Moral education: its laws and methods

Front matter

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Contents

Chap. Page

I. The Essential Elements of a Liberal Education ....... i

II. Moral Education 25

Introduction

The signal failure of educational systems to elevate the social condition of mankind, and the development of the higher intelligence and wiser philanthropy which demand something better, make the present eminently the proper time for a fundamental change.

A system of education substantially identical in its spirit and aim with those which prevailed over twenty centuries ago in Greece and Rome (being merely a limited intellectual culture) is very far behind the demands of modern philanthropy and intelligence. It belongs to the intellectual condition of that old period which college students are still taught to venerate, when Nature was supposed to consist of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water; when the magnitude and rotundity of the earth were unknown; when the stellar universe was considered a mysterious accompaniment of the flat earth; when the climates, oceans and continents of earth were still unexplored, the vegetable and animal kingdoms almost unknown and the structure of the globe totally unknown; when the structure and functions of the human body were mysteries, and the attributes of soul and body being alike an inaccessible mystery, their culture and development were necessarily either neglected or blindly and aimlessly undertaken. In such a condition the school could do nothing but cultivate language, oratory, history and speculation.

The immense progress of modern society beyond the ignorance of the ancients has been a progress in

VI INTRODUCTION,

everything but that which specially concerns education, and education therefore stagnates with its basic sciences. In all that concerns man except the structure and physical operations of his body, the modern university is but little in advance of the Athenian Lyceum. Its pneumatology and psychology, if it can by courtesy be said to have such sciences, are little else than speculation, and as to the conjoint action of soul and body, and the laws of their interrelation, the modern college professor knows about as little as the Greek speculator; indeed there are many who know less, having been educated into doubt or denial of the existence of the soul. This absolute stagnation of psychic science and anthropology in the universities has necessarily carried with it a similar stagnation in the science of development or education, for development must be based upon, or guided by, the knowledge of the thing to be developed.

A satisfactory knowledge of the psychic and physiological functions of life and their definite association with the brain and body and laws of interaction would necessarily indicate the laws of their development. That development is education, and the system of education which I present has its scientific basis in the anthropology which I have been teaching for forty years, and its empirical basis in the successful operations of schools in which correct principles and methods have been adopted.

In presenting by this volume the convictions which I have cherished for nearly half a century, I find that I am no longer a solitary voice in the wilderness, and that the most liberal thinkers of the present generation are prepared to hail with cordiality the principles of a " full-orbed education/' which, when I presented them at Minneapolis before the National Educational Association, were received with much approbation.

During the preparation of this volume I have received so many indubitable evidences of appreciation, sympathy and co-operation as to induce me to propose the establishment of the Pantological University at Boston, as an embodiment of the new education, and

INTRODUCTION. Vll

to deliver an address upon the subject at Boston, June 18, 1882.

To this address* (a concise statement of the principles of the new education) arid the purposes which it unfolds, attention has been called by a few of my friends in the following appeal to progressive minds. The great intelligence, learning and ability of those whose names are signed, and who have long been familiar with the most advanced forms of modern thought, are sufficient to arrest the attention of the most conservative, or even the most pessimistic thinkers.

To the Friends of Progress.

In the eloquent and memorable address delivered by Prof. J. R. Buchanan, at Boston, on the " New Era in Education," we find a scheme of philanthropy more comprehensive, wide-reaching and efficient than any of which we have any knowledge. We ask you to read it carefully, that each one may answer for himself the question, What can I do to promote so grand a measure ?

If the principles for which heroes, saints and martyrs have died, and will continue to toil and suffer, are to become established on earth, it must be by such means, for falsehood and wrong can never cease to prevail until they are expelled by what Prof. Buchanan calls the omnipotent power of education. That power and the mode of realizing it have been presented by him as they have never before been presented. He is the leader in this great reform, and it is fitting that he should be, since his life has been given disinterestedly to reform, and his wonderful discoveries have organized with philosophic clearness the great science of man — the science of anthropology — from which philosophy will take a new departure, and the results of which in the words of the poet Bryant are, " Second to no other in immediate interest and in promise of important future results to science and humanity. " No one individual in the whole history of vital and medical science has done so much to solve the mysteries of being and apply the solution to human welfare.

Among the grand results arising are an entire change of our educational system and a fundamental change in medical philosophy and practice, the merit of which is already recognized by those who have attended his original courses of instruction.

* I know of no better method of diffusing a knowledge of the proposed educational reform than the circulation of the Boston address, a pamphlet of twelve pages, which I shall furnish gratuitously to all applicants, or in quantities at the rate of $2 per hundred.

