SPARING THE ROD

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 August 1938, Page 2

SPARING THE ROD

FATHER’S REFUSAL Recently a Massachusetts judge, apparently a member of the school which believes that to spare the rod is to spoil the child, sentenced two boys to be horse-whipped for thievery, says a correspondent in the “Christian Science Monitor.” The idea behind this unusual sentence was probably sound, although it was roundly criticised, and protests were received from such organisations as the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Undoubtedly it. was intended as a form of punishment that would make an impression on the boys, without subjecting them to the ignominy and the bad influences of a reform school. The judge, however, reckoned without the fathers of the boys who were to administer the punishment Both fathers appeared in court the other day to state that they had never corporally punished their children, and they did not propose io start, now. Whereupon the justice, as an alternative, sentenced both youths to the Shirley Industrial School for an indeterminate time.

; There is considerable cause for regret here, for with the respective fathers wielding the whips of punishment would have been tempered with fatherly restraint. In the reform school, however, these boys may encounter had influences which will bo difficult to resist, with nothing to temper the temptations but their own strength of character.