“PUNISHMENT”

Taranaki Daily News, 6 April 1932, Page 3

“PUNISHMENT”

A LECTURE TO TEACHERS.

HUMUffATION IS BAD. London, Feb. 3. “Any form of punishment which humiliates a child is bad,” declared Dr. P. B. Ballard, in a lecture on “Punishment” to members of the Association of University Women Teachers. “Corporal punishment,” he continued, “does not reform, but brutalises a child, and for that reason the cane is bad. I have traced the careers of boys whose names have been recorded in the punishment books of schools, and my experience is that where a boy has been frequently punished in his first year at school, he has been more frequently punished in his last year. The cane has not reformed him.” He recalled inspecting a girls’ school where an assistant mistress was acting as head pending the appointment of a new headmistress. The candidates for the post were visiting the school, and of one, the acting headmistress said: “I hope Miss X. does not get it.” Asked why, she said: “Well, I was taught by her years ago, and one day for punishment she made me kneel before her. I shall never forget it, and I shall never forgive it,” she declared with emphasis. “What,” asked Dr. Ballard, “was the good of a punishment like that? Such a punishment is not reformative.” “School rules should be few in number, but absolutely rigid. Children are extraordinarily reasonable in the main. One thing that has always struck me in the London secondary schools is that there are too many ‘don’te,’ too many prohibitions. “It would be a good plan if all rules were first submitted to the children themselves. Unless they have the right to criticise the rules they do not give voluntary obedience to them. The best punishments in school are those decided upon by the children themselves.” School punishments should flow out of the offence. None ever did. What was the good, for example, of writing so many lines. It was not reformative, and served, only to impair the handwriting. “The atmosphere of our secondary schools, at any rate in London, ” he proceeded, “is nothing like as happy or as free as it ought to be. That might be because they are constantly working for the leaving certificate, which is an incubus on the school. “It has done some good, but that good could have been achieved in other and better ways. It has served, to divide secondary school children into sheep and goats, and the failures. have left school with the sense of an inferiority complex, which is the worst thing possible for a child on the outset of life.”