain, for the leitmotif of all moralities, not excepting that of the school, is "to love one another." To exhort children to help one another and show mutual affection the teacher perhaps adopts a psychological method in three periods distinguishing perception, association, and volition; or she may adopt the method of cause in its relation to effect; this is left to her discretion; but she must always keep her class in a state of "discipline" and "goodness," for these are its essential constituents.