Vlll

INTRODUCTION.

In this great movement we shall co-operate as friends, and we do not see how any one who understands the subject and feels a sentiment of love for his fellow-beings can hesitate to co-operate by personal exertion, and by all the means that he can control, for works of benevolence and enlightenment.

Nelson Cross, J. L. O'Sullivan, S. B. Brittan, Henry Kiddle, Allen Putnam, Wm. K. Hoyt, R. P. Wilson, L. L. Whitlock, E. L. Saxon,

Wm. P. Strickland, D.D.

J. M. Peebles, M.D.

Wm. H. Atkinson, M.D.

F. L. H. Willis, M.D.

O. H. Wellington, M.D.

M. B. Hayden, M.D.

D. Higbie, M.D.

Samuel T. Thompson, B. Franklin Clark, M.D. S. B. Nichols, and others.

/ heartily approve the grand Educational Reform proposed by Dr. Buchanan, and shall be glad to co-operate in its furtherance in all ways in my power*

A. E. NEWTON, Arlington, Mass.

MORAL EDUCATION.

Chapter I. The Essential Elements Of A Liberal Education*

Ancient ignorance. — A glacial period of twenty centuries not yet ended. — Illiberal education. — Its signal defects. — Schooling not education. — The five indispensable elements of liberal education. — ist. Physiological development antagonized by schools. — 2d. Industrial education — its absence demoralizing and degenerating. — < 3d. Medical education — we have no right to be sick and should understand the preservation of health. — 4th. Life not worth living without moral development— virtue should be the first object of education. — 5th. The literary or intellectual, the least important of the five. — Omnipotence of the school. — Results of liberal and illiberal education contrasted. — Illiberal education responsible for the world's misery. — Mill's ideal of education. — The moral the only elevating power. — Criticism of Italian universities. — Criticism of German universities. — Degradation of education by the exclusion of its ethical elements. — Indifference to collegiate education. — Colleges not self-sustained.— A liberal education should be attractive and accessible to all.

For about two thousand years the progress of science and philosophy was virtually arrested by a superstitious reverence for Greek literature. The dense ignorance of the age of Plato and Aristotle was crystallized into forms of thought which, like a vast iceberg, covered the civilized world, until in the time of Galileo it began to thaw in the divine light of science.

* An address delivered in the University Convocation of the State of New York, at Albany, July 10th, 1878, with subsequent additions.

It is commonly supposed that this glacial period of fully twenty centuries has passed away entirely — that the ice is all dissolved, and that the light of divine love and wisdom, falling upon the soil with unobstructed warmth, is bringing forth the dense and rapid growth that insures a magnificent harvest; or, in plainer language, that we are fully emancipated from the influence of ancient ignorance, and are proceeding in the most direct and rational manner to cultivate and develop human intelligence, and to apply that intelligence to the acquisition of all attainable knowledge.

Disclaiming all intemperate radicalism and all needless iconoclasm, I am nevertheless compelled by a conception of truth derived from new and peculiar investigations, and also verified by experience in education, to maintain the opposite opinion — to declare that the iceberg is not yet entirely melted, but still exists as a benumbing power ; for although Aristotle has been annihilated as authority by Galileo, Newton, tmd the physiologists, the barbarian conceptions of education and of philosophy which come down from the Aristotelian age are still dominant in various degrees over the leading universities of the world — to so great an extent, indeed, that we shall not be able to boast of a true system of liberal education until the entire philosophy, ethics, teaching, and practice of our leading institutions of Europe and America shall be thoroughly revolutionized, their leading conceptions being not only fundamentally changed, but absolutely reversed. If you will pardon the audacity of this language, I will endeavor to show that it is not extravagant. There seems to be nothing in existence at present on a large scale in the leading institutions which can be properly called a liberal education, for that which makes the most imposing claims to be recognized as liberal education in the universities appears, when viewed from the standpoint of anthropology, not only lame, feeble, and defective in the most essential elements of a liberal education, but positively illiberal in its contractile influence upon the intellect and soul, as well as its degenerative influence upon the body.

The science of man demands a revolution in education, but the narrow limits of a paper before this convocation do not admit an exposition of this demand, or its basis — nor do they admit a distinct criticism of education as it is, nor a distinct exposition of education as it should be. The fullest development our time admits of the philosophy of education will be but offering the synoptic head-lines of a chapter that is not yet written. I desire that these remarks may be accepted, not as a statement of the case, but as an index referring to the statement that may be made hereafter.

