The Evening Telegraph

HOMICIDE IN SCHOOL.

From the N. Y. Tribune.

What which we have, with a painful confidence, long anticipated, has come at last. In November, 1869, in the Skinner School, in Chicago, the teacher had a difficulty with a lad named Willie Atkins. This boy "had previously been affected with a difficulty in the head," and was, therefore, entitled to the patience and consideration of the teacher, who nevertheless undertook to flog him. A struggle ensued, in the course of which the boy's head struck violently against a steam-pipe. Since that time he remained unconscious and absolutely dumb, until, on the 28th of last month, death came mercifully to relieve him from present and future misery. This is a plain case of homicide—justifiable, may be, by the maxim of Solomon—we may call it boy-slaughter in the sixth or sixteenth degree, but it is a killing, after all possible extenuations. This question then arises:—How often, in the discipline of a school, will it be necessary to kill a boy?—a question of decided interest to parents, to guardians, and to the public at large. How many such murders will committees allow annually to each school? In teaching the young idea how to shoot, how often will it be necessary to finally extinguish the young idea, consigning it to cold obstruction, and abandoning all chance of any further "shooting" altogether?

It is a little strange that the head of a child, being that part for the cultivation and development of which schools are said to be established and maintained, should be the very corporal locality against which teachers appear to entertain a peculiar spite—thumping it, drumming on it, cuffing it, and treating it as if the skull were of cast iron riveted like a steam-boiler, and not of bone still in a pulpy state. Upon this tender organ the passionate teacher advances with clenched fist, with open palm, with the oaken ferrule. He declares war against the medulla oblongata; he vents his spleen upon the cerebrum; he smites ferociously the cerebellum, just as if he were hired by society to manufacture the largest possible number of idiots in the smallest possible time. He has so often declared the cranial cavity of his victim to be empty, and the cranial walls to be disgracefully thick, that he plays his tattoo and reveille upon the dome of thought as if it were the bottom of a tin kettle. "Nothing is more handy than the head. A boy cannot put it into his pocket, as he puts his fist. There it is, a fair, open, and convenient mark for boxing, smiting, hitting, cuffing, and with its ears always ready for an auxiliary pull. Boards of education are usually very timber-like, knotty, gnarled, and cross-grained, and the Chicago board seems to be no exception to the wooden rule. Last November the cruelty practiced upon this boy was officially brought before "the boarders," and they solemnly resolved that 'the charge of undue violence or unnecessary severity on the part of the teacher was not established.' Good heavens! will these Chicago Solons be obliging enough to tell what testimony and how much of it would have been "sufficient?" Here was a boy with his brain ruined, a child fallen into brute unconsciousness, or something less, and here was also evidence that he was reduced to this pitiful condition through the passionate physical violence of the teacher; and here, too, as if it were a coroner's jury sitting in a railway murder case, we are treated to the everlasting droning verdict of "Nobody to blame!" Why not? Why, because 'the boy had previously been affected with a difficulty in the head.' Ergo, all boys "with difficulties in the head" may be pounded in that region without the slightest restraint; while, upon the other hand, it would be exceedingly wrong so much as to fillip any head happening to be perfectly healthy. We had no idea that the Dogberry breed was so far from being extinct. When we have thus a claim for peculiar tenderness metamorphosed into an excuse for unrestrained severity, we begin to wonder what kind of heads it has pleased Divine Providence to bestow upon the Chicago Board of Education.

We lay it down as a broad and general rule that a school-teacher who cannot manage his or her pupils without destroying their brains by physical violence, is not fit for the business of education; and in these enlightened days would hardly be thought fit to drive a herd of cattle, or to be trusted with the care of horses. Rarey tamed Cruiser by kindness; schoolmasters and mistresses tame little boys and girls by a free use of the cowhide, which has been banished from all respectable stables. If a brutal driver should kill his steed by overdriving or unnecessary blows, the courts of justice would have something to say about it; but when teachers kill little boys, the bland Board of Education unanimously resolve that the victim invoked his own fate, and that nobody else is to blame.

In order that we may not be accused of injustice to the teacher, or to any person who has been connected with this painful affair, we think it right to add that it has been concluded with one of those ceremonials called a coroner's inquest, and that after hearing the testimony of a large number of doctors, the jury found that the inflammation of the boy's brain "arose from natural causes," and the teacher was 'exonerated from all blame in the matter.' The fact, however, remains that a lad subject to brain disease was physically maltreated, and never spoke afterward. We leave the intelligent reader to draw his own conclusions.