Edgeworth Maria
Practical Education, Volume I
We cannot better conclude a chapter upon Truth, than by honestly referring the reader to a charming piece of eloquence, with which Mr. Godwin concludes his essay upon Deception and Frankness.61 We are sensible how much we shall lose by the comparison: we had written this chapter before we saw his essay.
CHAPTER IX
ON REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS
To avoid, in education, all unnecessary severity, and all dangerous indulgence, we must form just ideas of the nature and use of rewards and punishments. Let us begin with considering the nature of punishment, since it is best to get the most disagreeable part of our business done the first.
Several benevolent and enlightened authors62 have endeavoured to explain the use of penal laws, and to correct the ideas which formerly prevailed concerning public justice. Punishment is no longer considered, except by the ignorant and sanguinary, as vengeance from the injured, or expiation from the guilty. We now distinctly understand, that the greatest possible happiness of the whole society must be the ultimate object of all just legislation; that the partial evil of punishment is consequently to be tolerated by the wise and humane legislator, only so far as it is proved to be necessary for the general good. When a crime has been committed, it cannot be undone by all the art, or all the power of man; by vengeance the most sanguinary, or remorse the most painful. The past is irrevocable; all that remains, is to provide for the future. It would be absurd, after an offence has already been committed, to increase the sum of misery in the world, by inflicting pain upon the offender, unless that pain were afterwards to be productive of happiness to society, either by preventing the criminal from repeating his offence, or by deterring others from similar enormities. With this double view of restraining individuals, by the recollection of past sufferings, from future crimes, and of teaching others, by public examples, to expect, and to fear, certain evils as the necessary consequences of certain actions hurtful to society, all wise laws are framed, and all just punishments are inflicted. It is only by the conviction that certain punishments are essential to the general security and happiness, that a person of humanity can, or ought, to fortify his mind against the natural feelings of compassion. These feelings are the most painful, and the most difficult to resist, when, as it sometimes unavoidably happens, public justice requires the total sacrifice of the happiness, liberty, or perhaps the life, of a fellow-creature, whose ignorance precluded him from virtue, and whose neglected or depraved education prepared him, by inevitable degrees, for vice and all its miseries. How exquisitely painful must be the feelings of a humane judge, in pronouncing sentence upon such a devoted being! But the law permits of no refined metaphysical disquisitions. It would be vain to plead the necessitarian's doctrine of an unavoidable connection between the past and the future, in all human actions; the same necessity compels the punishment that compels the crime; nor could, nor ought, the most eloquent advocate, in a court of justice, to obtain a criminal's acquittal by entering into a minute history of the errours of his education.
It is the business of education to prevent crimes, and to prevent all those habitual propensities which necessarily lead to their commission. The legislator can consider only the large interests of society; the preceptor's view is fixed upon the individual interests of his pupil. Fortunately both must ultimately agree. To secure for his pupil the greatest possible quantity of happiness, taking in the whole of life, must be the wish of the preceptor: this includes every thing. We immediately perceive the connection between that happiness, and obedience to all the laws on which the prosperity of society depends. – We yet further perceive, that the probability of our pupil's yielding not only an implicit, but an habitual, rational, voluntary, happy obedience, to such laws, must arise from the connection which he believes, and feels, that there exists between his social duties and his social happiness. How to induce this important belief, is the question.
It is obvious, that we cannot explain to the comprehension of a child of three or four years old, all the truths of morality; nor can we demonstrate to him the justice of punishments, by showing him that we give present pain to ensure future advantage. But, though we cannot demonstrate to the child that we are just, we may satisfy ourselves upon this subject, and we may conduct ourselves, during his non-age of understanding, with the scrupulous integrity of a guardian. Before we can govern by reason, we can, by associating pain or pleasure with certain actions, give habits, and these habits will be either beneficial or hurtful to the pupil: we must, if they be hurtful habits, conquer them by fresh punishments, and thus we make the helpless child suffer for our negligence and mistakes. Formerly in Scotland there existed a law, which obliged every farrier who, through ignorance or drunkenness, pricked a horse's foot in shoeing him, to deposit the price of the horse until he was sound, to furnish the owner with another, and in case the horse could not be cured, the farrier was doomed to indemnify the injured owner. At the same rate of punishment, what indemnification should be demanded from a careless or ignorant preceptor?