In presenting such a paper I place myself at your mercy, without a shield against misconception, and attribute to you the candor, patience, courtesy, liberality and intuitive recognition of truth when nakedly presented, which would become a body of philosophers. If we need philosophers anywhere especially, it is among those who organize and control our systems and institutions of. education.

The barbarian conception of education, which Bpiankind have not yet outgrown, coming from a period when science was scorned, is, that education is the acquisition of a command of language and familiarity with literature, opinions and speculations. This is the fundamental conception, to which is added the knowledge of mathematics and of history. By the strenuous exertions of educational reformers something has been added to this in modern times. The physical sciences have asserted their claims. Ethics and sociology, in the form of political economy, are getting some recognition, and the spirit of progress is making so many additional improvements in different institutions that it is difficult to make any exact estimate of their present status.

But all this is merely intellectual and chiefly literary. As an intellectual education it is defective, because it does not teach that originality of thought upon which the world }s progress depends. It fails to develop originality and power of independent thought ; it fails to develop invention ; it fails to overcome dogmatism and prejudice; it fails to develop liberality of thought; it fails to develop the power of reasoning upon testimony and evidence in reference to new truths, and all things which are beyond the accustomed routine. The most educated men are often below the average of society, in the ability to discard prejudice and to ascertain the existence of any truth foreign to their training. Such education does not qualify men to lead society into new truths, new arts, and a better social condition. It is not so hopelessly repressive as the Chinese system; but it is negative, adding little to the onward and upward movement of society; and the profound scholar is sometimes up to the Chinese standard of immobility. It is notorious that hundreds of colleges, containing or controlling at least threefourths of the learning, reputation and dignity of the medical profession, have not only closed their eyes against certain contemporary progress in medical science, refusing all examination of the scientific facts presented, but have assailed the new investigations witl^ far more of partisan bitterness and malignity thari was ever shown in darker ages by the partisans of Aristotle and of Des Cartes. Does not every one know that this is true of the organized hostility against the scientific investigations and discoveries of homoeopathy and American eclecticism, which captivate every individual physician who dares to investigate them, but which have never yet received an honest and courteous investigation or even respectful treatment from the faculty of any old school college ? A system of education which produces such results is a survival of barbarism, and is at war with the spirit of the nineteenth century.

But if all these barbarisms were removed by a radical change in our colleges, this would be but the beginning of reform. The whole system is wrong from top to bottom, for it is not educatio?i, but only schooling. Intellectual training, however perfect we may make it, is not a liberal education. It is not an education at all, but only a fragment of an education, as an arm is a portion of a man.

It is not even the moiety of an education, for education consists of five distinct departments, which may be compared to the five fingers of the hand. In selecting literary education or schooling as their sole purpose, the colleges have virtually chosen the little finger, leaving the four more useful and more powerful ones to blind chance, or perhaps to atrophy or paralysis. There has been many a learned collegian, in whom four-fifths of his nature was undeveloped. If collegiate education had been truly intellectual education, in the full meaning of that expression, this criticism would still be applicable ; but, instead of intellectual development, it has been simply literary training, guided by a superstitious faith in the value of dead languages. Their value was correctly estimated by Prof. Huxley when he said : " A knowledge of Greek is no more an indispensable element of liberal education, in the highest sense of the word, than is a knowledge of Sanscrit, or of the differential calculus, or of vertebrate morphology." The dead languages have been obtruded upon those who did not need them, to the destruction of the knowledge which they did most deplorably need, and, in some cases, to the destruction of every purpose of a liberal education. The head master of Rugby, who is certainly a very competent witness, says : " For the most boys who do Greek at a public school it is not merely useless, but pernicious. Greek is for them a lesson in slipshod. They never get the ideal, nor even the idea of doing their work perfectly. They give up the attempt at being sure of it ; and nothing can be more demoralizing to the intellect than this."

The five indispensable elements of a liberal education are these :

First, and most necessary, physiological development ; the formation of the manly, active, healthy constitution, competent to live a hundred years — competent to win success in life by unflagging energy — competent to enjoy life, and thus become a source of happiness to others, instead of a pauper or an invalid — competent to transmit life, health and joy to the thousands of future ages — competent to meet all the difficulties of life triumphantly, instead of struggling in misery and railing at society and at Divine Providence. Such are the men society needs, but if our colleges would look back two thousand years they would see how much better this education was conducted then. Instead of making men and women, the colleges have often impaired or destroyed them ; broken them down so often that it is even made an argument against education, and especially against the education of women, that education is dangerous to health.

