The Daily Telegraph. WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 1884.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 4009, 28 May 1884, Page 2

The Daily Telegraph. WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 1884.

We arc glad to notice in our telegrams that the Palmerston magistrate has had the good sense to dismiss an information against a local teacher for punishing a pupil. Some time back the Sydney Bulletin contained a capital woodcut, the subject of which was "The Larrikin, and how we train him." On the left hand side a pedagogue is represented in the act of punishing a pupil who is hanging on to the master's beard, while a policeman has seized the schoolmaster's arm. Underneath is the inscription:—■ "When he is curable we fine a schoolmaster for correcting him." On the right hand side of the page is a picture of a man stripped to the waist and being flogged, with the suitable inscription, " When he is incurable, we pay a man to flog him." These pictures give a faithful representation of the mistaken direction that sentimentality has taken during the last twenty-five years. It is no longer lawful to maintain discipline in a school by means of the fear of the rod. A youngster knows that if he receives corporal punishment, no matter how well deserved, he has only to show slightly bruised shoulders to his fond and foolish parents to secure the degradation of his schoolmaster. We doubt very much whether there is a teacher in the Australasian colonies whj does not regard himself as a fortunate man if, in the course of his professional career, he can say that he has never been before a Police Court on a charge of assault. 3?or that is the term applied to a case of juvenile punishment. Immunity from fine, or censure from a school committee, through abstaining from inflicting corporal chastisement, if properly regarded, should be no feather in the cap of a schoolmaster. In any large school it is impossible to maintain discipline without the occasional use of the cane, or some other suitable instrument, and when a teacher states that he can do without anything of the kind an impression is created in the mind of a man of the world that he is being addressed by either a hypocrite or an inefficient instructor. In a school containing two or three hundred boys the diversity of character to be met with ranges from the juvenile saint to the incipient ruffian; to flog all alike would be cruelty, and to abstain altogether from corporal punishment would be on the part of the master a dereliction of duty. But in view of modern sentimentality a teacher may well be excused if he allows the wrongdoer to go unpunished. It is better for him from a bread-and-butter point of view to keep on good terms _ with his committee and the parents of the children than to fearlessly do his duty to his pupils. Unquestionably he would be fined for flogging the youthful but malleable larrikin; ancTtherefore, leaving him aloue, he consoles himself by the reflection that the time will not be distant when the State will perform the needful punishment in a severer form. We should like to know how many Australian larrikins who have suffered the lash attribute their experience of the cat-o-nine tails to their immunity from the cane or birch-rod in their boyhood. We have mentioned the birch-rod; has it ever been used in a public school in New Zealand ? The very idea of it would make a teacher shudder at the thought of the pains and penalties he would be subjected to_ if he dared to order a boy to be "hoisted." Nevertheless the birch is a much safer instrument to use than a cano, which latter can be made to inflict severe injuries where the other would be perfectly harmless. Our contention is that in these colonies the tendency is to allow children such an extent of freedom from parental control that naturally their habits and characters have a leaning towards larrikinism, which, unchecked in the school-room, leads to their own unhappiness and to that of society.