Holds Solomon All Wrong on 'Spare the Rod'
Bad Boy Merely Reflects Treatment, Adler Says.
Solomon's advice to spare the rod and spoil the child was definitely reversed yesterday by Dr. Alfred Adler, noted Viennese psychologist, who spoke in Recital hall of the Fine Arts building. The stick, he said, has long been the friend of the teacher, but as a more powerful curative agency he recommended understanding.
"The most common error in education," Dr. Adler said, "is the failure of the teacher to understand the coherence of the child's living. The 'problem child,' the class 'bad boy,' is scolded and punished, but that is about as foolish as for a physician to call on a man who has broken his leg and say, 'Aha! I see you've broken your leg—for shame!'
"If the teacher will put herself in the bad child's place she would see that, according to his lights, he is acting intelligently. He has either been pampered or hated and has grown into an atmosphere of alienness, feeling nothing in common with others around him and wanting to be aloof.
"To discover the child who steals and punish him does not correct the evil; it increases his sense of the sport of the thing and only sets him to figuring out what his mistakes were which led to his discovery so that in future he can avoid them."
The progress of education, Dr. Adler said, has been greatly retarded through the stress placed on the inheritance of abilities. To say that one child is gifted and another stupid is to retard both, according to the psychologist.
"The gifted child is stumped by thinking too much is expected of him, and the stupid one comes to think it is futile for him to try to achieve anything," he continued.
"Mankind is as a species tremendously timid. We need encouragement, not discouragement. We need to be taught, what is really the truth, that we can be anything we want if we will train ourselves properly for it."
Fuente: Chicago Daily Tribune (Chicago), miércoles 11 de abril de 1928, p. 35; crónica sin firma. Transcripción hecha sobre la imagen de la página (fultonhistory.com, «Chicago IL Daily Tribune 1928-04-11_87_87_35.pdf»), cotejada con el OCR de la plataforma, que altera el orden de las palabras en dos pasajes (la imagen no confirma la palabra «regarded» que conjeturaba la transcripción normalizada). El titular principal es «Holds Solomon All Wrong on 'Spare the Rod'»; el inventario daba solo el subtítulo.