Moral education

Preface

It is now widely recognized in America that the chief . aim of education is to develop noble manhood and womanhood. The absorption, natural to our pioneer period, in sharpening the tools of the mind and equipping the individual for personal success, is being rapidly replaced by the effort to mold the moral personality that will use the mind's instruments for the great ends of human life, in harmony with the good of the whole. Nor is this movement confined to our own country. The struggle to recover from the disaster of 1870 in France, the influence of the educational reformers in Germany, the enthusiastic awakening of the nation in Italy, the growth of social and humanitarian sentiment in England, have led to interesting experiments in moral education in the countries named. We have still much to learn from these experiments, especially in France and Germany, but it is in our own country that the greatest awakening to the moral aim of education has occurred.

Yet while the end is thus generally, if vaguely, recognized, there is still the greatest confusion as to what it implies and as to the means by which it can be attained. Character is often conceived in a purely negative way, as the avoidance of evil, while the problem of moral culture is at times even interpreted to mean assigning a school period in which to teach 'morals and manners ' as one would teach arithmetic. Moreover, much of the literature of the subject is singularly dreary and barren. I have long puzzled over the

4 PREFACE

cause of this. Certainly, in practice, ethical problems are the most absorbingly interesting of all we must meet, and it would seem that moral education should be the most interesting, as it is the most important part of the whole process of culture. Yet many of the books on the subject are filled with a wearisome repetition of the conventional analysis of duties, and the commonplace, trite maxims that are fruitless for man or child.

I have been able to discover three reasons for this barrenness:

1 . Ethical teachers have too often yielded to the temptation to inculcate what they considered useful without much regard to its truth. Where tliey have allowed their desire to be helpful to supplant their reverence for reality the result is always hypocrisy and artificiality.

2. It is necessary to take a point of view that is not merely of the time, if one's work is to escape triviality. This explains why so much of the literature of moral education that once had a value is useless after twenty years, while the artistic literature contemporaneous with it is permanent in worth. If we lose the eternal in the transient, life ceases to have a meaning; if we live perfectly in the moment we realize the eternal. So Plato and Spinoza are as useful today, almost, as when they WTote, while the ephemeral books born of their hour load our libraries with barren stuff.

3. Deeper than both of these causes is the fact that so much of the literature dealing directly with ethical problems is born of the study rather than the world, evidencing an habitual detachment from human life that involves a loss of apDreciation of its concrete problems. While the resulting theory may be logical and satisfying to the intc!-

PREFACE 5

lect, it helps us little in dealing with the real problems of human living.

Therefore, if we can keep close to the process of life itself, asking always reverently what is the truth, and seeking to find the eternal in the best life of the moment, we may hope to retain, both in our study and in the practical work of moral education, something of the deep interest that ethical problems possess in our experience.

Thus I have thought it worth while to attempt a study, as exhaustive as I could make it, of the whole problem of moral culture : its purpose in relation to our society and all the means through which that purpose can be attained. My aim has been sanity and not novelty. In education as in life we are led astray by brilliant half-truths. It is not difficult to detect and avoid what is merely false, but wisdom means putting half-truths in their place, viewing each element in widest relation and therefore truest perspective, seeing life, as Matthew Arnold said Sophocles saw it, 'steadily and whole.'

Today, particularly, it is sanity we most need in education. The tides of thought come with ebb and flow; just now we are in the flood-tide of what is somewhat mythically called "the new education," We have turned from duty to interest, from form to content, from discipline to nutrition, from instruction to expression, from prescription to election. In all this is much gain, but only if we avoid extreme reaction and keep the good of the old in the new. To assume that the novel must be the best, to despise the old because it is old, and regard only the most recent theories as worthy of enthusiastic following, is to mistake a tidal wave for the Gulf Stream and invite a reaction to the extreme of the very elements against which we have been e • PREFACE

contending. The great truths of life are simple and universal ; they have been repeated over and over again. The form of their expression is ever new and changing, born anew as they must be to meet the needs of a new age. The Truth is not a mean between two extremes, nor is it an eclectic patchwork combining pieces of truth artificially. We attain even glimpses of it only with a certain wholeness of vision and sanity of perspective, with a recognition that is inclusive and unified. The aim in this book has been to see 'steadily and whole' both human life and the process of moral culture that leads to it and makes possible the happiest and most helpful living.

