Children in Need: A Symposium

CHILDREN IN NEED

by MAX WINSOR, M.D.

BLOODLETTTNG in medicine seems a barbarous procedure for most of the diseases for which barber-surgeons formerly prescribed it. It had some logic, however, when the distinctive nature of a disease was not recognized. If you do not know the difference between the causative agents of pneumonia and gout, you may as well go on treating both in the same way — especially if your treatment has a little sadism associated with it.

Bloodletting was prominently used in George Washington’s day. The articles on “delinquency” and “rowdyism” in the May Atlantic turn back to methods more ancient than that — methods prevalent throughout all time. And for the same reason: absolute imawareness of the causative factors involved.

When we are told, “This is a delinquent child,” there is, of course, too little information to suggest any causation. The child may have stolen at home or broken into a store. He may be a chronic truant. He may have killed his stepmother. lie may habitually bully other children in school. Correction would be easier if stealing, aggressiveness, and sex offenses were parallels of disease entities in medicine. Then we might proceed to treat all stealing one way, and all aggressiveness another. We find, however, that stealing may result from different causes, and that the same influence may in one child lead to stealing, in another to aggressiveness, in a third to truancy. In this sense, delinquency is only a symptom.

No doctor would rush to lower an abnormal temperature or to eliminate pain without first determining the condition of which these were symptomatic. You can stop the fever and leave the pneumonia untreated. You can drug the discomfort and have the patient painlessly pass out with the peritonitis of a neglected appendix. You can beat a boy. Temporarily he will be subdued. But you may be thrusting him into more lasting “delinquency” because you have neglected to deal with what in the first place motivated his difficult behavior.

If a boy is aggressive toward other boys and persistently steals in school, one can turn to punishment to “knock it out of him,” or one can look for the causes underlying his behavior. A common cause of this type of behavior is a severe parent who punishes the boy for the slightest infraction of the parent’s standards and denies him his allowance. To achieve results in such a case, we must treat the boy and his father, not the aggressiveness and the stealing. Punishment in this instance becomes extraneous. It is bad medicine.

I have had plenty of opportunity for observing the results of this “bad medicine” in over twelve years of contacts with criminals and delinquents. For two years as Research Associate with one of the Rockefeller Foundations I was able to study one hundred front-page felons — “topnotchers” in crime. I saw them in prisons from Charlestown, Massachusetts, to San Quentin, California. Later, at Warwick, I examined some two thousand boys as they first came from court. In nineteen out of twenty cases, severe punishment had preceded the more fixed delinquency patterns.

In treating delinquent children, we are not limited to physical force or to “appealing to the child’s better nature.” Let me illustrate by another case of stealing. Rhoda picked up a purse in the girls’ rest-room. The assistant principal of the high school appealed to Rhoda’s “sense of honor” and gave her a “second chance.” Rhoda stole again in a few weeks. The principal did not know that Rhoda never spent the money. She did not know anything about Rhoda. She merely gave way to habitual indignation. She called Rhoda a common thief and wanted her expelled. But the school system does not permit automatic expulsion. Rhoda was referred to the Bureau of Child Guidance for an opinion.

We found Rhoda a sensitive, shy young person. She was certainly not the “common thief.” Neither was she in need of money. Her family lived in a poor section but was in fair circumstances. Rhoda’s mother was determined not to spoil Rhoda, an only child. Rhoda was taught standards. From the time she was two years old, she had never been kissed by her mother.

When Rhoda’s aunt died, the mother decided to take in Laura, Rhoda’s cousin. To make Laura feel at home, and perhaps because she was temperamentally closer to this child, the mother treated her like a daughter — with more attention than she had ever given Rhoda. Rhoda’s first theft came a few weeks after Laura entered the house and was accepted as the favored child. The stealing was doubly motivated, but neither motivation was in the direction of getting “easy money.” Rhoda needed to take back from Laura the mother’s love. Since this was impossible, Rhoda unconsciously found satisfaction in taking something — the symbol for love — from another child who became the Laura substitute.

We disregarded Rhoda’s behavior. We offered pyschotherapy for her neurotic reaction to deprivation of affection. Our case worker helped the mother to change the home situation. Here, psychiatry and casework effected the cure. We have had reports concerning Rhoda for three years. Stealing has never recurred.

