THE ROD AND THE CHILD. A Valuable Aid.

Free Lance, Volume VIII, Issue 369, 27 July 1907, Page 6

THE ROD AND THE CHILD. A Valuable Aid.

WHILE bishops and parsons and other great people are beseeching the colonists to stand to their guns, and not "to turn the other cheek also" in several parts of the Dominion, as well as in Wellington, the enraged parent is writing to the papers demanding to know why his Johnny should be caned at school. The idea seems to be that it is quite reasonable to inflict mortal injuries on a stranger, but quite inhuman to inflict the most trifling bruise on a home product. » • « Most of us who have arrived at the bald-headed stage view with delight (from a safe distance) the disciplinary whackings we got in our callow youth, and ascribe our present eminence to the treatment meted out by the man who thumped in the modicum of teaching we received m the days before free, secular, and compulsory education made lawyers of everybody and politicians of the rest. • « • On the ground that the strap was good for us, we assert that the strap is not bad for the young colonial of tod!ay, who is much disposed to resent discipline and to regard his seniors as his inferiors. The average parent, believing his goose is a swan, is loth to lay on the corrective supplejack, and this misplaced kindness makes the part of the school-teacher harder. The moral effect of the judiciouslyapplied supplejack is sometimes greater than the moral effect of a hundred "lines." * *' * We do not believe that the average school-master in NeAv Zealand applies the rata-vine either too frequently or too severely. The healthy youngster in New Zealand is as "naughty" as any other healthy young human, and his ebullience of spirits frequently requires toning down if it runs to wickedness. It is when we ourselves get a bit stiff and crabbed that we begin to object to our children being treated as we were treated in the "good old days." With all our modern "humanitarlanism," boys happily still tight amongst themselves, and the boy who is proud of a black eye because he gave the other fellow two black eyes, ought to take his gruelling from the srhool-master like a man if he deserves it — and he generally does. The young colonial is not namby-pamby at heart, but so many nice people with thick mufflers and a hectic cough are out to keep every wind that blows from him that he is in danger of becoming a candidate for a glass case and cotton wool. • » • We fear that it is a lack of the Spartan-like quality in mothers that induces so much anxiety in regard to

school flagellations. Probably we recommend the careful and considerate use of the occasional rod for the child because we are not a child, arid our* brutal British instinct to something get hurt is another reason. West renuously object to the caning of" children who don't deserve it, andl highly recommend the strapping or" the teachers who inflict undeserved punishment. But, the infuriated parent who demands the resignation of a teacher for smacking a boy who immediately goes away and gets hisleg broken at football has not our sympathy.