I may sometime publish a body of selected and graded material for the ethical instruction of children as outlined in Chapters XIX-XXIII. The present work is not a text for children, but is intended as a guide for parents and teachers, a text for classes studying the subject of moral education in normal schools and universities, and as an effort at a complete and inclusive view of the problem for all who are interested in moral culture.

Edward Howard Griggs.

Montclair, New Jersey, September 1904.

Table of Contents

PAGE

Preface 3

Chapter I. The Ckild World 9

'II. The Unity of Human Life 17

III. The Uniqueness of Each Personality . . 21

IV. The Growth-Process op Human Life . . 32

V. The Two Principles of Moral Evolution . 40

VI. The Relation of Moral Culture to Other

Aspects of Education 47

VII. The Type of Character Moral Education

Should Foster 56

VIII. Types of Activity 67

IX. Moral Education Through Play ... 74

X, Moral Education Through Work ... 86

XL The Moral Influence of Environment:

Art and Nature 101

XII. Moral Influence of the Social Atmosphere 114

XIII. Principles of Government in Home and

School 129

TABLE OF CONTENTS, Continued

PAGE

Chapter XIV. The Progressive Application of Democracy IN Home and School Government 142

" XV. The Nature and Function of Corrective

Discipline 156

" XVI. The Administration of Corrective Discipline 1C)7

" XVII. Personal Influence of Parent and Teacher IN THE Government of Children . 182

" XVIII. Moral Teaching by Example . . . .199

" XIX. Direct Ethical Instruction 207

" XX. Ethical Instruction through Other Subjects: History 222

• " XXL The Ethical Value of Mythology and

FOLK-LORE 236

" XXII. The Value of Literature for Ethical

Instruction and Inspiration . . . 248

" XXIII. The Practical Use of History and Literature FOR Ethical Instruction . . . 258

" XXIV. Instruction in the Intimate Problems of

Human Life 268

" XXV. The Relation of Moral to Religious

Education 279

Conclusion 293

Index 342

THE CHILD WORLD

It has taken long to learn the lesson that childhood is not simply an imitation of mature life, nor a preparation for it, but a separate and different world with its own joys and sorrows. As the early Italian painters made their children, even their babies, smaller men and women, paying little attention to the true anatomy and structure of the child's body, so the older education treated children as lesser men and women, planning its courses of study on an analysis of the adult mind. Just as the true representation of childhood has been one of the great steps forward in art, so the recognition of the different character and independent meaning of the child world is perhaps the greatest advance in recent education. That recognition is almost universal today, though many of its practical results are not yet worked out; and we are able to state with some definiteness the distinguishing characteristics of childhood.

1. Perhaps beyond anything else it is the intensity of interest in the present moment that marks child life in contrast to our mature attitude. With the child there is less 'looking before and after,' especially with reference to painful experience. It is true children take keen pleasure in the anticipation of a specific promised joy, but largely by living it over in advance in the imagination, while there is no postponing of the meaning of the present moment. Our consciousness that the chapter will end often takes the heart out of a joy or lessens the bitterness of our pain ; but the child lives in a moment that seems to stretch away limitlessly. Wakening on Saturday morning with ' a whole day to play in,' he looks forward to a reach of anticipated joy hardly equaled by the adult's dream of paradise.

2. Thus children feel more keenly than we do the joys and sorrows of the passing moment. Discounting both types of experience for ourselves, we are apt to do so still more for the child, unless we have unusual sympathy with his point of view. But the breaking of a doll may bring the child for the moment into the presence of absolute tragedy. It is we who can say:

"There, little girl; don't cry!

They have broken your doll, I know; And your tea-set blue.

And your play-house, too.

