progress in School Discipline. 
REMARKS 
or 
DR. MORRILL WYMAN, 
OF CAMBRIDGE, 
IN SUPPORT OV 
THE RESOLUTION TO ABOLISH THE CORPORAL PUNISHMENT OF GIRLS IN 
THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF THE CITY, 
MADE 
IN THE REPUBLICAN CAUCUS, NOVEMBER 26, 1866. 
CAMBRIDGE: 
JAMES COX, PRINTER, PRESS OFFICE. 
1866. ADDRESS. 
Resolved,—It is the opinion of this meeting that the ! 
corporal punishment of girls should be abolished in j 
each and every public school in this city. 
Dr. Wyman spoke as follows: 
Mr. Chairman—Until last June I had not 
supposed any occasion would occur which 
would render it necessary to offer for the con- 
sideration of a public assembly of our citizens, 
a resolution like that which I have just read. 
More than twenty years ago, I knew that in 
the world-renowned schools of Prussia, pro- 
testaut, victorious Prussia, which owes her vic- 
tories more to the intellect of her Bismark 
than the efficiency of her needle-guns; in those 
schools, I say, not a blow had fallen upon the 
person of a girl for more than a quarter of a 
century. In Boston, in 1845, during the con- 
troversy between the Hon. Horace Mann, then 
Secretary of the Board of Education, and the 
“thirty-one Boston School Masters,” in which 
school discipline was discussed, Ido not recol- 
lect that the whipping of girls was ever mooted. 
Indeed that same year, while this famous con- 
troversy was in progress, the Hon. Theophilus 
Parsons, in a report of the Boston School Com- 
mittee, says:—“We are ready to say of him 
who in this age and city avows that he can- 
not teach our girls without resort to blows, that 
he cannot so use the respect and docility and 
the affectionate temper which characterize the 
many, as to subdue the perversity of the few, 
is not yet fit for the high vocation of teacher.” 
The Boston school report for last year con- 
tains a report of a special Committee, appoint- 
ed to examine into certain disagreeable rumors 
or irregularites in the discipline of some 
schools, and they express the opinion that in 
regard to girls schools, corporal punishment 
should never be used, and find their justifica- 
tion in the very gratifying fact that “ in 
two of the best girls schools in Boston, corpo- 
ral punishment is not used nor allowed on any 
consideration.” Our own school report for 
1864 contains the following: “ It is granted 
that whipping is altogether wrong as a discip- 
line for girls;” the report is signed unanimous- 
ly by the then School Committee, (three of the 
gentlemen comprising it being members of the 
present School Committee), and distributed to 
the inhabitants of the city that they might know 
the opinions of their Committee upon the 
points discussed. It was supposed, therefore, 
that the whipping of girls in the public schools 
of our city had ceased. And this was the 
state of things until last June, when that most 
deplorable case occurred which made us 
aware of the fact that a girl of sixteen years of 
age had been whipped, and that the whipping 
was in accordance with the rules for the 
government of our public schools. This case 
excited a good deal of surprise and indignation, 
and a petition was presented to the School 
Committee respectfully requesting that the 
corporal punishment of girls be abolished in 
each and every public school in the city, on 
the ground that such acts are brutalizing to 
the teacher, injurious to the pupil, and shock- 
ing to the community. This petition was 
signed by Rev. Dr. Walker, ex-president of 
Harvard College, Thomas Hill, President of 
Harvard College, Professor Longfellow, Pro- 
fessor Washburn, Professor Parker, and other 
scientific and literary gentlemen and citi- 
zens—more than three hundred in number. 4 
Nothing was heard from this petition until 
four months after its presentation, when the 
Committee published an “Address to the Peo- 
ple of Cambridge,” and not only refused to 
abolish the rule, under which the whipping 
had taken place, but substantially reaffirmed 
it. By this rule, as it now stands, any pupil, 
without distinction of age or sex, must be 
whipped whenever the principal shall so deter- 
mine, whatever the force required to accom- 
plish it. Now the citizens have no power di- 
rectly to modify this rule; the School Commit- 
tee have by law exclusive control of this mat- 
ter, but they can modify the Committee, and 
this it is proposed to do. Not that we 
have any complaints to make against the gen- 
tlemen composing the Committee; I war 
against the rule alone. These gntlemen en- 
joy in a high degree the confidence of the 
comnmnity; they are conscientious men, many 
of them my personal friends. 
