Felix Adler

“ And must not the parent too feel humiliated in such a situation! Courage is one of the noblest of the manly virtues. We should train our children to bear unavoidable pain without flinching, but sensitive natures can only be slowly accustomed to endure suffering; and chastisement, when it is frequent and severe, results in making a sensitive child more and more cowardly, more and more afraid of the blows. In such cases it is the parents themselves, by their barbarous discipline, who stamp the ugly vice of cowardice upon their children. ”

“ We should be extremely careful in deciding what to demand of a child. Our demands should be determined by a scrupulous regard for the child's own good, but when the word has gone forth, especially in the case of young children, we should insist on unquestioning obedience. Our will must be recognized by the child as its law; it must not suspect that we are governed by passion or caprice. ”

“ There are many parents who never stop to ask before they punish—that is, before they prescribe their moral remedies—what the nature of the disease is with which their child is afflicted. They never take the trouble to make a diagnosis of the case in order to treat it correctly. There is perhaps not one parent in a thousand who has a clear idea of the character of his child, or to whom it even so much as occurs that he ought to have a clear conception of that character, a map of it, a chart of it, laid out, as it were, in his mind. ”

“ I am afraid that some of my hearers, from having been over-confident as educators in the beginning, may now have become over-timid; from having said to themselves, "Why, of course we know the characteristics of our children," may now, since the difficulties of studying character have been explained, be disposed to exclaim in a kind of despair, "Who can ever understand the character of a single human being?" A perfect understanding of any human being is indeed impossible. We do not perfectly know even those who are nearest and dearest to us. ”

“ Such parents, if they were asked to repair a clock, would say, "No, we must first learn about the mechanism of a clock before we undertake to repair it." But the delicate and complex mechanism of a child's soul they undertake to repair without any adequate knowledge of the springs by which it is moved, or of the system of adjustments by which it is enabled to perform its highest work. They thrust their crude hands into the mechanism and often damage or break it altogether.
I do not pretend for a moment that education is as yet a perfect science ”

“ Man is endowed with a variety of faculties, and a different type of pleasure or satisfaction arises from the exercise of each. Pleasure, in general, may be defined as the feeling which results from successful exercise of any of our faculties—physical, mental or moral. A successful rider takes pleasure in horsemanship, an athlete in the lifting of weights. The greater an artist's mastery over his art, the greater the pleasure he derives from it. The more complex and difficult the problems which a scholar is able to resolve, the more delight does he find in study. ”

“ It may be said that the proper positive treatment for this fault is to set the example of the strictest truthfulness ourselves, to avoid the little falsehoods which we sometimes allow ourselves without compunction, to show our disgust at a lie, to fill the child with a sense of the baseness of lying, and above all to find out the direct cause which has tempted the child in any given case. As a rule, falsehood is only a means to an end; children do not tell untruths because they like to tell them, but because they have some ulterior end in view. ”

“ By their method of bestowing extraneous rewards, parents contribute to pervert the character of their children in earliest infancy, giving it a wrong direction from the start.
But, it may be objected, is there not a wholesome truth contained in Saint Paul's saying that "he who will not work, neither shall he eat"? Is not our conscience offended when we see a person enjoying the pleasures of life who will perform none of its more serious duties? And should we not all agree that, in a certain sense, virtue entitles one to pleasure, and the absence of virtue ought to preclude one from pleasure? ”

“ But I think it can easily be made clear that this method of moral discipline should be an exceptional and not a general one, and that there are not a few but many occasions when it becomes simply impossible to visit upon children the natural penalties of their transgressions. In these cases the evil consequences are too great or too remote for us to allow the child to learn from experience.
A boy is leaning too far out of the window; shall we let him take the natural penalty of his folly? The natural penalty would be to fall and break his neck. ”

“ The world cries "Shame" upon the lawbreaker in general, but those who in their youth are accustomed to be put to shame by corporal punishment are likely to become obtuse to other forms of disgrace as well. The same criticism applies to those means of publicly disgracing children which have been in vogue so long—the fool's cap, the awkward squad, the bad boy's bench, and the like. When a child finds itself frequently exposed to ignominy it becomes indifferent to ignominy, and thus the door is opened for the entrance of the worst vices. ”

“ Vulgar persons, when a child has told a falsehood, say, "You liar." They identify the child with the fault of lying, and thereby imply that this vice is ingrained in its nature. They do not say or imply, "You have told a falsehood, but you will surely not do so again; hereafter you will tell the truth"; they say, "You are a liar"; which is equivalent to saying, "Lying has become part and parcel of your nature." In the same way [Pg 6] when a child has proved itself incapable of mastering a certain task, the thoughtless parent or teacher may exclaim, impatiently, "You are a dunce" ”

“ Try to win the confidence of the child so that it may disclose its inner life to you. Children accept the benefactions of their parents as unthinkingly as they breathe the air around them. Show them that your care and untiring devotion must be deserved, not taken as a matter of course. In this way you will deepen their attachment and lead them to willingly open their hearts to you. At the same time enter into the lesser concerns of their life. ”

“ Take the case of lying, for instance. The natural penalty for telling a falsehood is not to be believed the next time, but the real secret of moral redemption consists in not inflicting this penalty. We emphasize our belief in the offender despite the fact that he has told a falsehood, we show that we expect him never to tell a falsehood again, we seek to drive the spirit of untruthfulness out of him—by believing in him we strengthen him to overcome temptation. And so in many other instances we rescue, we redeem, by not inflicting the natural penalty. ”