When a young child puts his finger too near the fire, he burns himself; the pain immediately follows the action; they are associated together in the child's memory; if he repeat the experiment often, and constantly with the same result, the association will be so strongly formed, that the child will ever afterwards expect these two things to happen together: whenever he puts his finger into fire, he will expect to feel pain; he will learn yet further, as these things regularly follow one another, to think one the cause, and the other the effect. He may not have words to express these ideas; nor can we explain how the belief that events, which have happened together, will again happen together, is by experience induced in the mind. This is a fact, which no metaphysicians pretend to dispute; but it has not yet, that we know of, been accounted for by any. It would be rash to assert, that it will not in future be explained, but at present we are totally in the dark upon the subject. It is sufficient for our purpose to observe, that this association of facts, or of ideas, affects the actions of all rational beings, and of many animals who are called irrational. Would you teach a dog or a horse to obey you; do you not associate pleasure, or pain, with the things you wish that they should practise, or avoid? The impatient and ignorant give infinitely more pain than is necessary to the animals they educate. If the pain, which we would associate with any action, do not immediately follow it, the child does not understand us; if several events happen nearly at the same time, it is impossible that a child can at first distinguish which are causes, and which are effects. Suppose, that a mother would teach her little son, that he must not put his dirty shoes upon her clean sofa: if she frowns upon him, or speaks to him in an angry tone, at the instant that he sets his foot and shoe upon the sofa, he desists; but he has only learned, that putting a foot upon the sofa, and his mother's frown, follow each other; his mother's frown, from former associations, gives him perhaps, some pain, or the expectation of some pain, and consequently he avoids repeating the action which immediately preceded the frown. If, a short time afterwards, the little boy, forgetting the frown, accidentally gets upon the sofa without his shoes, no evil follows; but it is not probable, that he can, by this single experiment, discover that his shoes have made all the difference in the two cases. Children are frequently so much puzzled by their confused experience of impunity and punishment, that they are quite at a loss how to conduct themselves. Whenever our punishments are not made intelligible, they are cruel; they give pain, without producing any future advantage. To make punishment intelligible to children, it must be not only immediately, but repeatedly and uniformly, associated with the actions which we wish them to avoid.
When children begin to reason, punishment affects them in a different manner from what it did whilst they were governed, like irrational animals, merely by the direct associations of pleasure and pain. They distinguish, in many instances, between coincidence and causation; they discover, that the will of others is the immediate cause, frequently, of the pain they suffer; they learn by experience, that the will is not an unchangeable cause, that it is influenced by circumstances, by passions, by persuasion, by caprice. It must be, however, by slow degrees, that they acquire any ideas of justice. They cannot know our views relative to their future happiness; their first ideas of the justice of the punishments we inflict, cannot, therefore, be accurate. They regulate these first judgments by the simple idea, that our punishments ought to be exactly the same always in the same circumstances; when they understand words, they learn to expect that our words and actions should precisely agree, that we should keep our promises, and fulfil our threats. They next learn, that as they are punished for voluntary faults, they cannot justly be punished until it has been distinctly explained to them what is wrong or forbidden, and what is right or permitted. The words right or wrong, and permitted or forbidden, are synonymous at first in the apprehensions of children; and obedience and disobedience are their only ideas of virtue and vice. Whatever we command to be done, or rather whatever we associate with pleasure, they imagine to be right; whatever we prohibit, provided we have uniformly associated it with pain, they believe to be wrong. This implicit submission to our authority, and these confined ideas of right and wrong, are convenient, or apparently convenient, to indolent or tyrannical governours; and they sometimes endeavour to prolong the reign of ignorance, with the hope of establishing in the mind an opinion of their own infallibility. But this is a dangerous, as well as an unjust, system. By comparison with the conduct and opinions of others, children learn to judge of their parents and preceptors; by reading and by conversation, they acquire more enlarged notions of right and wrong; and