Thus the educational systems of two thousand years have at last culminated in this self-evident absurdity, that education is an injurious process; as if the very meaning of the word education had been forgotten. A grosser falsehood never has been current so long in civilized society. Education means development and growth of our powers and organs, and true education is necessarily healthful and pleasant.

A male or female school which does not develop its pupils, which does not send them home in better health and development than when they were received, ought to be abolished as a mistake, if not a nuisance. Such schools would never have existed, but for the barbarous ideas of education maintained and propagated by the colleges, which train the little finger, while the other four are tied up in helplessness.

This physical destruction is utterly inexcusable, even when physical training is impossible, for intellectual education is not injurious to physical healthy but beneficial, and it were easy to prove this if I had time. But a false system of intellectual training, which worries and fatigues the mind and injures the brain, does impair the health, because it is not education, but drudgery, worry, tyranny, and exhaustion, which are the reverse of education. True intellectual education is animating, joyous, and healthful ; but such an education is like angels' visits to the school-room. The angels prefer to visit the Kindergarten and the Industrial Palace of M. Godin, in France. And I doubt not they often visit Northampton, Vassar, and the other nurseries of young angels.

2. The second element of a liberal education is training for the business and duties of life — in other words, Industrial Education, without some share of which it were better for a man that he had never been born ; for without industrial capacity (unless a hereditary capitalist) he must be either a beggar, a thief, or a swindler. It is one of the greatest crimes of society that in withholding industrial education from woman it has forced upon her these alternatives, with the addition of legal and illegal prostitution. When we all confess our sins in this matter some of us can plead to the recording angel that our medical colleges have always been open to women, teaching them not to be noisy babblers, but to be ministering angels in the chamber of suffering.

Our colleges generally have educated American citizens as if they were the sons of wealthy noblemen, who needed only intellectual accomplishments. Silently, but effectively, they have taught them to look with contempt on manual labor as something degrading ; to speak with contempt of money and the arts by which it is honestly acquired ; to aspire to professional life and office-holding, and to glory in the military exploits of the crowned felons who have ravaged the homes of civilization with wholesale homicide and arson. It is no palliation that these things are not ostensibly and expressly taught, for the silent teaching is often the most effective.

College education is thus largely demoralizing. The world is full of wrecks and failures from inefficiency, for which colleges are often responsible, and has been continually ravaged by wars in which the college-taught have been the leaders and instigators, instead of being conservative and moral influences to teach mankind their brotherhood. When the college knows nothing of universal brotherhood, and the church on which it leans also knows nothing of universal brotherhood, having its chaplains, its deacons, bishops, and members righting against each other in every war, what can we expect but the satanic reign of national crime, desolation, and misery, perpetuated by the national debt that crushes out the life of labor. We need true churches and true colleges, whose walls are not stained with human blood, by whose influence swords and cannons shall be turned into ploughshares and anvils.

In neglecting physiological education we have degenerated the human race, impaired its efficiency, and saddled on its back a costly medical profession — ten times as many physicians as should be needed, who struggle to prolong lives that are hardly worth preserving— that perpetuate physical and moral degeneracy.

In neglecting industrial education we have produced a race of soft-handed, soft-muscled men, who struggle to escape man's first duty, useful production, and to live at others' expense by the innumerable methods of financial stratagem. The reign of fraud will never cease until each man is taught that life presents this sharp alternative — useful production or the life of a vampire. He who has attained manhood without being trained to useful production, may justly utter maledictions against parents and schools for having blasted his life and deprived him of the only solid foundation of honor and prosperity.

Industrial education, giving the mastery of productive arts, is the second necessity as the development of the body is the first. The college says, if you condescend to acquire an industrial education, there is time enough after your literary education is completed, and therefore it excludes industrial education and builds the man without certain necessary elements of manliness, as the habits of twelve years of literary effeminacy must cling through life. Would it be rational to confine a baby to the cradle for ten years, on the pretext that it must first acquire language perfectly before it learns to walk ? The infant would be impaired for life, as men are impaired by any system which for many years separates practical from literary culture.

Under this antiquated system intellect is trained to adorn with effeminacy and pedantry selfish ambitions, while the workshops and the farms are surrendered to ignorance and blind routine. Invention lags behind necessity; the lands are worn out; the wheat-field that ought to produce thirty bushels per acre produces ten, and the work that one man ought to do in eight hours occupies three men twelve hours. At the close of day they come to cheerless homes where their wives are equally exhausted by toil. Thus the laborer is brutalized by ignorant toil, and classes are separated by broad, dividing lines of caste that limit fraternity and are premonitory of social convulsions, the end of which none can foresee.

