Public Controversy: Should teachers
be allowed to use physical punishment?
A bitter debate broke out in Massachusetts about
whether teachers could punish their children with whips and rods. The following
selections indicate some of the arguments that both sides used in this
controversy.
Horace Mann (1844)
Authority, Force, Fear, Pain!...
These are the motives, by which the children of Boston,--and if this doctrine
prevails, the children of the State also,--are to be trained.... Throughout
this whole section, conscience is no where referred to, as one of the
motive-powers in the conduct of children. The idea seems not to have
entered into the mind of the writer, that nay such agency could be employed in
establishing the earliest, as well as the latest relations, between teacher and
pupil. That powerful class of motives which consists of affection for parents,
love for brothers and sisters, whether older or younger than themselves,
justice and the social sentiment toward schoolmates, respect for elders, the
pleasures of acquiring knowledge, the duty of doing as we would be done by, the
connection between present conduct, and success, estimation, eminence, in
future life, the presence of an unseen eye,--not a syllable of all these is set
forth with any earnestness, or insisted upon, as the true source and spring of
human actions....
Was it not, and is it
not, one of the grand objects in the institution and support of Common Schools,
to bring those children who are cursed by a vicious parentage, who were not
only "conceived and brought forth," but have been nurtured in
"sin"; who have never known the voice of love and kindness; who have
daily fallen beneath the iron blows of those parental hands that should have
been outstretched for their protection;--was it not, and is it not, I say, one
of the grand objects of our schools to bring this class of children under
humanizing and refining influences; to show them that there is something
besides wrath and stripes and suffering in God's world?
...Let me avow...that physical
coercion is, in certain cases, necessary, natural, and proper;...and
to...[discredit] the sickly and ridiculous notion, that all use of pain and
compulsion is disgraceful and degrading....
Children should not hear the authority of
their parents and teachers called in question. They should not be allowed to
speak disrespectfully of their own or of each other's parents and teachers, and
he who through the press, or in any other way, encourages this, whatever he may
intend, is a disorganizer; is weakening and dissolving the primal bond of civil
society, and sapping the foundations of social order.