But no matter which route you select, you will have the wise
company of a great many teachers, parents, and guardians, and an
innumerable throng of fair and lovely children will journey by your
side.
The road of threat and fear, of arbitrary and over-severe punishment,
has been much traveled in all times, though perhaps it is a little
grass-grown now.
The child who obeys you merely because he fears punishment is a slave
who cowers under the lash of the despot. Undue severity makes him a
liar and a coward. He hates his master, he hates the thing he is made
to do; there is a bitter sense of injustice, a seething passion of
revenge, forever within him; and were he strong enough he would rise
and destroy the power that has crushed him. He has done right because
he was forced to do so, not because he desired it; and since the
right-doing, the obedience, was neither the fruit of his reason nor
his love, it cannot be permanent.
The feeling of justice is strong in the child's mind, and you have
constantly wounded that feeling.
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