TEACHING CHILDREN TO FIGHT.
By Editor
DR. G. STANLEY HALL, head of the Department of Mental Science in Clark University, Worcester, Mass., has some very queer things to say in regard to the nature of boys. Some of his utterances, as reported in the San Francisco Examiner of September 17, are as follows:— "Boys are naturally robbers. They are bandits and fighters by nature. There has recently been conducted a scientific study of the societies which boys form—I mean the kind of society or club they get up when they are away from the supervision of their elders. In every instance those societies have been predatory. All of the members thirsted for blood, and all their plans were for thievery and murder. . . .9Unless Tommy is a mere manakin, a namby-pamby little milksop, he doesn't refrain from stealing apples because his conscience troubles him. Not a bit of it; he hasn't got any conscience to trouble him. . . . Then there is the idea of teaching children that it is wrong to fight—that they ought to turn the left cheek when they are struck on the right. Fiddlesticks! Unless you want to make a selfish, knock-kneed weakling of him, teach him to double up his fists and strike back. I believe in healthy children's quarrels and fights. Physical courage is the foundation for moral courage later in life. . . . Within reason I believe in allowing children to bully and fag each other at school. The English have the right idea about these things in their schools. The children there soon find out who is master." If such doctrine as the foregoing is seriously taught and believed, it could do nothing else but turn the world back to the savagery from which the professor, in a sentence that we do not quote, says that it sprung. It is doubtless true that boys who are allowed to run wild, without the supervision of Christian parents, would form societies bent on rapine and murder. But what have been their surroundings?—They have lived in some back alley, and in all probability have been taught by their fathers and mothers that if they can steal anything and not get caught they are doing a praiseworthy deed. Then what literature they have read has been of the border-ruffian stamp, and the ideals placed before their minds have been those of bloodshed and crime. What else could such children do than to form societies whose constitutions and by-laws provided for murder and robbery? But even if the child has not had this most unfortunate back-alley education, perhaps he has had the almost equally unfortunate education that has instilled into his young mind that soldiery and every other form of fighting, including the ordinary fisticuff, are among the “manly arts.” And because the child, under these abnormal and improper influences, shows a marked disposition to fight, that is no reason why he should be encouraged to keep it up all through his childhood. The principles that are taught to the child are the hardest of any to dislodge. And if he is taught when he is a boy that it is all right to fight, he is apt to keep those notions in his head during all his life. Nothing but the supernatural, saving power of God will turn him from it. Any person who has any of the lingering shades of faith in Christ, knows that it is decidedly wrong to make sport of the Christian precept, “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” This one text from the Bible shows conclusively that the professor is very greatly in the dark in talking as he does. Christ did not give that precept for men alone; it is for children as well. When you come to talk of manliness, the most unmanly thing that can be taught to a child is that he ought to fight. Even a coward will fight when he is driven into a corner. But true, manly courage, that is, the courage of Christian manliness, enables even a child to allow himself to be bullied and abused in every conceivable way, and yet he has the courage not to fight. I am personally acquainted with a few boys that have been taught from their infancy that it is decidedly wrong to fight, that it is not only cowardly, but is contrary to Christian manliness. I have seen some of those boys set upon by the rowdies of the street, but they offered them no resistance. And, instead of holding a grudge at these little marauders, the Christian boy-men showed them the same kindness every time they would meet them, as if nothing had happened. This had the effect to change the little street desperadoes into friends. And the boys who had enough manliness not to fight, were the masterful conquerors. And the weapons of their victory were not their fists, but the depth of courage that led them to do as Jesus, their Master, had bidden them. Between the teaching of the Massachusetts professor and the teaching of the Man of Nazareth, let us choose the latter every time. T.