Now let us turn to insubordination in schools. Mary was said to be a ringleader among the rough girls in her school. At times she flared up and defied the teacher. What particularly provoked the teacher was Mary’s impudence about assembly. Girls were told to wear white blouses on assembly days. Mary wore a white blouse, but a long-sleeved gray sweater over it and a dirty multicolored kerchief around her neck. She woidd not take the sweater off. There was talk of sending Mary to court as uncontrollable in school. But the principal sent her instead to the Bureau of Child Guidance.

At first Mary was scared and acted defensively and insolently. But when she found we were neither flustered nor insulted, she began to talk, then to cry, and asked us if we really wanted to know about the sweater. She took it off. We saw huge blotches of deforming scars, the result of a bad burn years ago and of unsuccessful skin grafting. There were smaller scars on Mary’s neck (which had been hidden by the kerchief). You do not get such illuminating answers about the causes of children’s behavior unless you ask — with decent concern for the child’s point of view and with respect for her personality.

A modern institution for delinquents should be a combination hospital-school. It should not be a custodial institution any more than a hospital should be a place for merely feeding patients. It should not be a place where children are sent for “discipline” because you do not know what else to do with them, any more than a hospital is a place to which you send a patient with an undiagnosed fever of 104 degrees with the recommendation that he be given an ice bath. The hospital will diagnose and treat according to the findings; it may change the therapy if a given course of treatment does not bring expected results. An institution with “discipline” as its sole equipment is indeed back in the “bloodletting” stage.

It is tragic to read, in Mr. White’s article, of an institution described as if it had only one other approach: “Instead of effective discipline, the usual penalty for the most serious disregard of rules is a mark of zero entered on a daily report card.” It was found long ago that there is no one approach to understanding a child, and with complex cases we consider almost mandatory a fourfold investigation: the physical, psychological, social, and psychiatric. An institution must have these diagnostic facilities and must have the resources for carrying out the treatment.

It is unrealistic of Mr. White to suggest that “children do not get into our state schools until every known method has been tested.” For example, in the case of one boy committed to a state school, it required a very special hearing examination — an audiometer test — to indicate that what had been taken for dullness and impudence, or even incipient schizophrenia, was a reaction to partial deafness. Thyroid extract changed another boy from a morose, troublesome, cringing youngster to an alert, independent, vigorous, appreciative, and comparatively happy being. There was a one-legged boy who came to the institution with a pair of crutches. Why had not the resource of getting him an artificial leg been tried before he reached the institution?

In diagnosis we look for causes, but in treatment the modern institution docs not restrict itself to a single procedure. The institution relies, not on the scientific unit alone, not on medicine, psychiatry, or psychological measurements, not on good social service alone, nor on vocational training alone, but on a complete unit — organized to find out why a child comes to the institution “antisocial” and directed to change this antisocial pattern. In one case it may be endocrine treatment that helps effect a cure, in another it may be teaching a “ non-reader " to read with pleasure, in another, thoughtful guidance by priest or chaplain; or again it may be the impact of an active recreational department for a boy who had never learned to play; it may be a work program planned to meet the individual needs of a given child; it may have to be long, patient, painstaking treatment by the psychiatrist or a psychiatric case worker. For all cases, there must be an institutional atmosphere where the emotional climate is one of treatment, not that of a junior jail.

Jails and prisons came into existence as a substitute for corporal punishment after a long history of failure. Let me make myself clear, however. There is a difference between corporal punishment and physical force. We are not sentimentalizing about never laying a hand on a child. When a boy is assaulting another boy or a staff member, force may have to be used to stop him — not as punishment, but to avert a dangerous act. When a boy angrily announces that he is running off, force to keep him from doing so is one thing; corporal punishment to “teach” him not to run away is just brutality. You never teach him, by such means, not to run away. You make him more careful not to get caught, more desperate in the escape effort, and more fixed in his hatreds.

Before a medical point of view was introduced in some state institutions, we saw boys stopped and then punished. We knew a boy who had been kicked in the stomach by a guard weighing two hundred and sixty pounds. We have the record of a boy who was thrown to the ground when he had been returned to the institution after an attempt to run away. He was kicked in the face by a boys’ supervisor who was going to “ teach him not to run away again.” In the kicking, one of the boy’s eyes was crushed by the heel of the man’s shoe. There was danger of bilateral blindness, as the other eye was affected by the nerve injury.

