The Industrial Review, Social and Political. — 1877-07-21 (London, England)

OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS.  The story of the boy who committed suicide at Christ's Hospital in consequence of the severe treatment he received, is a very sad one. Mr. Cross promises inquiry, and although inquiry may be necessary to get at the exact facts of this particular case, inquiry is not at all necessary to secure the emphatic condemnation of the brutal system that led to it, by the working men of England. At certain intervals the public mind is shocked by something of this kind, sometimes at one public school, and sometimes at another; and after a few writers in the newspapers have explained, condemned, or justified such barbarities, public indignation dies out, and the old system goes forward until some new atrocity brings it again into prominence. It is not necessary to go into the particulars of any of these cases. Usually some weak or timed boy is bullied and beaten by some young brute placed over him in authority, and when a public outcry is made—which we may be sure is not once out of a thousand cases—we are told by writers in the newspapers that such things are part of the educational system pursued in our public schools, and that on the whole the system answers very well, that boys ought to be able to bear such things without grumbling or flinching, and that only the milksops cry out and ask for protection. Nothing can be worse than such attempts at justification, the thing is to be utterly condemned, and not in any way to be justified. The tyrants of the school become the over-bearing brutes in the battle of life, they make the lives of gentler lads  miserable while they can, and then they go out into the world to hector and bullock their fellow-men to the fullest extent to which their really cowardly natures can prompt them to go. Such practices in our schools as that which led poor little William Arthur Gibbs to commit suicide are unmitigated evils. To ill-use a boy is not the way to make him good, or brave, or happy. or in any way to correct any foible he may have; to inflict illusage is to make in time a cruel blackguard of the youth who does it. To keep open a pretence of any kind for it is to prove that the schools are not managed as they ought to be. The working men of the country would not permit a system of this kind to exist for an hour in connexion with the elementary schools of the country, and they should raise their voices loudly against it when practiced in middle and upper class schools.  Whatever Mr. Cross's inquiry may bring out in regard to this particular case, the system out of which it has come is for ever condemned. Such barbarities are outrages on the humanity of the day. We have, it is to be hoped, got beyond the necessity for such tortures either for men or boys, and the lash or the rod as a punishment, except for criminals or convicts of the worst kind, cannot be any longer tolerated. It ought to be put aside at once in the public service, and in our public schools it never should be heard of again. Any punishment in our public schools that has a degrading or brutalizing effect has no reason for its continuance but such all it finds in the incompetence of those to whose hands the management of such establishments are confided. The bad way of doing any thing is only continued till the better way is discovered, and if we have not already found this we are bound to find a better way of maintaining discipline in our public schools than that which has led to the suicide of the boy Gibbs.