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Show KATHLEEN NORRIS Should Schools Abandon Rod? TN THE CALIFORNIA college town at Berkeley, Calif., a movement move-ment was recently inaugurated to restore the old custom of whipping as a punishment for refractory children in schools. It appears now to be a lost cause, and Berkeley's mothers and fathers are drawing a long breath of relief mingled with indignation. But that isn't the whole story, even to those of us who can remember re-member the frightened helpless tears of small boys ordered to report re-port to the principal's office, and the swollen hands and tear-swollen eyes of gentle little girls who had felt Teacher's merciless rod. Naturally, we regard that cold impersonal im-personal beating of our loved youngsters as a relic of barbarism, small private school. In the school was a 9-year-old named Stuart. Stuart was a heavy, blubbery sort of child who had been left entirely entire-ly to oriental servants, and had had his own way all his life. Stuart threw ink about, pulled curls, kicked the shins of smaller boys, and finally took up his stand in the yard, and for three days would not come into school. Twice I dragged him in, and twice he made himself heavy in the mysterious way a child can, and it was with difficulty that I could pull him off the ground. Meanwhile school hours were lost, and the other children stood about entranced. The board of managers, church folk all, arrived in a body to criti- cize. Stuart's elegant mother was among them. She was the one who asked if a teacher was not expected expect-ed to win the love of the children. And she went to put a motherly arm about Stuart. Stuart bit his mother's wrist until the blood ran. I was shocked; we all were. But I felt that if Stuart was going to bite anyone, he had chosen the right and responsible person. It seems to me that if we parents par-ents are going to ban physical punishment pun-ishment in school and I believe we should that we should also find the solution for the teachers' problem prob-lem when one of those completely incorrigible children comes along. There is no such thing as a naturally natural-ly bad child. an admission of the failure of school discipline and control. But it isn't the whole story. The story includes children who simply cannot be reached by any other means than that of bullying, of breaking of the spirit, of physical physi-cal pain and shame. There are many such children. Unmanageable Child They are children who have had no home training at all. They do not know the words duty, obedience, attention, respect, manners. They are sent to school to be gotten out of the way; nobody at home ever suggests that they try to make the teacher's task easier, that they do their home work conscientiously, conscientious-ly, that they learn to concentrate. They don't know what school is. They don't know that civilization has painfully developed schools, and that every hour in a school is paid for by taxpayers and that Amer- lllllljjjf fi'ii L ymim ". . . the unmanageable child . , ," ica spends millions upon millions every year to give every one of her little sons and daughters training in educational essentials, athletic development, capability to accept the right calling in life, when it offers itself. Every teacher of the grade school classes knows the unmanageable child. Sometimes it is a girl, more often a boy. The boy is a smarty show-off. He isn't afraid of anyone; he doesn't have to obey anyone. He laughs joyfully if he is dragged bodily into school. His idleness, his sneers, affect all the other children. chil-dren. He knows how to punish the teacher, and he punishes her through weary lesson hours, exhausting ex-hausting her energies and delighting delight-ing in increasing signs of her helplessness. help-lessness. A certain 13-ycar-old boy, put back into a class of 10-year-olds, was such a boy. He bullied smaller small-er boys, answered the teacher with veiled insolence, and one day thrust out his foot as she walked down the aisle. The teaoher, a gentle, 50-year-old woman, fell heavily, and the boy's grinning denial that he had done it filled the smaller boys with admiration. Bit Right Person A long, long time ago I was substitute sub-stitute teacher for a week in a |