When industrial education shall have become universal, we shall not only have a more honest and manly and fraternal race, but our fields will be more than doubled in their production, and our arts advanced from twofold to tenfold in their product; and in the abundance thus produced poverty and pauperism will be submerged, as the Desert of Sahara will be gone when the ocean flood is let in upon it.

Does any one doubt the practicability of this ? I would say that it is an easy matter to make every young man and woman proficient in more than five prof - itable occupations, not only without detriment, but with positive benefit to their literary education. The progress of industrial education in Europe will ere long furnish a triumphant demonstration of this; and in this country the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (under President Runkle) and several other institutions are making rapid progress in the demonstration.

3. The third element of a liberal education, next in importance to the physical and industrial, is the Medical. It has become a familiar thought that anatomy, physiology, and hygiene are necessary elements of a liberal education; but it demands much more.

The first duty of a man is to sustain himself — that he be not a burden to others. This corresponds to industrial education. The second duty is akin to the first two elements of education. It is to sustain himself in full vigor of mind, soul and body, that he may perform every duty, and be a help instead of a burden to those around him. Without this second duty performed, physiological development and industrial culture are both failures; and without either of these three indispensable qualifications the man himself may be a total failure. Therefore these three are the first elements of a liberal education. With physiological development and industrial qualifications, the Medical Education which I ask for all men and women will enable them to live without failure in the performance of every duty and the diffusion of a beneficent influence.

It is said that Col. Ingersoll recommended as an improvement on the plans of Divine Providence that health should be contagious instead of disease. I have demonstrated, and am daily demonstrating to my pupils and patients, that health is contagious. The man who maintains high health is a fountain of health to all around him.

I am speaking really of a moral duty. No man has a right to be drunk, and no man has a right to be sick. He gets sick, if not by poverty or exposure, either through profligacy or ignorance, and he has no right to be either profligate or, ignorant, even if the college trains him up in ignorance of himself.

My demand for a medical education for all sounds extravagant when it is first heard: it brings up a terrific array of surgery, obstetrics, and death-bed consultations; but I mean nothing of that sort. I mean an education by which disease shall be stamped out in its incipience. I mean that disease should be treated as a mad dog, who is entirely harmless if you do not allow him to insert his teeth in your flesh. ^When you are trained to high health you should resolve to live on that high plane, inaccessible to disease. Its first approaches are easily repelled. The great majority of diseases can be repelled without the use of

ELEMENTS OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION. II

drugs. Allow me, I pray, to speak ex cathedra as a medical professor, referring to what I am teaching to students and proving by experiments. Call at my office in New York, and I will prove what at present I only hint at, for want of time. I will show you what I mean — how thoroughly men and women maybe protected from disease by methods almost unknown in the schools, and enabled to break up attacks of disease as soon as they are aware of its presence.

By such a medical education as I propose nine-tenths of all the disease that ravages society would be annihilated, and nine-tenths of the physicians and the medical schools granted a furlough for life.

One-half the time that is usually expended on the Latin language would be sufficient for such a medical education as I propose for every man and every woman— but more especially for every woman, to whom it is far more necessary and valuable than rhetoric, grammar, arithmetic, geography, history, languages, and music.

4. With physical, industrial, and medical education, man is just prepared to live. But that his life shall be worth living, shall be a blessing to himself and the world, we need the fourth element of a liberal education, which is to make him a good and happy man — the moral, or ethical, or religious education. Either of these words, rightly understood, conveys the full idea, for each should mean the same; although contracted and perverted by vulgar usage, each word has but half its proper meaning. I mean the education which shall exalt man to the plane of a happy, a holy, and a glorious life, in harmony with the Divine nature — a life so high that it shall be in communion with the angels — a life so beneficent that it shall diffuse happiness around to all and leave a blessed fragrance behind in all the atmosphere that it filled.

Is this an idle dream of possibilities ? I say it is not, for heaven has many saints who have led such a life, and almost every one can recognize, if not within his reach at present, at least somewhere on the horizon of his life, some one who was born to bless by loving ways and deeds, and whose memory as we look up to heaven is a blessing like the falling dew.

Colleges are supposed to be devoted to intelligence, but I affirm that they should be devoted first to virtue, and that it is as practicable to take the plasmic elements of youth, and thereof make a good man, as it is to make an intelligent or wise one. Intellectual without moral education simply increases the dangerous and corrupting elements of society. It gives the sceptre of knowledge into the hands of the social Lucifers.