The Discipline of Consequences.—The idea of Rousseau that children, instead of being punished, should be left to the natural consequences of their disobedience, has much plausibility, and is taken up at the present day by educationists. Mr. Spencer has dwelt upon it with great emphasis.
One obvious limitation to the principle is, that the results may be too serious to be used for discipline: children have to be protected from the consequences of many of their acts.
What is intended is, to free parents and others from the odium of being the authors of pain, and to throw this upon impersonal agencies, toward whom the child can entertain no resentment. But, before counting on that result, two things are to be weighed. For one, the child may soon be able to see through the device, and to be aware that after all the pain is brought about by virtue of a well-laid scheme for the purpose: as when the unpunctual child is left behind. The other remark is that, the personifying or anthropomorphic tendency being at its greatest in early years, every natural evil is laid to the door of a person known or unknown. The habit of looking at the laws of Nature, in their crushing application, as cold, passionless, purposeless, is a very late and difficult acquirement, one of the triumphs of science or philosophy: we begin by resenting everything that does us harm, and are but too ready to look round for an actual person to bear the brunt of our wrath.
A further difficulty is the want of foresight and foreknowledge in children: they are unable to realize consequences when the evil impulse is upon them. This, of course, decreases by time; and, according as the sense of consequences is strengthened, these become more adequate as a check to misconduct. It is then indifferent whether they are natural or ordained.
Among the natural consequences that are relied on as correctives of misbehavior in the family are such as these: going with shabby clothes, from having spoiled a new suit; getting no new toys to replace those that are destroyed. The case of one child having to make reparation to another for things destroyed is more an example of Bentham's "characteristical" punishment.
In school, the discipline of consequences comes in under the arrangements of the school for assigning each one's merit on an impersonal plan, the temper or disposition of the master being nowhere apparent. The regulations being fixed and understood, non-compliance punishes itself.—Author's advance-sheets.
What is maintained is that these other punishments are not so liable to abuse, nor so brutalizing to all concerned, as bodily inflictions.