I trust that good men may be found who 
will supply their places. We must not jeopar- 
dize our cause by placing it in the hands of its 
opponents. Not wild radicals who will lay the 
axe to the root of this fair system of common 
schools which has been of so slow a growth 
and required so much wisdom to bring it to 
its present proportions, but judicious men who 
will lop off a worse than useless branch which 
not only interferes with but threatens to 
destroy it. Before advancing civilization the 
whipping post has disappeared from the streets; 
flogging is no longer allowed in the State Pris- 
on, the House of Correction, nor on ship- 
board; and why should it be continued for 
little girls? 
The “Address to the People” would seem to 
be more properly a defence of the position as- 
sumed by the Committee, and also an argu- 
ment for corporal punishment. I propose to 
examine some points so far as they apply to 
girls.- This also is signed by the Committee 
unanimously, and among the names are those 
who, two years ago declared that “whipping 
of girls as a discipline is altogether wrong.” 
It opens with an account of the case of 
Josephine Foster. I regret that the Com- 
mittee did not see fit to furnish us a plain 
statement of facts, instead of their own views, 
opinions and inferences. We could be safely 
trusted to draw our own inferences, without 
their guidance. I am willing to take the case 
as I find it in the Address, notwithstanding its 
considerable variations from the facts as eli- 
cited on the examination; and what are 
briefly these facts ? A girl, not in good odor 
with her teacher, is detected in whispering; 
she is thought defiant, and is sent to the reci- 
tation room to be whipped; the teacher follow- 
ed, almost immediately, with a rattan, intend- 
ing to punish her, but found the pupil too old, 
or too strong, or both, and concluded to await 
the return of the principal, when it was ar- 
ranged that the girl should be whipped by one 
of the female teachers, assisted by another. 
According to this programme, the whipping 
commenced; the screams were loud, and 
reached the adjoining room; the 'whipping 
was continued until the principal came into 
the room, when it was discontinued, and the 
principal took the place of one teacher and di- 
rected the other to whip till the girl ceased 
screaming, which was done, and the principal 
left the room. The two teachers were now 
left alone with the girl; she was told she had 
submitted to the principal and must now sub- 
mit to them, and was whipped a third time. 
The Committee tell us “ there was no trace of 
improper motive on the teacher’s part.” Will 
they tell me what proper motive could have 
actuated those teachers in that third whip- 
ping? I certainly know of none. These are 
the facts as given by the Committee them- 
selves. Now I wish to ask what has been 
gained by this display of violence. Has the 
pupil been improved? has school discipline 
gained? have the teachers gained in reputa- 
tion ? has the fair fame of the city gained ? lias 
any interest been advanced except the interests 
of the private schools of the city ? and these, 
if I am not greatly misinformed, have been 
very materially advanced. 
The Committee say it is because parents do 
not abandon the rod at home that it is found 
so difficult to dispense with it at school; that 
the public schools embrace children of both 
native and foreign parentage from all the va- 
rious classes of our society, and that “ the per- 
suasive influences of home discipline” are 
needed. Now, sir, if I am not very much mis- 
taken it is one of the main objects of the com- 
mon schools'to seek out those children who 
have suffered in their homes from neglect and 
the ill consequences of vicious parentage, who 
have never known what kindness and gentle- 
ness is, who have daily fallen under cruel blows 
from parental hands that should have been out- 
stretched for their support and protection; to 
gather these unfortunate beings into a new 
* I here but repeat the expressions of one of the best 
friends of the School. 5 
fold,where it is the duty of the teacher to show, 
and the duty of the School Committee to aid 
him in showing by kindness and gentleness 
and sympathy that there is something be- 
sides stripes and blows in God’s world, and not 
because she has not already felt the “persuasive 
influence of home discipline” to redouble the 
blows in severity and in number, until after 
three successive whippings she shall acknowl- 
edge “the abstract beauty of unconditional 
submission.” 
The Committee speak of the teacher as stand- 
ing in loco parentis in the place of a parent. 
I apprehend that this expresses but a part of 
the relations between the teacher and pupil. 
He stands not merely in the place of a parent 
but in the place of a wise and good parent. 
The city of Cambridge does not pour out a 
hundred thousand dollars annually on her 
public schools that they may be supplied with 
teachers who take for their example the worst 
parents or even excell them, and become orig- 
inals in this wretched competition. For where 
can you find in this community a man who 
lays any, even the slightest claim to the char- 
acter of a good parent, who whips his daughter 
after she has arrived at the years of woman- 
hood, three successive times for any offence. 
