The discipline upon which schools pride themselves so much is an altogether false and pernicious discipline. The only liberty which is vouchsafed to schoolboys is outside of their work. No doubt it is an excellent thing that boys should be free to choose the manner in which they make use of their leisure hours. There would be a great uproar amongst parents if their sons were forbidden to join in the games they wished to play, and compelled to play those for which they had no taste. It would be considered monstrous to remove a boy who was a capital bowler from the cricket-field, and make him go in for fives or racquets; or, to use an Eton illustration, to take a 'wet bob' who was a promising oarsman and might row in the school eight at Henley, and turn him into the playing-fields to become an inferior 'dry bob.'
But the same arguments that apply to physical discipline apply also to mental discipline. In the class-room there is practically no latitude given to the boy at all. In many schools, it is true, there is the choice of a classical or a modern side; but the choice is the parents', not the boy's. The latter is always treated, in reference to his school-work, as a machine. There is simply the offer of a classical strait-waistcoat or a modern strait-waistcoat; and the boy is put into one or the other according to the fancy of a third person.
Strait-waistcoats have long been discarded in lunatic asylums. It has been discovered by medical experts that anything like coercion is the worst possible treatment for the brain. Whilst our lunatics, however, are treated in this humane and rational spirit, the educational expert is busily occupied in destroying the delicate fabric of the schoolboy brain by the very methods that have been discontinued in the case of madmen.
The school curriculum, or any other arbitrary course of study, is a mental strait-waistcoat. It has a more immoral and degenerating effect upon the mind because it is applied directly. If physical restraint acts perniciously upon the reasoning powers, a far greater degree of harm must be caused by direct mental restraint. Yet nobody, from Arnold and Thring down to the professional crammer of to-day, seems to have grasped this simple fact.