n prisons, lunatic asylums, and schools have been
abandoned in schools; the penalties of to-day are slight: bad marks,
reproofs, unfavorable reports to the family, suspension of attendance.
The ceremonial prize-giving is also a thing of the past, the solemn
function at which the scholars mounted the platform as in triumph to
receive their prizes from the hands of the noblest and most
distinguished persons of the neighborhood, who accompanied the
presentation with amiable words of encouragement while the public,
consisting mainly of proud and agitated parents, murmured their
approval and admiration. All these superfluities have been abolished;
the prize, the object, is simply handed to the winner in an ante-room
of the school.

The important matter is that the child shall receive the object he has
deserved. The medals, too, with which pupils were formerly able to
adorn their breasts, are now abolished; the prize is a book, a useful
object. A sense of the practical has found its way even into our
schools. Perhaps the good children will presently be rewarded by the
presentation of a piece of soap, or the material for an apron, in a
_tete-a-tete_ between giver and recipient.

But a prize there must needs be.

However, throughout all the discussions of the pedagogists and the
evolutions of punishments and prizes, no one has dreamt of asking
himself what is the good which is rewarded, and what the evil which is
punished, or whether, before urging children on to an undertaking, it
would not be well to cast a glance at the undertaking itself, and
judge of its value.

At last positive studies on the school question have shed sufficient
light to enable us to construct a new base for the old question. Is it
well to allure children by a prize, to incite them to exhaust their
nervous systems and injure their eyesight? And is it well to check
them by means of punishments, when, urged by an overpowering instinct
of self-preservation, they seek to avoid these perils? At last we all
know that the prize-winners of the elementary schools are the mediocre
pupils of the high school; that the prize-winners of the high school
are the exhausted students of the academies; and that those who gain
prizes throughout their school career are those who are most easily
vanquished in the battle of life.

Knowing this, is it well to stimulate on the one hand and to repress
on the other, to the end that children may remain in this ruinous
conditio