PUNISHMENT AND OFFENSE.
By Nora Smith
THE child who obeys you simply because he fears punishment is a slave who cowers under the lash of the despot. Undue severity makes him a liar and a coward. He hates his master. He hates the thing he is made to do. There is a bitter sense of injustice, a seething passion of revenge, forever within him, and were he strong enough he would rise and destroy the power that has crushed him. He has done right because he was forced to do so, not because he desired it, and since the right-doing of obedience was neither the fruit of his reason nor his love, it can not be permanent. The feeling of justice is strong in a child’s mind. You have wounded that feeling. You have destroyed the sense of cause and effect by your arbitrary punishment. You have corrected him for disobedience, for carelessness, for unkindness, for untruthfulness, for slowness in learning his lessons. How is he to know which of these offenses is the greatest if all have received the same punishment? Why should giving him a sound thrashing teach him to be kind to his little sister? Why should he learn the multiplication table with greater rapidity because you ferrule him soundly? Have you ever found pain an assistance to the memory? If he has little intellectual perception of the difference between truth and falsehood, why should you suppose that smart strokes on any portion of the body would quicken that perception? Is it not clear as the sun at noonday that since he observed the punishment to have no necessary relation to the offense, and since he observed it to be light or severe according to your pleasure, is it not clear that he will suppose you to be using your superior strength in order to treat him unfairly? And will not the supposition sow seeds of hatred and rebellion in his heart?—Nora Smith.