When punishment is the “treatment” program, it is extraordinary how unfailingly the wrong kind of punishment is selected. We were called in to see a boy who had dropped of exhaustion after he was forced to march endlessly around an institution quadrangle to teach him not to march off the institution grounds. Investigation disclosed that the boy had been diagnosed as a cardiac case to be excused from strenuous physical exertion. But the man who ordered the marching punishment never looked at the boy’s card before giving the orders.

What about a Disciplinary or Lost Privilege Cottage as a substitute? In the main, this too represents a vicious system. At its best the idea is crude — some boys will profit from the realization that certain acts bring with them such consequences as lost “privileges.” To base a general system on what is good for individual cases is as false in treatment as it is in logic. There is the vital question of what you mean by privileges, and the larger element of individual differences in personalities.

The seriously disturbed boys in an institution for delinquents are in need of more services, more facilities, if their behavior symptoms arc aggravated. It is shocking to learn that in any institution the supervisor had to bootleg pencils, paper, and games for the boys in such a cottage. What kind of regime do they have? What do they expect the boys to do in such a setup but become more restless, more vindictive, and more aggressive — unless they turn in on themselves and totally collapse mentally? Pencil, paper, and games are no “privileges”—they should be part of the resources. Some institutions deprive such boys of movies, the athletic field, and other recreation. These activities are meant for what they say: to re-create. This is the group, moreover, that has the greatest need for intensive resources and personnel relationships. These boys should be helped to change, to be capable of more normal contacts — not bludgeoned into admitting that they “can’t beat the rap of the institution.”

One danger of sanctioning physical punishment is noted in the May Atlantic. Begin by sponsoring it for an institution, and before you know it, you have called for it in the public schools. The most elementary point is that schools with an adequate, meaningful program of activities and proper personnel do not have disturbances which call for brute force. If there are children who cannot profit from proper education and social activities, and cannot control themselves, they need special expert study, diagnosis, and treatment. There may be some who do not belong in ordinary schools. They should be taken out and sent to other places, including institutions, for treatment. Miss Irwin confined her discussion to a “slum” area. Any underprivileged area is an indictment on the city or state, not on the children in it. But the children were discussed as if they were a peculiar species.

The schools in complex city living have had to assume vast responsibilities for bringing experiences to children’s lives which formerly came naturally to them —in the woods, on the farm, and in the sheltered home. The difficulty with such articles as “Children Out of Hand” is that there is no orientation in them toward a program of vital functioning for children. The emphasis is on discipline, on children’s sitting still and standing up to recite, on teachers who have “control,” on teachers who are “rough” but “get things done.” What things?

It is neither the teacher nor the doctor who ultimately constructs a nation’s philosophy. It is the children who live it out. It is these children — including the many in underprivileged areas — who will relive and remake the philosophy of our land.

Force does not make for a disciplined life — at best it can make only for a regimented life. And discipline is no end in Itself. An ordered life can be developed when teachers help to proper emotional acceptance of life’s realities. Among these realities are authority, self-discipline, the tools necessary for growth, a decent respect for the rights of others. The Germans and the Japanese have regimented lives without a decent respect for other people.

Let no one think I have been discussing delinquency in this article. I have been writing of the handling of delinquent children. The prevention of delinquency is a much larger social problem. Do children come out of inadequate homes into delinquency? We should more honestly turn to the social conditions of these families — and give these children the opportunity their parents cannot offer them. Are children attending crowded schools — schools without the organization and personnel to deal with the child as a whole? Wo shall have to pay for better schooling. Are recreation facilities necessary? Are courts, welfare agencies, clinics insufficiently staffed? There is money to pay for these if we think the need urgent.

These are the real roots of delinquency. No talk of stern, prompt punishment, no sentimental talk of always trusting to the “better nature” of children, is realistic. The good is what parents, churches, public and private community services, and schools develop in children. When any of these fail, the others have to make up the deficiency. Where children are in need, let us not call them “out of hand.”