their obedience, unless it then arise from the conviction of their understandings, depends but on a very precarious foundation. The mere association of pleasure and pain, in the form of reward and punishment, with any given action, will not govern them; they will now examine whether there is any moral or physical necessary connection between the action and punishment; nor will they believe the punishment they suffer to be a consequence of the action they have committed, but rather a consequence of their being obliged to submit to the will of those who are stronger or more powerful than they are themselves. Unjust punishments do not effect their intended purpose, because the pain is not associated with the action which we would prohibit; but, on the contrary, it is associated with the idea of our tyranny; it consequently excites the sentiment of hatred towards us, instead of aversion to the forbidden action. When once, by reasoning, children acquire even a vague idea that those who educate them are unjust, it is in vain either to punish or reward them; if they submit, or if they rebel, their education is equally spoiled; in the one case they become cowardly, in the other, headstrong. To avoid these evils, there is but one method; we must early secure reason for our friend, else she will become our unconquerable enemy. As soon as children are able, in any instance, to understand the meaning and nature of punishment, it should, in that instance, be explained to them. Just punishment is pain, inflicted with the reasonable hope of preventing greater pain in future. In a family, where there are several children educated together, or in public schools, punishments may be inflicted with justice for the sake of example, but still the reformation and future good of the sufferer is always a principal object; and of this he should be made sensible. If our practice upon all occasions correspond with our theory, and if children really perceive, that we do not punish them to gratify our own spleen or passion, we shall not become, even when we give them pain, objects of their hatred. The pain will not be associated with us, but, as it ought to be, with the fault which was the real cause of it. As much as possible we should let children feel the natural consequences of their own conduct. The natural consequence of speaking truth, is the being believed; the natural consequence of falsehood, is the loss of trust and confidence; the natural consequence of all the useful virtues, is esteem; of all the amiable virtues, love; of each of the prudential virtues, some peculiar advantage to their possessor. But plum-pudding is not the appropriate reward of truth, nor is the loss of it the natural or necessary consequence of falsehood. Prudence is not to be rewarded with the affection due to humanity, nor is humanity to be recompensed with the esteem claimed by prudence. Let each good and bad quality have its proper share of praise and blame, and let the consequences of each follow as constantly as possible. That young people may form a steady judgment of the danger of any vice, they must uniformly perceive, that certain painful consequences result from its practice. It is in vain that we inflict punishments, unless all the precepts and all the examples which they see, confirm them in the same belief.
In the unfortunate son of Peter the Great, we have a striking instance of the effects of a disagreement between precept and example,63 which, in a less elevated situation, might have escaped our notice. It seems as if the different parts and stages of his education had been purposely contrived to counteract each other. Till he was eleven years old, he was committed to the care of women, and of ignorant bigotted priests, who were continually inveighing against his father for the abolition of certain barbarous customs. Then came baron Huysen for his governour, a sensible man, who had just begun to make something of his pupil, when prince Menzikof insisted upon having the sole management of the unfortunate Alexey. Prince Menzikof abandoned him to the company of the lowest wretches, who encouraged him in continual ebriety, and in a taste for every thing mean and profligate. At length came Euphrosyne, his Finlandish mistress, who, upon his trial for rebellion, deposed to every angry expression which, in his most unguarded moments, the wretched son had uttered against the tyrannical father. Amidst such scenes of contradictory experience, can we be surprised, that Alexey Petrovitch became feeble, ignorant, and profligate; that he rebelled against the father whom he had early been taught to fear and hate; that he listened to the pernicious counsels of the companions who had, by pretended sympathy and flattery, obtained that place in his confidence which no parental kindness had ever secured? Those historians who are zealous for the glory of Peter the Great, have eagerly refuted, as a most atrocious calumny, the report of his having had any part in the mysterious death of his son. But how will they apologize for the Czar's neglect of that son's education, from which all the misfortunes of his life arose?