No, sir, we have a right to expect our teachers 
will bring to their work intelligence, fidelity 
and a sound judgment, united with kindness, 
sympathy and a calm temper, and these I 
am bound to say do not appear in those three 
teachers. The “Address” then passes in re- 
view the various kinds of punishment now in 
use in our public schools, and enumerates 
the objections to them, and I am ready to ad- 
mit that the objections are well founded. One 
thing I must say, in passing, in the whole of 
these twenty-four pages I do not find a single 
allusion to rewards and encouragements, nor 
yet to that system of checks and credits by 
which, as it seems to me, the school accounts 
are so expeditiously settled. The Committee 
does not say that it proposes to sweep away all 
those other and less objectionable forms of cor- 
rection and substitute corporal punishment, 
but this last is the only one defended or even 
mentioned with approbation. But if this is the 
plan of their new campaign and this the prin- 
cipal arm to be brought into use, the sooner 
we flank them the better. With regard to ex- 
pulsion from school the Committee is more 
definite. They draw a lively picture of the 
effect of dismissal from school; the pupils will 
seek it, they intimate that life and property will 
not he safe, the haunts of ignorance and crime 
will be recruted, the houses of correction filled, 
and our public schools decimated into the 
reform schools. 
Now all this is said within sound of the col- 
lege bell. One third of all the classes which 
enter Harvard College disappears in one way 
or another before graduation; some for inatten- 
tion, some for misdemeanors and insubordina- 
tion, and some for much more serious offences 
than any ordinarily found in our public schools; 
and yet we do not learn that they ordinarily 
become thieves or murderers, or even necessa- 
rily get into the State prison, and if this is not 
true of those who assemble in Colleges, to as- 
sert it of young girls is simply absurd. 
As to the right of the School Committee to 
suspend and dismiss children from the public 
schools there is no doubt. This is clearly 
stated in the opinion of Chief Justice Shaw, 
in the Charlestown case, some years ago. 
“ Schools are established for the benefit of all 
the inhabitants. The enjoyment of this ben- 
efit, then, is a common and not an exclusive 
or personal right; then like other common 
rights, that of way, for instance, it must be 
exercised under such limitations and restric- 
tions that it shall not interfere with equal and 
coextensive rights of others.” The Committee 
seem to forget that good children have rights 
as well as naughty children; that they have a 
right to receive the benefit of the provisions 
made for their education, and if these naughty 
children interfere materially with the good 
conduct of the school, or if their repeated cor- 
rection would so take up the time and atten- 
tion of the teachers and pupils as to cripple its 
action, they should be removed, and provision 
made for them elsewhere, in a separate school 
perhaps, and under more favorable circum- 
stances for their reform. There is no question 
in my mind as to our duty in this respect. 
The last point in the address I propose to 
notice is that the Committee are of opinion 
that the abolition of flogging on shipboard has 
been followed by more cruel consequences, and 
they express their fears that the same cruel 
consequences may follow the abolition of flog- 
ging of little girls. I will give them the credit 
of consistency in these expressions, but wheth- 
er the community partake in these fears I 
have very grave doubts. As to the last fear, 
it vanishes at once under the watchful care of 
a good and faithful School Committee, who 6 
take care that those teachers who exhibit a 
tendency to cruelty or bad temper silently and 
speedily disappear from the schools. 
Why should not girls be treated as boys ? 
Because girls are not boys. Every parent 
having children of both sexes knows that they 
have moral characteristics which at once dis- 
tinguish them before they have arrived at the 
school age. They are weaker in body and 
more sensitive in feeling, and are more occu- 
pied with the impression they make upon 
others long before they know its value. That 
delicate sense of propriety which distinguishes 
the woman has already its germs in the girl. 
They seem to know instinctively that they 
cannot rely upon physical strength and as in- 
stinctively cling to others for support and pro- 
tection. They are gentle, docile, confiding 
and affectionate. They exhibit these gentler 
qualities at home and in school in a thousand 
ways; they hasten to meet their teacher as 
she approaches in the morning; they run by 
her side, they seize her hand, and evince their 
affection by kisses upon her cheeks and roses 
upon her desk. The skillful and faithful 
teacher takes advantage of these qualities, es- 
pecially of their docility, and so moulds them 
that corporal punishment is not only unneces- 
sary but it is cruelty. 
