The most frequent as well as the most dangerous of the numerous
mistakes made in handling children is that people do not
remember how they felt themselves at a similar age, that they
do not regard and comprehend the feelings of the child from
their own past point of view. The adult laughs or smiles in
remembering the punishments and other things which caused him
in his childhood anxious days or nights, which produced the
silent torture of the child's heart, infinite despondency,
burning indignation, lonely fears, outraged sense of justice,
the terrible creations of his imagination, his absurd shame,
his unsatisfied thirst for joy, freedom, and tenderness.
Lacking these beneficent memories, adults constantly repeat the
crime of destroying the childhood of the new generation,--the
only time in life in which the guardian of education can really
be a kindly providence. So strongly do I feel that the
unnecessary sufferings of children are unnatural as well as
ignoble that I experience physical disgust in touching the hand
of a human being that I know has struck a child; and I cannot
close my eyes after I have heard a child in the street
threatened with corporal punishment.

Blows call forth the virtues of slaves, not those of freemen.
As early as Walther von der Vogelweide, it was known that the
honourable man respects a word more than a blow. The exercise
of physical force delivers the weak and unprotected into the
hands of the strong. A child never believes in his heart,
though he may be brought to acknowledge verbally, that the
blows were due to love, that they were administered because
they were necessary. The child is too keen not to know that
such a "must" does not exist, and that love can express itself