The spirit that accompanies the political rally or basketball game, held
in our amusement halls, too frequently is carried into our sacred
meetings. The spirit of unconcern is carried into our classrooms until
all too often to call the condition one of disorder is a very inadequate
description of the procedure.
It is interesting to note the changing attitude generally in the matter
of discipline. The harshness of other days is largely replaced by a
leniency that borders on "easiness." Our whole attitude toward criminals
has been revolutionized, and our human impulses have carried over into
the realm of teaching, until now, at least in the opinion of very many
critics, we have drifted largely into "soft pedagogy"--a process of
trying to please regardless of the consequences.
Earlier treatises on education devoted a good bit of space to the amount
and kind of punishment that should be administered in a well-ordered
school. Punishment is decidedly out of taste these days. The biography
of an old German master discloses the fact that during his teaching
career he had administered 911,527 raps with his cane, 20,989 with a
ruler, 136,715 with his hand, and that he was responsible for 1,115,800
slaps on the head. The same attitude is reflected in the fact that in
England, as late as the year 1800, two hundred twenty-three offenses
were punishable by death.
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