p. 12 | Children’s Rights

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 13, 1906

Children’s Rights

There is one among the children’s rights that is very often not respected by their elders. It is their right to be treated with civility and politeness. They are taught—or have been, and ought to be—to be respectful to their parents and teachers and all older people, but the opposite obligation is not often enough insisted upon and practised. If there be more in older persons to call forth respect, there is also with them, or should be, more capacity for showing respect, more knowledge, judgment, and practise in courtesy. Children are quick to follow examples; and to do as they see others do is but natural with the children. The pattern, much to be regretted, is too often but a poor one.

Not only are parents remiss in recognizing and granting this right of children, but teachers in our schools have yet to learn much of what they owe to their pupils. In many instances these teachers, who are paid to look after the deportment of the children entrusted to their care, are grossly discourteous, both as to words and manners, and many of them are in no sense fit to have charge of the little ones to whose impressionable minds they show forth the very rudest manners and most discourteous language. They would not dare to talk to the parents and guardians as they do to the children.

Many parents who are careful of the manners and speech of their little ones at home are at a loss to understand where their carefully guarded children learn such rudeness of speech and such brusqueness of manner as they sometimes display. This is but another reason why parents and guardians should visit the schools and familiarize themselves with the companionship to which they subject these tender charges, and as to the fitness or unfitness of the teacher for the trust and reliance placed in his hands. Teachers are often no more faultless than are the pupils they are supposed to train properly, and, being seldom visited by the parents, they are on their best behavior when “visitors” do appear, and thus the child is more often than not unjustly blamed for offensive manners and speech when he is only “following copy.”— Selected.