The Fight Against Classroom Brutality
After the conviction of two teachers for beating a student in Chewelah, the P-I condemns corporal punishment as a 'relic of a dolorous age.'
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The conviction and punishment of two teachers in the public schools of Chewelah for the brutal beating of a pupil is apparently in the line of justice. No person is fit to teach school who is incapable of self-restraint, and corporal punishment, if inflicted at all in school, should never be done in passion. A parent who punishes a child brutally in passion always does the child more harm than good, and the parent suffers moral deterioration every time brutal, passionate punishment is inflicted. A bold, vigorous child, when punished with passionate brutality, becomes sullen and ruffianly, and a timid, sensitive child generally becomes a liar and a hypocrite to escape punishment. Recently, there was an exhibition of cockfighting in the suburbs of South Seattle, where the spectators watched a brace of pugnacious fowls gut each other to death with steel spurs. It was a disgusting exhibition, which ministers to the same education of cruelty that is illustrated by prizefighting, dogfighting, bullfighting and bearbaiting. Brutal flogging in the public schools is an education to a manhood of cruelty, and is a relic of a dolorous age when everyone believed in barbarous punishment; an age when a literal hell was preached from the pulpit; an age when hangings were all public; an age when lunatics were confined in iron cages and beaten by their keepers.
“A teacher who cannot punish with calmness and dignity is not fit to preside over a school.”
While schools today have largely moved away from corporal punishment, the debate over how we discipline children and the role of violence in our civic institutions remains a persistent concern. The editorial’s connection between 'the education of cruelty' in schools and blood sports like cockfighting mirrors contemporary conversations about how societal violence is normalized for children.
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