MORE CHILDREN OUT OF HAND

by VIRGINIA CHASE PERKINS

FOR nine years I taught in a large suburban high school. The building was new when I went there, and one of the show places of the city. It had a double swimming pool and a double gymnasium. A loud speaker connected all the classrooms. (The only program I can recall ever being generally broadcast was the World Series.) The auditorium, seating 2800, was equipped with a motion picture projector and an electric organ. The library was ornately frescoed.

“Our children are the privileged,” a teacher told me when she showed me through.

I soon realized that her words had held an ironic implication. The children were privileged in more ways than one. They ran and jumped and wrestled in the marble corridors. They went out of doors marked IN and came dashing in through doors marked OUT. They hung from the open windows between classes. They spat their gum into the drinking fountains and left wastepaper anywhere it happened to fall. They threw food around in the lunchroom. They ate candy and matched pennies in the study halls. They kept up a loud undertone in the library and shouted and whistled in the auditorium. They ran across lawns and broke off pieces of shrubbery.

“This is a public school,” a senior, the son of a doctor, once told me. “I can do what I please in it.”

Deplorable as it was, this lack of order was not the most serious evidence of children out of hand. Students were chronically tardy. The number of their absences, especially on Monday, was appalling. They came to class by the dozen unprepared. They “forgot” their books and pencils. Their written work was careless, untidy, and superficial. Their attention span was limited. They responded only to what was lively and amusing — demurring, even rebelling, at distasteful tasks. Marks meant little or nothing to them. The majority were perfectly satisfied with “getting by.”

At first I was shocked and apprehensive. “Suppose the public finds out what is going on here,” I thought. I visualized indignant supervisors, aroused parents, sensational headlines. But it was not long before I discovered that such conditions were not peculiar to that school or even that city. They were — and still are — prevalent almost everywhere.

“One of the greatest benefits that ever God gave me,” Lady Jane Grey once said to Roger Ascham, “is that he sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster.” But parents have not been on the job. They have indulged their children to the point of license, giving them too much of everything except time and patience and guidance. They have not supervised homework. They have been lax about bedtime, so that children come to school sleepy and sluggish. They have no real idea of what is going on at school. (Of the more than 8000 parents in tiie school where I taught, fewer than 100 joined the P.T.A.) When anything unpleasant comes up between child and school, they rationalize by saying, “We haven’t wanted to interfere.” Translated, that too often has meant, “We don’t want to be bothered.”

Most parents come to the school for only one purpose— to seek some concession. If a child has failed an examination, his parents arrange for him to take it over. If he dislikes his teacher, they manage to transfer him to one whose personality is more in harmony with his own. If they are dissatisfied with his mark, they take care of that, too.

A few years ago a senior girl to whom I gave a D — richly deserved — was, at the end of sixteen weeks, sent to another teacher for the remainder of the semester. My mark, a cumulative one, was disregarded. Without any examination covering her work with me, she was passed with a final grade of B, elected to the national honor society, and awarded an honor diploma. Significantly, she was dropped from college before the end of her freshman year because of failing work.

Parental indulgence and progressive education make dangerous companions.

Under such circumstances students naturally have little or no respect for their teachers. This leads to more than mere teacher humiliation. It may be actually dangerous for the children themselves. A recent incident in my own community will serv e as an illustration.

Though the white children in the high school outnumber the colored almost twenty to one, for the past two years there have been race riots inside the school itself—riots so serious that state troopers have twice been called and stationed there. Two white boys have been critically stabbed.

In handing down his decision of the more recent case, where the white boy was the son of a former member of the school board, the judge vigorously attacked the lack of discipline in the school — which, incidentally, is considered a very good one. I quote from his published report: —

“A teacher pled with the crowd of over one hundred children to disperse. Not a single child respected his authority or followed his commands. He talked to both boys [a colored and a white, both equally to blame, the judge decided], demanding and insisting that they leave. They both wilfully refused. He testified that he felt helpless to stop the trouble and ran for more assistance. Right here it should be noted that if t his is typical lack of respect for authority and school discipline, drastic action is necessary.” If this situation is not now typical, it may well be soon.

Recently I talked with a former student who had returned from the Pacific. “Once in a while we fellows get to talking about bow we were brought up,” he told me. “Guess what comes in for the greatest panning.”

“The school,” I suggested promptly.

