The Brutalization of Childhood, 
[Reprinted from The Beacon, Boston, Mass.] 
The action of the Boston School Committee in 
voting to prohibit the practice of vivisection in the 
public schools is condemned as unnecessary in certain 
quarters, on the ground that vivisection has not been 
adopted here and is not likely to be adopted, but the 
friends of sound and wholesome education will be 
inclined to believe that the bar has been put up none 
too soon. In other large cities of this country teach- 
ers have taken it upon themselves to adopt vivisec- 
tion for the purpose of instructing young pupils in 
the elements of anatomy and physiology, and where 
vivisection is not employed it is becoming the cus- 
tom, far too often, to resort to the dissection of the 
bodies of dead animals for the same purpose. .... 
There is such a thing as brutalizing the youthful 
mind. By dwelling upon the material aspects of life 
there is danger of crushing out that feeling of sym- 
pathy and wonder which is the bloom of childhood 
and the source of all the multiform pleasures associ- 
ated with the cultivation of the imaginative facul- 
ties. 
A child naturally regards domestic animals with 
something like a sense of comradeship. The dog, the 
cat, the horse are to the children playmates and 
friends. Stories of the devotion of these members 
of the lower order of creation to their human com- 
panions are numerous and authentic. And to chil- dren the charm of living pets is no doubt largely due 
to the fact that they are endowed with the mystery 
of life. In them the child personifies his own 
thoughts and emotions. He asks that the pet be 
treated as .he is treated ; he fancies that he under- 
stands its language; he is happy if his pet is happy, 
and sorrowful if his pet is hurt or ill-used. Take 
this same child, with all his fresh and ingenuous 
sympathies active, into the schoolroom and confront 
him with a demonstration upon the body of a puppy 
or a kitten, and what is the result ? One of two 
things. Either he is irreparably wounded in his 
sensibilities and shocked into such utter loathing 
that the lesson, as a means of acquiring facts, is 
valueless; or his curiosity hardens his heart, and 
from that time on the child is lost in the devotee of 
science. If the child is naturally cruel, his disposi- 
tion to cruelty is increased many fold. It will be 
hard to make him understand that vivisection may not 
be practised outside of the schoolroom as well as in 
it, or that if his pet is merely a bundle of bones, 
muscles and nerves, it is anything more than a me- 
chanical toy or deserving of any more considerate 
treatment. 
It is well that children should be taught at an early 
age the fundamental principles of hygiene, but col- 
ored plates and charts will supply all the details of 
physiology or anatomy that they need to know, and 
scientific instruction in these branches may with 
every advantage be postponed till the finer qualities 
of the mind and the appreciation of moral obliga- 
tions have attained a fair degree of development. 
There is no such sacred object in the world as the 
mind of a young and innocent child, and those who 
2 would debase and brutalize its activities will have 
much to answer for. 
The truth is that the movement to introduce vivi- 
section, or at least dissection, into the schools, is part 
of the mistaken tendency in educational circles to 
hold that education consists in the acquirement of 
facts. To learn facts, to learn more facts, to learn 
as many facts as possible, at the expense of ideality 
and originality of thought — this is the apparent aim 
of modern scholastic instruction. By and by the 
world will see its mistake and realize that the true 
education is what the name implies, “ drawing out,” 
a fostering of the essential faculties of the individual. 
Then school committees will not be obliged to vote 
that in the schools under their supervision vivisection 
shall not be practised. 
Copies of this leaflet can be obtained of the Humane Education Com- 
mittee, Providence, R. I. Thirty copies for io cents or 28 cents per hundred, 
postage paid.