But all this is past for ever; the only advantage we can gain from recalling these circumstances, is a confirmation of this important principle in education; that, when precept and example counteract one another, there is no hope of success. Nor can the utmost severity effect any useful purpose, whilst the daily experience of the pupil contradicts his preceptor's lessons. In fact, severity is seldom necessary in a well conducted education. The smallest possible degree of pain, which can, in any case, produce the required effect, is indisputably the just measure of the punishment which ought to be inflicted in any given case. This simple axiom will lead us to a number of truths, which immediately depend upon, or result from it. We must attend to every circumstance which can diminish the quantity of pain, without lessening the efficacy of punishment. Now it has been found from experience, that there are several circumstances which operate uniformly to this purpose. We formerly observed, that the effect of punishment upon the minds of children, before they reason, depends much upon its immediately succeeding the fault, and also upon its being certainly repeated whenever the same fault is committed. After children acquire the power of reasoning, from a variety of new motives, these laws, with respect to punishment, derive additional force. A trifling degree of pain will answer the purpose, if it be made inevitable; whilst the fear of an enormous proportion of uncertain punishment, will not be found sufficient to govern the imagination. The contemplation of a distant punishment, however severe, does not affect the imagination with much terror, because there is still a secret hope of escape in the mind. Hence it is found from experience, that the most sanguinary penal laws have always been ineffectual to restrain from crimes.64 Even if detection be inevitable, and consequent punishment equally inevitable, if punishment be not inflicted as soon as the criminal is convicted, it has been found that it has not, either as a preventative, or a public example, the same power upon the human mind. Not only should the punishment be immediate after conviction, but detection should follow the offence as speedily as possible. Without entering at large into the intricate arguments concerning identity and consciousness, we may observe, that the consciousness of having committed the offence for which he suffers, ought, at the time of suffering, to be strong in the offender's mind. Though proofs of his identity may have been legally established in a court of justice; and though, as far as it relates to public justice, it matters not whether the offence for which he is punished has been committed yesterday or a year ago; yet, as to the effect which the punishment produces on the culprit's own mind, there must be a material difference.
"I desire you to judge of me, not by what I was, but by what I am," said a philosopher, when he was reproached for some of his past transgressions. If the interval between an offence and its punishment be long, it is possible that, during this interval, a complete change may be made in the views and habits of the offender; such a change as shall absolutely preclude all probability of his repeating his offence. His punishment must then be purely for the sake of example to others. He suffers pain at the time, perhaps, when he is in the best social dispositions possible; and thus we punish the present good man for the faults of the former offender. We readily excuse the violence which a man in a passion may have committed, when, upon his return to his sober senses, he expresses contrition and surprise at his own excesses; he assures us, and we believe him, that he is now a perfectly different person. If we do not feel any material ill consequences from his late anger, we are willing, and even desirous, that the passionate man should not, in his sober state, be punished for his madness; all that we can desire, is to have some security against his falling into any fresh fit of anger. Could his habits of temper be instantly changed, and could we have a moral certainty that his frenzy would never more do us any injury, would it not be malevolent and unjust to punish him for his old insanity? If we think and act upon these principles with respect to men, how much more indulgent should we be to children? Indulgence is perhaps an improper word – but in other words, how careful should we be never to chain children to their dead faults!65 Children, during their education, must be in a continual state of progression; they are not the same to-day that they were yesterday; they have little reflection; their consciousness of the present occupies them; and it would be extremely difficult from day to day, or from hour to hour, to identify their minds. Far from wishing that they should distinctly remember all their past thoughts, and that they should value themselves upon their continuing the same, we must frequently desire that they should forget their former errours, and absolutely change their manner of thinking. They should feel no interest in adhering to former bad habits or false opinions; therefore, their pride should not be roused to defend these by our making them a part of their standing character. The character of children is to be formed – we should never speak of it as positively fixed. Man has been defined to be a bundle of habits; till the bundle is made up, we may continually increase or diminish it. Children who are zealous in defence of their own perfections, are of all others most likely to become stationary in their intellectual progress, and disingenuous in their temper. It would be in vain to repeat to them this sensible and elegant observation – "To confess that you have been in the wrong, is only saying, in other words, that you are wiser to-day than you were yesterday." This remark will rather pique, than comfort, the pride of those who are anxious to prove that they have been equally wise and immaculate in every day of their existence.