He looked surprised, as though he had expected to open my eyes. “That’s right,” he said. “We agreed we learned more our first week in the Army — things we needed to know, I mean — than in all our years at school.”

“For instance?” I prompted.

He grinned. “How to be on time, for one thing. How to take orders, for another. Remember how I was always raising my hand to get you to give instructions over again?”

I nodded.

“Why is it that teachers can’t pound a little sense into kids?” he demanded. “Have we got to have a war to do that?”

How can teachers pound sense in? No one will listen to preaching. There is no “after school " in the modern schedule. If a teacher reports a culprit, little will come of it and she will discredit herself in the eyes of the administration. (Good teachers are supposed to have no behavior problems.) If she threatens to fail a child, he will laugh in her face. She dares not fail too many, and he knows it. (Progressive education stands strongly against failures. They breed discouragement and a sense of inferiority.) Corporal punishment, even where it is allowed, is not a satisfactory remedy.

Where then does the remedy lie? It lies in the hands of the public, which has been patient too long. If the public demands a disciplined school, free from meddling interference, it will get it, for the public pays the bills. If it makes known that it will not tolerate indulgence and impractical theories, it will have no more of them. Educators are timid people. Let the public put its foot down and they will rush to fall in line.

And let the public do it soon, before children who already are out of hand are out of reach as well.

DISCIPLINE IN THE CLASSROOM

ANONYMOUS

SPARE the rod and spoil the child,” they used to say. They’re getting back to that now. Yet in eight years of teaching I never saw a case where spending the rod accomplished anything that sparing it might not have done.

This does not mean that I am a “progressive.” I believe that teachers, no matter what their situation, must assume authority. How to assume it — and how to wear it well — is the big question.

I began to teach in a junior high school located on the wrong side of the tracks in a Midwestern industrial city. I was a young man fresh from college and much too opt imistic. I looked even younger than I was, and I smiled too much. I had done my supervised teaching under a stern disciplinarian who always remained in the back of the room when I was in charge.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the authorities gave me a fidl schedule, with classes every period of the day. They gave me supervision of the school newspaper. They gave me two classes of pupils whose IQ’s were the lowest in the school. They gave me a room and a desk and copies of textbooks and said, “You’re on your own.”

But when I got up before my first class, I was frightened. So were the youngsters. That helped. When the day was over and I staggered home, I congratulated myself that I had carried it off pretty well. The second and third days went as well. By the end of the week I grew a little too confident.

So it wasn’t surprising that during the second week things began to happen. I don’t know why. Perhaps I was smiling too much, being too enthusiastic about poetry, forgetting my dignity in the rapture of a pleasant subject-matter. Anyway, the youngsters, even the stupid ones, caught on to me. They saw through my easy tyranny of authority and realized — as masses must never be allowed to realize, for the safety of a dictator—that there was nothing behind my shell of austerity.

I had never had any intention of paddling. Indeed, when the suggestion was made to me by the principal of the school and by the head of the department, I was horrified. Was it possible that these two persons, high in the educational councils of our city, believed in barbarism? How had the North Central Association permitted them to hold their positions?

But I soon learned that paddling was the one approved method of discipline in this particular school. The teachers, many of them potential progressives, were apparently being practical in saying, “It’s all very well to give children their own way in some places, but here we paddle!” So I paddled, feeling like a Judas betraying my education professors.

The first boy I paddled was an eighth grade lad as tall as I was, the descendant of Kentucky mountain people. His sullen attitude and stolid resistance to learning finally led him into one downright breach of discipline after another. His name was Asa Barnstetter.

The second boy to receive a paddling was Leviticus Johnson, a happy Negro lad whose natural good spirits occasionally exploded and whom no amount of explaining, reasoning, or instruction seemed able to reach. Leviticus’s father was an it inerant evangelist, and the children were named Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Gomorrah, and J. C. — for Julius Caesar.

In Leviticus’s case, the paddling seemed to work, but only because at the end of the pitiful process I was so moved by big Levi’s tears that I had a long and friendly talk with him. I got to know him then — as I had been unable to do before because no decent human emotion had ever reached out from me to him or from him to me. Before I felt pity and interest in Leviticus, I had been not a human being but a teacher — and he had been not a likable boy but a subject.