“ In the first place it brutalizes the child; secondly, in many cases it breaks the child's spirit, making it a moral coward; and, thirdly, it tends to weaken the sense of shame, on which the hope of moral improvement depends.
Corporal punishment brutalizes the child. We may be justified in beating a brute, though, of course, never in a cruel, merciless way. A lazy beast of burden may be stirred up to work; an obstinate mule must feel the touch of the whip. Corporal punishment implies that a rational human being is on the level of an animal. ”

“ We should never attach absolute blame to a child, never overwhelm it with a general condemnation. And in like manner we should never give absolute praise, never injure a child by unlimited approbation. The words, "excellent," "perfect," which are sometimes used in school reports, are inexcusable. I have seen the object of education thwarted in the case of particularly promising pupils by such [Pg 7] unqualified admiration. No human being is ethically perfect, and to tell a child that he is perfect is to encourage a superficial way of looking upon life and to pamper his conceit. ”

“ One feels tempted to say to some parents: "You do not succeed as well as you might in the training of your children because you talk too much. The less you say the more effective will your discipline be. Let your measures speak for you."
When punishment is necessary let it come upon the child like the action of a natural law—calm, unswerving, inevitable. Do not attempt to give reasons or to argue with the child concerning the punishment you are about to inflict. ”

“ We inwardly rebel when we see the indolent and self-indulgent living in luxury and affluence. And this not because the enjoyments which such persons command are the proper compensations of virtue, or because physical pain would be the proper punishment of their moral faults, but because we demand that the lower faculties shall not be exercised at the expense and to the neglect of the higher, that the legitimate rank and order of our faculties shall not be subverted. ”

“ In this orchestra the violins represent the intellectual faculties. They lead the rest. Then there are the flute-notes of love, the trumpet tones of ambition, the rattling drums and cymbals of the passions and appetites. Each of these instruments is to come in its proper place, while the moral plan of life is the musical composition which they all assist in rendering. ”

“ There is one excellence, indeed, which I perceive in corporal punishment; it is an excellent means of breeding criminals. Parents who inflict frequent corporal punishment, I make bold to say, are helping to prepare their children for a life of crime; they put them on a level with the brute, break their spirit and weaken their sense of shame. ”

“ We ought to see that it is radically wrong to make such enjoyments the reward of virtue; we ought to have the courage to make application of our better theories to the education of our children if we would develop in them the germs of a nobler, freer manhood and womanhood. I admit, indeed, that a child is not yet sufficiently developed to stand on its own feet morally, and that its virtuous inclinations need [Pg 12] to be supported and assisted; but we can give it this assistance by means of our approbation or disapprobation. ”

“ On the other hand, by making physical pleasures—sports, games and the like—the reward of study, we exalt these satisfactions so as to make them seem the higher, so as to make the satisfactions of knowledge appear of lesser value compared with the satisfactions of the senses.
In an ideal community every one of our faculties would be brought into play in turn, without our ever being tempted to regard the pleasures of the one as compensation for the exercise of the other. The human soul has often been compared to an instrument with many strings. ”

“ The true aim of every school should be to lead the pupils to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and to preserve a correct deportment in order to gain the approbation of conscience and of the teacher whose judgment represents the verdict of conscience. ”

“ Laziness, like other faults of character, sometimes disappears in the process of growth. Just as at a certain period in the life of a youth or maiden new faculties seem to develop, new passions arise, a new life begins to stir in the heart, so at a certain period qualities with which we had long been familiar, disappear of themselves. ”

“ A moralizing talk with an older child sometimes does good. The parent should not, however, indulge in generalities, but, looking over the record of the child for the past weeks or months, should pick out the definite points in which it has transgressed, thus holding up a picture of the child's life to its own eyes to reenforce the memory of its faults and stimulate its conscience. ”

“ We can look over our own past record, we can honestly examine how we have acted in the leading crises of our lives, we can summon our own characteristic traits before our minds—the things that we like to dwell upon, and the things which we would gladly blot out of our memories if we could—and by comparing this trait with that, we may discover the springs by which we have been moved. It is difficult to attain self-knowledge, but it is imperative that we should try to attain it. ”

“ Never Administer Punishment in Anger
The first general rule to which I would refer is, never administer punishment in anger. A saying of Socrates deserves to be carefully borne in mind. Turning one day upon his insolent servant, Speucippus, who had subjected him to great annoyance, he exclaimed, "I should beat you now, sirrah, were I not so angry with you." The practice of most men is the very opposite; they beat and punish because they are angry. ”

“ That is perhaps the most dangerous trait of all.
If you try to deal, as people actually do, with each of these traits separately, you will fail. If you try to influence the sense of shame, you will meet with no response; if you disgrace such a child, you will make it worse; if you whip it, you will harden it. If you attempt to overcome indolence by the promise of rewards, that will be useless. The child forgets promised rewards just as quickly as it forgets threatened punishment. ”

“ Many a time later on in life its self-love will beat in vain against the immutable barriers of law, and if the child has not learned to yield to rightful authority in youth, the necessity of doing so later on will only be the more bitterly felt. The child should sometimes be compelled to yield to the parent's authority simply because the parental authority expresses a higher law than that of its own will. ”

“ It is important that the will power of the young be strengthened. Now, the more the will is accustomed to fasten upon the objects of desire the stronger does it become, while, by rapidly introducing new objects the will is distracted and a certain shiftlessness is induced, the will being made to glide from one object to another without fixing itself definitely upon any one. It is far better to allow a child to develop a will of its own, but to make it understand that it must at times yield this will to the will of the parent, than thus to distract its attention. ”