VIVISECTION IN SCHOOLS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 24, 1895

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 21, No. 42.

VIVISECTION IN SCHOOLS

The Journal of Education, among many other good things, has the following faithful protest against the killing of cats, rabbits, birds, or frogs for school work. We commend what it says to both parents and teachers:—

EFFECTS OF KILLING.

Now before a class of pupils in a public school, suppose you illustrate the lesson by dissection of a rabbit or a cat, killed at that time and for that purpose. It is possible that the majority of students might have their attention fixed only upon the facts of anatomy thus illustrated. But to some others—children quite as likely as otherwise to have been most carefully trained, and to be the objects of most tender solicitude—there will come slowly creeping into consciousness a vague, abnormal, horrible sense of satisfaction at the sight of this quivering flesh, yet ruddy with the warm blood of out-gone life. Which are the pupils that experience this emotion? Will they confess it to you?—Not at all. Yet they may be nearest and dearest to you by every human tie. It is you who have put them to a danger from which they should have been spared. You have aroused within them a sensation that is oftentimes the very mother of every cruelty. For out of this awakened sensation of abnormal pleasure at the sight of blood is born the instinct of murder, and the lowest tendencies of viciousness and crime.

ANOTHER VIEW.

There is yet another aspect of these methods of instruction—their influence upon all children who are entirely normal, but yet exceedingly sensitive to impressions. I do not hesitate to say that nothing such a child will learn by these lessons can ever compensate for the deleterious impression it may receive by the needless sacrifice of life in its presence. Say what we will, there is a kind of moral deterioration inseparable from the act of killing anything which is doing us no harm. To put out of existence a noxious animal or insect is to obey the instinct of self-preservation; but to take a perfectly harmless creature, kin to the pet of many a child, and to deprive it of whatever joys come from living—simply that children may see how curiously nature has constructed it—can hardly fail to give them a sense of wrongful complicity with deprivation of another’s rights. Not long since I was talking with a young girl graduate of the principal female college in this country, and although she was greatly interested in the study of biology, she told me that a most distasteful impression was created among the girl students by the fact that so many rabbits were killed to demonstrate what the sacrifice of a single life would have done equally well. Is it wise to blunt this sensibility regarding the sacredness of life? I am not referring to the psychopathic child, but to all children alike. There will come a time when, as young men and women, they should know how to prevent pain, by causing the painless termination of life; but for childhood that lesson should be unlearned, and as far as possible delayed. The beauty, the grace, the excellence of all harmless living things is the lesson for children, rather than precocious intimacy with the mystery of death.

A DANGER.

Then, too, there is yet another danger. The desire, the ambition to imitate is one of the first instincts of conscious life. I question whether there was ever experiment in class room that some child or children did not try to imitate in private or by themselves. Suppose it is merely a dissection of a rabbit just killed. Some child or children will wish to repeat it—and kill the rabbit themselves. Then you have initiated childhood into private vivisection. Is that advisable? Admit that you caution your class against such repetitions. But you can not easily convince an inquiring mind that what is right for the teacher to do in public may not also be copied in the privacy of his own room, and in the presence of his classmates.

“But is not dissection of recently killed animals absolutely necessary to a right understanding of the text-book?”

Not at all. Such methods of instruction are not only dangerous, but wholly unnecessary.

OBJECTS OF STUDYING PHYSIOLOGY.

What is the purpose of lessons in school physiology? Is it to start boys and girls on the road to a medical school?—Certainly not. The one great object—in fact, the only practical object—is simply to enforce on the minds of the pupils the lessons of hygiene. What are the plain rules for the preservation of health? What are the effects which may arise from use of tobacco, especially by the young? Wherein lies the danger of alcoholic stimulants? What injury to health comes from overeating, from improper food, from bad ventilation, from constriction of the body by unhygienic dress? How do people ignorantly injure their digestion, their breathing capacity, the heart, the brain? How may typhoid fever be prevented? How does a community help to stamp out scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles, smallpox, and other epidemic diseases? What shall one do in case of an accident, till the doctor comes?

These are the lessons of practical hygiene which schoolchildren should be thoroughly taught. They are the lessons which instruction in physiology in schools was designed to impart, and the importance of which can not be overestimated. But surely it needs no killing of rabbits, cats, or dogs to make such lessons plain. Everything needful may be illustrated by colored charts and manikins. A quickly-forgotten smattering of anatomy may indeed be learned by a child, dabbling its fingers in bloody tissues, but nothing which might not be better learned by other methods, without the danger of moral perversion, and at the cost of not a single pang.

Dangerous and unnecessary—these are the words which, in the august name of Science herself, may we not stamp upon all methods of instruction in our public schools which make for the brutalization of childhood by inducing early familiarity with the sacrifice of life?