Now, simply because we had scratched the surface, — the hard way, — we were on common ground for friendship. From then on, Levi and I got on well. Later, when he came to high school and was in one of my classes there, he was still ebullient and inclined to disrupting activities, but he continued to recognize my authority.

I tried to get to know Asa too, but he resisted attempts at friendliness, and while my fraternity paddle seemed to make some impression on him — at least temporarily — it was the only thing that did.

In short, I soon got the reputation that all the other teachers had at this school. I would stand just so much — then came the paddle. It was a kind of game. The youngsters would test themselves and me by carrying on as far as they thought safe; then they found themselves unable to resist the one step further that might — or might not —■ mean disaster. The result was that I was paddling, on an average, once or twice a month.

By the end of that year I had discovered many things. I discovered, for instance, that the reason most of my discipline cases became “cases” was that they had been put into a school situation which was absolutely meaningless to them. Asa, for instance, had been hopelessly passed from grade to grade. He was almost sixteen and an eighth-grader when I got him, but he was unable to read even a pre-primer.

In May of that year I finally succeeded in teaching Asa the alphabet, and in the last few weeks before he reached the birthday that would allow him by law to quit school, he actually began to take an interest in the business of learning to write.

But the most important thing I had discovered by the end of my first year as a teacher was that my authority had crumbled to the bare foundation stones. True, I still had an authority left, but that was solely vested in the paddle. There was no recourse short of that — no point at which I might safely stop before that last, ignominious resort.

My second year I made up my mind I would not return to the nightmare of constant paddling. At the same time I resolved that I would not turn namby-pamby, like my colleagues at one of the “progressive” schools in the city, and allow my pupils to wreak their will upon my schoolroom. I wouldn’t waste time trying to make the hopeless cases “want” to learn; neither would I drive them to learning as a last refuge from physical violence.

What I planned to do, and what I did, was to work the Leviticus Johnson trick, without the preliminary bout. Where, the year before, I had been concerned with what to do should a situation arise, now I was concerned with how to keep a situation from arising. Despite all my efforts, of course, situations occasionally did arise.

One such situation was created by Harold Newerman. Harold was a big fellow with the mind of an eight-year-old. He was grouchy and lethargic. I strongly suspect that there was something wrong with his liver. Harold could not do the work prescribed in the 7B class. Furthermore, he resented being asked to try lessons intended for third-graders. He knew when he was being coddled.

So Harold grew very objectionable. He grumbled aloud through class period after class period. He swore audibly when addressed, frowned threateningly, and finally arose to the supreme manifestation of telling me in stentorian tones, before the whole class, that he had no intention of doing anything except disturb me.

My paddle had been hanging in an honored spot in the front of the room all year. I could tell by the expectant hush that fell on the room that the class expected me to take it down now and go into action. But I had learned that the anticipation of my vindictiveness had nearly as much effect on the class as the deed itself. So I let them stare, wide-eyed, while I said to Harold, “I’m sorry to hear that. We can’t talk about it here, though, as the rest of the class has work to do. Suppose we go outside.”

Beyond the glass-paneled doors to the room, where I could observe my more willing charges going about their tasks with one eye out for further developments, Harold and I talked. I asked him what he thought I ought to do. “Paddle me,” he said quite simply.

“Would that do any good?” I asked. “Would it make you any more willing to work?”

Sullenly he replied, “I don’t know. You’re supposed to be the teacher, ain’t you ? Then why don’t you make me work ?" It was a dare, of course, and I recognized in his pronunciation of the word “teacher” the familiar barrier to progress.

I laughed. “You know,” I said, “I can’t make anybody do anything. I’m just a young fellow trying to do a job, same as you. Paddling wouldn’t make you work. As a matter of fact, it would only make me work. And judging from your upholstery,” said I, glancing at the back of his trousers, “ I’d have to work pretty hard!”

That broke down the barrier. Harold laughed. From then on, Harold and I proceeded to get acquainted. It was a long time, of course, before I discovered just what he could do. But meanwhile the obstacle which had made for strained relations between us had disappeared. I was no longer an unreasonable creature from another world — a teacher.

I am convinced now that the solution of the discipline problem lies just there. Teachers have too often considered themselves — and allowed their pupils to consider them — non-human creatures. “Progressives” would not blunder into the pathological so often if they remembered that teachers are human beings dealing with human beings. And the browbeaters wouldn’t have to browbeat if they considered classroom situations as controlled social situations.

