No grown person, for instance, likes to be interrupted, and is likely to regard the child who interrupts him wilfully naughty.  No young child, on the contrary, objects to being interrupted in his speech, though he may object to being interrupted in his play; and he cannot understand why an adult should set so much store on the quiet listening which is so infrequent in his own experience.  Grown persons object to noise; children delight in it.  Grown persons like to have things kept in their places; to a child, one place as good as another.  Grown persons have a prejudice in favor of cleanliness; children like to swim, but hate to wash, and have no objections whatever to grimy hands and faces.  None of these things imply the least degree of obliquity on the child’s part; and yet it is safe to say that nine-tenths of the children who are punished are punished for some of these things.  The remedy for these inconveniences is time and patience.  The child, if left to himself, without a word of admonishment, would probably change his conduct in these respects, merely by the force of imitation, provided that the adults around him set him, a persistent example of courtesy, gentleness, and cleanliness.

[Sidenote:  Real Faults]

The faults that are real faults, as Richter[A] says, are those faults which increase with age.  These it is that need attention rather than those that disappear of themselves as the child grows older.  This rule ought to be put in large letters, that every one who has to train children may be daily reminded by it; and not exercise his soul and spend his force in trying to overcome little things which may perhaps be objectionable, but which will vanish to-morrow.  Concentrate your energies on the overcoming of such tendencies as may in time develop into permanent evils.

[Sidenote:  Training the Will]

To accomplish this, you most, of course, train the child’s own will, because no one can force another person into virtue against his will.  The chief object of all training is, as we shall see in the next section, to lead the child to love righteousness, to prefer right doing to wrong doing; to make right doing a permanent desire.  Therefore, in all the procedures about to be suggested, an effort is made to convince the child of the ugliness and painfulness of wrong doing.

[Sidenote:  Natural Punishment]

Punishment, as Herbert Spencer[B] agrees with Froebel[C] in pointing out, should be as nearly as possible a representation of the natural result of the child’s action; that is, the fault should be made to punish itself as much as possible without the interference of any outside person; for the object is not to make the child bend his will to the will of another, but make him see the fault itself as an undesirable thing.

[Sidenote:  Breaking the Will]