Physiologically she is different, and to this 
I would most earnestly beg your attention. 
Her blood corpuscles are smaller, her nervous 
system is of a more delicate structure, her 
brain is lighter, and her muscles smaller; she 
is made for quickness and vivacity, but not for 
strength and endurance. The same reasons 
which prevent her from sharing the rougher 
games and plays of boys should protect her 
from suffering the harsher punishments of 
boys. She is more sensitive to internal emo- 
tions and external sensations; and I assert, 
without fear of contradiction, that no physi- 
cian can be safely trusted to advise for the 
preservation of health or its restoration who 
disregards even in the child the distinction of 
sex. The most eventful period of her physio- 
logical life is spent in schools. During this 
period there is not unfrequently mental un- 
easiness, irritability and depression,easily mis- 
taken for petulance and defiance by the un- 
wise,and I greatly fear has sometimes produced 
punishment for that for which she is answer- 
able to her God alone. 
With a rapidity of development unknown 
in the other sex she becomes a woman 
with all a woman’s refined sensibilities, 
hopes and fears. She now instinctively 
knows that upon the good impression she 
makes upon others is based her hopes for- 
the future. If her physical organization is 
sensitive, her spiritual nature is doubly sensi- 
tive, and it is this which makes her what she 
is. It is in vain to count the number and 
weigh the severity of the blows upon her per- 
son, and note the hours that elapse before their 
marks disappear. Her spirit is wounded, she 
is disgraced and degraded; years may not ef- 
face the consequences. It is this that stirs 
the sensibilities and brings down the censure 
of the greater part of the civilized world, and 
from none is that censure more severe than 
from cultivated women. Strike not a woman 
even with a feather, is the motto of civiliza- 
tion, and it is in accordance with the spirit of 
Christianity also. 
But in consequence of her greater sensi- 
tiveness to external impressions, a blow of 
equal force produces a more serious effect; 
and this together with the fact that early wo- 
manhood is the period at which diseases of 
the brain and nervous system are most readily 
and most frequently developed, should lead us 
to beware lest the most serious consequences 
follow the violence done to mind and body by 
corporal punishment. I say this not without 
good reason. Within three months the city 
of Cambridge has paid a bill for the mainte- 
nance of a young woman at the Worcester 
Asylum who became first epileptic and then 
insane after, and as her physician believes, in 
consequence of a blow on the head with a 
ferule in the hands of one of our former female 
teachers. For the protection of teachers, then, 
it would be well to abolish corporal punish- 
ment of girls. 
The Committee tell us that taking away the 
power of corporal punishment from one sex of 
pupils would “ make a distinction of doubtful 
justice.” If the two sexes were alike this 
would be true, but they are not; all physiology 
is against it, all common sense is against it; 
and the injustice of continuing a rule which 
makes no distinction of age or sex is most un- 
mistakable. We do, therefore, most strenuously 
urge the abolition of the corporal punishment 
of girls, because the best public schools are 
successfully taught without it; because it is 
not permitted in private schools, and finally 
for reasons founded on the immutable laws of 
oilr Maker. He who declares that he cannot control our girls without resort to blows, or 
cannot use the gentle qualities of the many to 
control the perversity of the very few, has not 
yet risen to the level of his calling. He has 
yet to learn that it is the soft falling rain, the 
sunshine, and the gentle dew, and not the 
crushing tornado, which bring forth the fruits 
which are fitted to nourish and develop. 
But if there are still some who, from ob- 
stinacy or perversity, resist all those influences 
which the faithful and skillful teacher knows 
howT to use, then let her be held as one dis- 
eased, and removed from those she is injuring, 
and be instructed elsewhere, until she gives evi- 
dence of that more healthy condition which 
will qualify her for again enjoying those ad- 
vantages which the city so lavishly prepares 
for her. I cannot doubt, sir, that when this 
question shall be submitted to our fellow citi- 
zens they will agree with me that this relic of 
barbarism, the corporal punishment of girls, 
must be banished from our schools. I trust 
that the day is not far distant, when instead 
of those dark words, Authority, Fear, Pain, we 
shall see written on the walls of our school 
rooms in letters of light those other words, 
Gentleness, Kindness, Love. But whatever 
be the result of this evening’s deliberations, I 
shall be ever grateful that I have been allowed 
to raise my voice, with whatever of influence I 
possess, on the side of humanity, civilization, 
and the laws of God, as I see them developed 
in human beings. t