In the six remaining years I taught before turning to other fields, I had no reason to change my views. High school boys were bigger and tougher than junior high boys. And there were, to be sure, some who simply refused to make friends. But I always made certain that my own attitude, at least, was correct. I refused to put myself on a plane apart from my pupils.

From then on I seldom had a real discipline problem and I got a lot of teaching done. I think it was because I learned early enough that an easy friendliness, tempered with a responsive and reasonable dignity, was more effective than the slap, the shake, and the paddle.

LITTLE FOLKS AND BIG FOLKS

by CAMILLE McGEE KELLEY

A WHIPPING may be better than lost discipline, but I have always resented the idea of approaching a child’s reason through his nervous system.

Such an approach is often unnecessary. Children differ in their mental capacities, desires, and talents. Much violent discipline could be dispensed with if persons in charge of children would make an intelligent study of the individuals in their care. If the general public realized that bad behavior stems from many causes and that the crying need is for the analysis and interpretation of these causes, we should not dare to be stereotyped in our method of handling mistakes.

We spend about thirteen times as much to control crime as we spend for education. Adequate appropriations for education, rehabilitation, and recreation would reverse these figures.

When I was a very young judge, I promised never to harness the mistakes of a child to his back. I do not believe, however, in allowing a child to have his own way to the complete discomfort and distress of those about him. Behavior should be studied like health or electricity. We should not dare to take the liberties with either that wc take with the temperament of a child.

Nor do I think it cramps personality to teach children self-control. Often a boy will suffer great physical punishment before he will break the rule of the gang or the code agreed upon by his fellows. This rule or code has sunk deep into his thought. Our job is to sink the right code of behavior deep enough into his consciousness to command respect and to get coöperation. He then becomes responsive to right guidance. The deliberately delinquent boy of normal mind is rare.

The intelligence of a child plays a big part in making adjustments. A subnormal child needs special protection and supervision; and an abnormal child should not be in a diversified group without individual care — which brings us to the required cost again.

Any normal child can be salvaged. We have found that if a child’s program is varied enough, and includes enough privileges to make for a normal and interesting life, the lost-privilege plan will be effective. A lost sense of values makes for a confused traveler on the behavior road just as a lost sense of direction makes for a confused traveler on the high sea or in the jungle.

If we want our young people to respect law, we must respect it ourselves and make it worthy of respect. We must master evil and handle violence even by force, but it is an indictment against us when force is our only way out. There is no one recipe for handling antisocial human behavior.

When we learn to classify children, to protect the mental misfit, to develop the subnormal by patient training, and to provide pleasant, kindly environment; when we develop the talent of the normal boy and girl and inspire them toward achievement, we shall find little need for making a decision as to whether to slap a stubborn boy down or pat him on the head and give him a lollypop. We shall have a new answer to the problem. But people who handle children in groups must understand the difference between organization and regimentation.

I am not new-fashioned enough to believe that children can discipline themselves, and I am not old-fashioned enough to believe that force is a complete remedial agency. But I have had experience enough to dare to say that if wc would put as much time, thought, prayer, effort, and money into working out preventives of crime and behavior problems as we put into physical health measures, juvenile delinquency would not challenge the equilibrium of society.

The distance between the child and the adult in mind and spirit is often more dangerous than closeup conflicts. Respect must be deserved, not just demanded from the defiant child. One lesson I have learned is that most of what is the matter with little folks is the big folks. But the very biggest reason for our conflict is the tempo of the hour. People are fairly hurled from one experience to another.

I am not talking about delinquent children only, but about your child and my child, with their ambitions and futures. Understanding children is more than just being agreeable to them. We must understand the motors of the mind, guard carefully the sensitiveness of the temperament, protect them like the delicate parts of a fine watch. I have seen more mental than physical bruises inflicted on children.

Bad behavior without a press agent has no thrill. We must stop giving false values to wrong behavior if we expect good qualities to be in demand. Corporal punishment is a defense mechanism — not discipline in its highest sense.

I am sincere and constant in my belief that a child’s richest heritage is to be the son or daughter in an average American family, and our job is to safeguard that family life.