Only during the first few years of life is a kind of drill necessary, as a pre-condition to a higher training. The child is then in such a high degree controlled by sensation, that a slight physical pain or pleasure is often the only language he fully understands. Consequently for some children discipline is an indispensable means of enforcing the practice of certain habits. For other children, the stricter methods are entirely unnecessary even at this early age, and as soon as the child can remember a blow, he is too old to receive one.
The child must certainly learn obedience, and, besides, this obedience must be absolute. If such obedience has become habitual from the tenderest age, a look, a word, an intonation is enough to keep the child straight. The dissatisfaction of those who are bringing him up can only be made effective when it falls as a shadow in the usual sunny atmosphere of home. And if people refrain from laying the foundations of obedience while the child is small, and his naughtiness is entertaining, Spencer's method undoubtedly will be found unsuitable after the child is older and his caprice disagreeable.
With a very small child, one should not argue, but act consistently and immediately. The effort of training should be directed at an early period to arrange the experiences in a consistent whole of impressions according to Rousseau and Spencer's recommendation. So certain habits will become impressed in the flesh and blood of the child.
Constant crying on the part of small children must be corrected when it has become clear that the crying is not caused by illness or some other discomfort,--discomforts against which crying is the child's only weapon. Crying is now ordinarily corrected by blows. But this does not master the will of the child, and only produces in his soul the idea that older people strike small children, when small children cry. This is not an ethical idea. But when the crying child is immediately isolated, and it is explained to him at the same time that whoever annoys others must not be with them; if this isolation is the absolute result, and cannot be avoided, in the child's mind a basis is laid for the experience that one must be alone when one makes oneself unpleasant or disagreeable. In both cases the child is silenced by interfering with his comfort; but one type of discomfort is the exercise of force on his will; the other produces slowly the self-mastery of the will, and accomplishes this by a good motive. One method encourages a base emotion, fear. The other corrects the will in a way that combines it with one of the most important experiences of life.
The one punishment keeps the child on the level of the animal.
The other impresses upon him the great principle of human social life, that when our pleasure causes displeasure to others, other people hinder us from following our pleasures; or withdraw themselves from the exercise of our self-will. It is necessary that small children should accustom themselves to good behaviour at table, etc. If every time an act of naughtiness is repeated, the child is immediately taken away, he will soon learn that whoever is disagreeable to others must remain alone. Thus a right application is made of a right principle. Small children, too, must learn not to touch what belongs to other people. If every time anything is touched without permission, children lose their freedom of action one way or another, they soon learn that a condition of their free action is not to injure others.
It is quite true, as a young mother remarked, that empty Japanese rooms are ideal places in which to bring up children.
Our modern crowded rooms are, so far as children are concerned, to be condemned. During the year in which the real education of the child is proceeding by touching, tasting, biting, feeling, and so on, every moment he is hearing the cry, "Let it alone."
For the temperament of the child as well as for the development of his powers, the best thing is a large, light nursery, adorned with handsome lithographs, wood-cuts, and so on, provided with some simple furniture, where he may enjoy the fullest freedom of movement. But if the child is there with his parents and is disobedient, a momentary reprimand is the best means to teach him to reverence the greater world in which the will of others prevails, the world in which the child certainly can make a place for himself but must also learn that every place occupied by him has its limits.
If it is a case of a danger, which it is desirable that the child should really dread, we must allow the thing itself to have an alarming influence. When a mother strikes a child because he touches the light, the result is that he does this again when the mother is away. But let him burn himself with the light, then he is certain to leave it alone. In riper years when a boy misuses a knife, a toy, or something similar, the loss of the object for the time being must be the punishment.
Most boys would prefer corporal punishment to the loss of their favourite possession. But only the loss of it will be a real education through experience of one of the inevitable rules of life, an experience which cannot be too strongly impressed.