It may be said, that children cannot too early be made sensible of the value of reputation, and they must be taught to connect the ideas of their past and present selves, otherwise they cannot perceive, for instance, why confidence should be placed in them in proportion to their past integrity; or why falsehood should lead to distrust. The force of this argument must be admitted; yet still we must consider the age and strength of mind in children in applying it to practice. Truth is not instinctive in the mind, and the ideas of integrity, and of the advantages of reputation, must be very cautiously introduced, lest, by giving children too perfect a theory of morality, before they have sufficient strength of mind to adhere to it in practice, we may make them hypocrites, or else give them a fatal distrust of themselves, founded upon too early an experience of their own weakness, and too great sensibility to shame.
Shame, when it once becomes familiar to the mind, loses its effect; it should not, therefore, be used as a common punishment for slight faults. Nor should we trust very early in education to the delicate secret influence of conscience; but we should take every precaution to prevent the necessity of having recourse to the punishment of disgrace; and we must, if we mean to preserve the power of conscience, take care that it be never disregarded with impunity. We must avoid opposing it to strong temptation; nor should we ever try the integrity of children, except in situations where we can be perfectly certain of the result of the experiment. We must neither run the risk of injuring them by unjust suspicions, nor unmerited confidence. By prudent arrangements, and by unremitted daily attention, we should absolutely prevent the possibility of deceit. By giving few commands, or prohibitions, we may avoid the danger of either secret or open disobedience. By diminishing temptations to do wrong, we act more humanely than by multiplying restraints and punishments.
It has been found, that no restraints or punishments have proved adequate to ensure obedience to laws, whenever strong temptations, and many probabilities of evasion, combine in opposition to conscience or fear. The terrors of the law have been for years ineffectually directed against a race of beings called smugglers: yet smuggling is still an extensive, lucrative, and not universally discreditable, profession. Let any person look into the history of the excise laws,66 and he will be astonished at the accumulation of penal statutes, which the active, but ineffectual, ingenuity of prohibitory legislators has devised in the course of about thirty years. Open war was declared against all illegal distillers; yet the temptation to illegal distilling continually increased, in proportion to the heavy duties laid upon the fair trader. It came at length to a trial of skill between revenue officers and distillers, which could cheat, or which could detect, the fastest. The distiller had the strongest interest in the business, and he usually came off victorious. Coursing officers, and watching officers (once ten watching officers were set upon one distiller) and surveyors and supervisors, multiplied without end: the land in their fiscal maps was portioned out into divisions and districts, and each gauger had the charge of all the distillers in his division: the watching officer went first, and the coursing officer went after him, and after him the supervisor; and they had table-books, and gauging-rods, and dockets, and permits; permits for sellers, and permits for buyers, and permits for foreign spirits, printed in red ink, and permits for British spirits, in black ink; and they went about night and day with their hydrometers, to ascertain the strength of spirits; and with their gauging-rods, to measure wash. But the pertinacious distiller was still flourishing; permits were forged; concealed pipes were fabricated; and the proportion between the wash and spirits was seldom legal. The commisioners complained, and the legislators went to work again. Under a penalty of one hundred pounds, distillers were ordered to paint the words distiller, dealer in spirits, over their doors; and it was further enacted, that all the distillers should furnish, at their own expense, any kind of locks, and fastenings, which the revenue officers should require for locking up the doors of their own furnaces, the heads of their own stills, pumps, pipes, &c. First, suspicions fell upon the public distiller for exportation; then his utensils were locked up; afterwards the private distiller was suspected, and he was locked up: then they set him and his furnaces at liberty, and went back in a passion to the public distiller. The legislature condescended to interfere, and with a new lock and key, precisely described in an act of parliament, it was hoped all would be made secure. Any person being a distiller, who should lock up his furnace or pipes with a key constructed differently from that which the act described, or any person making such illegal key for said distiller, was subject to the forfeiture of one hundred pounds. The padlock was never fixed upon the mind, and even the lock and key, prescribed by act of parliament, were found inefficacious. Any common blacksmith, with a picklock in his possession, laughed at the combined skill of the two houses of parliament.
