Too Much Strap in Schools

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 964, 6 May 1930, Page 8

Too Much Strap in Schools

SIGN OF MORAL INEFFICIENCY (Written for THE SUN by the HEY. E. MOWBRAY-FINNIS.) ONE of the customs that take away the breath from a newcomer to this voting country is the freedom with which the strap is used in its State schools. And it is very difficult to justify this freedom in the light of all we know today oi the child.

In child-welfare New Zealand is more advanced than many other countries, but in this one particular it lags far behind. The old book says: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son; but he that loveth him ehasteneth him betimes.” And Ben Sira said: “Gold must be beaten and a child scourged.” But surely we have got a long way past this stage in the evolution of child education and training, Thackeray, who had such a deep insight into the true nature of the child, said of him: “Who feels injustice, who shrinks before a slight, who has a sense of wrong so acute, and so glowing a gratitude for kindness, as a generous boy?” It is only men and women who know the boy in this deeper sense, and have it in them to respect and honour this fine quality, who have any right to teach or train our children.

Moral Efficiency A great child psychologist has said; “If you want to know the child, sit at his feet.” This our teachers do in a very real sense today in our training colleges, but it is one thing to know the child, and quite another to have the capacity to respond to the best that is in children. The fact is that teaching is an art which cannot be taught. Musicians, artists, and teachers are born, not made. The born teacher will have that moral urge, that mysterious indefinable something that will command discipline, confidence and love from the worst offenders, without the use of tongue or hand.

The teacher who has constantly to stand with strap in hand does not know the first thing about teaching and training children. He lays bare before the whole class his lack of moral courage and efficiency, which children are more sensitive to detect than any adult.

The headmaster who is keenly alive to all we know about boys and girls today will make his staff keep a careful record of strappings, and in this way the strappers could soon be banished from our schools. Little Animals?

There are extreme cases where corporal punishment may be justified, but these are very rare, as our prison system evidently recognises. As soon as you touch a man with a whip you

treat him no longer as a man but as an animal; and this in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred defeats the very end of punishment, which is to prevent men from doing evil, and to urge them to do good. If this be true of men it is surely doubly true of children. If a man or a boy can get down so low as to become more an animal than a man, then corporal punishment may help him, as it certainly does the horse and the dog. There are many who justify the strap by maintaining that boys and girls are little animals, and nothing more; but the fallacy of this argument is that they do not know the child.

There are schools in our great city slum areas at Home where some of the children are so lowly bred that they harp back to the animal stage to an alarming degree, and are not sufficiently past the purely animal stage to respond to the moral urge in a teacher. Here the vicious tendency can only be kept in check by corporal punishment, but even the teachers in these schools, who are among some of our finest men and women, use the caue but seldom.

No Live Coal Carlyle once said: “How shall he give kindling in whose own inward man there is no live coal, but all is burnt out to a dead grammatical cinder?” One does not like to believe that the reason why the strap is used so frequently in many of our schools is that our teachers have no “live coal”—that they lack moral courage and efficiency. And one simply refuses to believe that the children of New Zealand are less advanced from the animal stage than the boys and girls of other countries. The only excuse we can make for the strappers is that the lack of parental control in many of the homes of New Zealand is appalling. But even so, that does not justify teachers in using corporal punishment, but should rather urge them to develop greater moral power. The system of strapping, therefore, drives one to the conclusion that there are a number of teachers, male and female, who would be better employed in breaking in horses or training lions, than training our children; but even here, our best trainers tell us that moral courage is the verv secret of success.