But if we must sit, be it ever so short a time, our seats should always have backs; and those which are designed for children, should not be so high as to render them uncomfortable. Nor should the backs of seats be so high as they usually are, either for children or adults. They should never come much higher than the middle of the body. If they reach the shoulders, they either favor a crouching forward, or interfere with the free action of the lungs.
This might be deemed a proper place for saying something on the position of children in manufactories. But here a world of abuse opens upon my view, the full development of which demands a large volume. How many crooked spines, emaciated bodies, decaying lungs, as well as scrofulas, fevers, and consumptions, are either induced or accelerated by these unnatural employments! I mean they are unnatural for the young. As to employing adults in them, I have nothing at present to say. But when I think of the cruel custom of placing children in these places, whose bodies—and were this the place, I might add, minds—are immature, and especially girls, I am compelled, by the voice of conscience, and, as I trust, by a regard to those laws which God has established in our physical frames, but which are yet so strangely violated, to protest against it. Better that no factories should exist, than that children should be ruined in them as they now are. Better by far that we should return, were it possible, to the primitive habits of New England—to those by-gone days when mothers and daughters made the wearing apparel of themselves and their families—when, if there was less of intellectual cultivation, and less money expended for luxuries and extravagances, there was much more of health and happiness.
There is one more species of abuse to which, in closing, I wish to direct maternal attention. I allude to injudicious modes of inflicting corporal punishment.
Let me not be understood to appear, in this place, as the advocate of bodily punishments of any kind; for if they are even admissible under some circumstances, I am fully convinced that in the way in which they are commonly administered, they do much more harm than good.
But leaving the question of their utility, in the abstract, wholly untouched, and taking it for granted, for the present, that they are—as is undoubtedly the fact—sometimes employed, and will continue to be so for a great while to come, I proceed to speak of their more flagrant abuses.
Among these, none are more reprehensible than blows of any kind on the head. Even the rod is objectionable for this purpose, since it exposes the eyes. But the hand—in boxing the ears or striking in any way—is more so. The bones of the head, in young children, are not yet firmly knit together, and these concussions may injure the tender brain. I know of whole families, whose mental faculties are dull, as the consequence—I believe—of a perpetual boxing and striking of the head. Some individuals are made almost idiots, in this very manner.—But the worst is not yet told. Many teachers are in the habit of striking their pupils' heads with thick heavy books; and with wooden rules. I have seen one of the latter, of considerable size and thickness, broken in two across the head of a very small boy; and this, too—such is the public mind—in the presence of a mother who was paying a visit to the school. I have seen parents and masters strike the heads of their children with pieces of wood, of much larger size;—in one instance with a common sized tailor's press-board; in another with the heavy end of a wooden whip-handle, about an inch in diameter.
Children are sometimes severely beaten across the middle of the body—the region where lie the vital organs—the lungs, the heart, the liver, &c. They are sometimes beaten too, across the joints, or in any place that the excited, perhaps passionate teacher or parent can reach. Rules and books are thrown with violence at pupils in school. There is a story in the "Annals of Education," Vol. IV. at page 28, of a teacher who threw a rule at a little boy, six years old, which struck him with great force, within an inch of one of his eyes. Had it struck a little nearer to his nose, it would, in all probability, have destroyed his left eye.
But without extending these remarks any farther, every intelligent mother who reads what I have already written, will see, as I trust, the necessity of properly informing herself on the great subject of physical education; and of being better prepared than she has hitherto been for acquitting herself, with satisfaction, of those high and sacred responsibilities which, in the wise arrangements of Nature and Providence, devolve upon her.