This digression from the rewards and punishments of children, to the distillery laws, may, it is hoped, be pardoned, if the useful moral can be drawn from it, that, where there are great temptations to fraud, and continual opportunities of evasion, no laws, however ingenious, no punishments, however exorbitant, can avail. The history of coiners, venders, and utterers, of his majesty's coin, as lately detailed to us by respectable authority,67 may afford further illustration of this principle.
There is no imminent danger of children's becoming either coiners or fraudulent distillers; but an ingenious preceptor will not be much puzzled in applying the remarks that have been made, to the subject of education. For the anticlimax, in descending from the legislation of men to the government of children, no apology is attempted.
The fewer the laws we make for children, the better. Whatever they may be, they should be distinctly expressed; the letter and spirit should both agree, and the words should bear but one signification, clear to all the parties concerned. They should never be subject to the ex post facto interpretation of an angry preceptor, or a cunning pupil; no loose general terms should permit tyranny, or encourage quibbling. There is said68 to be a Chinese law, which decrees, that whoever does not show proper respect to the sovereign, is to be punished with death. What is meant by the words proper respect, is not defined. Two persons made a mistake in some account of an insignificant affair, in one of their court gazettes. It was declared, that to lie in a court gazette, is to be wanting in proper respect to the court. Both the careless scribes were put to death. One of the princes of the blood inadvertently put some mark upon a memorial, which had been signed by the emperor Bogdo Chan. This was construed to be a want of proper respect to Bogdo Chan the emperor, and a horrible persecution hence arose against the scrawling prince and his whole family. May no schoolmasters, ushers, or others, ever (even as far as they are able) imitate Bogdo Chan, and may they always define to their subjects, what they mean by proper respect!
There is a sort of mistaken mercy sometimes shown to children, which is, in reality, the greatest cruelty. People, who are too angry to refrain from threats, are often too indolent, or too compassionate, to put their threats in execution. Between their words and actions there is hence a manifest contradiction; their pupils learn from experience, either totally to disregard these threats, or else to calculate, from the various degrees of anger which appear in the threatener's countenance, what real probability there is of his being as good or as bad as his word. Far from perceiving that punishment, in this case, is pain given with the reasonable hope of making him wiser or happier, the pupil is convinced, that his master punishes him only to gratify the passion of anger, to which he is unfortunately subject. Even supposing that threateners are exact in fulfilling their threats, and that they are not passionate, but simply wish to avoid giving pain; they endeavour to excite the fears of their pupils as the means of governing them with the least possible pain. But with fear they excite all the passions and habits which are connected with that mean principle of action, and they extinguish that vigorous spirit, that independent energy of soul, which is essential to all the active and manly virtues. Young people, who find that their daily pleasures depend not so much upon their own exertions as upon the humour and caprice of others, become absolute courtiers; they practise all the arts of persuasion, and all the crouching hypocrisy which can deprecate wrath, or propitiate favour. Their notions of right and wrong cannot be enlarged; their recollection of the rewards and punishments of their childhood, is always connected with the ideas of tyranny and slavery; and when they break their own chains, they are impatient to impose similar bonds upon their inferiors.