Are things of the long ago;

But childish troubles will soon pass by. — There! little girl; don't cry!"'

We can say this because we can see that every experience, however bitter, passes, since we have been schooled to recognize the changing succession of moods and events; but not so the child. To him the pain or joy of the moment is absolute while it lasts.

3. Childhood is further characterized by much greater spontaneity in action and expression than is shown in mature life. This applies to both good and bad impulses. The fit of passion and the mood of happy generosity tend alike to immediate action, since the child has not learned,

'From A Life-Lesson, by James Whitcomb Riley, in Child-Rhymes, pp. 171-172, The Bowen-Merrill Go., Indianapolis, 1899.

THE CHILD WORLD 11

as we have, to inhibit or control the expression of passing emotions through more permanent controlhng motives.

4. So the child is nearer reality as opposed to convention than are we. The fresh impulses of our lives get overladen with an ever denser garment of social forms, until in the end the impulses are suppressed in much of our living. Children live more immediately in the presence of truth and beauty, responding more directly to the simplest things in nature and human life.

5. Finally, in children the imaginative and erriotional life is strong, while the development of conscious reflection proceeds slowly. The child is a bundle of impulses and instincts, generic and individual, combined by heredity, called out under the influence of environment, rapidly crystallizing into habits, meagerly supervised by conscious reflection.

As the child world is thus distinct in character and meaning, so it has its own worth apart from its relation to subsequent life. It is most important to recognize this, since there can be no greater failure than in ever postponing life to some future time.^ This was the mistake of mediaeval Christianity with reference to the whole earth life. This world was regarded as so merely a preparation for another that the meaning of the present life was sometimes quite lost. We have learned that if life is to be good anywhere it ought to begin to be good now, and it is our busi-

* "To be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a man has been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on the confines of farce. The victim is dead — and he has cunningly overreached himself: a combination of calamities none the less absurd for being grim." — Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginihus Puerisque, p. 95.

ness to make it so. The best preparation for any possible future world is the fullest realization of life in the present.

In the same way life should have as complete a meaning as possible in each phase of it, and to postpone one phase ever to the next and the next is to miss the meaning of the whole. Kant's practical imperative of duty was: "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case, as an end withal, never as a means only."^ This imperative must be extended to each phase in the process of the individual life; each must be regarded as having its own value, therefore as in some measure an end in itself, never merely a means to some later phase."

This principle is generally recognized in its application to mature life, and sometimes to youth; but unfortunately the moment we turn to the problem of education we tend to forget it, and so to mold everything with reference to the adult life for which we wish to form the child. The result is the same as with human life in the middle ages. If we treat childhood merely as a preparation for maturity we fail to prepare well, besides losing much of the independent

* Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, translated by T. K. Abbott, p. 47. Longmans, Green, & Co., London, 1889.

^ "The boy has not become a boy, nor has the youthbecome ayouth, by reaching a certain age, but only by having lived through childhood, and, further on, through boyhood, true to the requirements of his mind, his feelings, and his body; similarly, adult man has not become an adult man by reaching a certain age, but only by faithfully satisfying the requirements of his childhood, boyhood, and yoyth." — Friedrich Froebel, The Education of ikf an, translated by Hailmann, p. 29.

" Woe to every sort of culture which destroys the most effectual means of all true culture, and directs us to the end, instead of rendering us happy on the way!" — Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels, translated by Carlyle, vol. 2, p. 80.

THE CHILD WORLD 13

worth of childhood in joy and beauty. One of our greatest debts to Rousseau is his insistence that we must make childhood joyous in every step of it;^ and later writers such as Stevenson, Grahame, Barrie, Field, Riley, have done us a priceless service in interpreting childhood so that we are made to see its worth for itself. The books of these modern authors, written nominally for children, often appeal less to a child audience than to us, to whom they give a new vision and appreciation of the child worlds

As childhood may and ought to be one of the happiest and most beautiful chapters of human experience, it is especially necessary that we should apply to it the principle of the independent worth of each phase of life. The 'golden glory' in which many of us see our early life, may indeed be due to the mists of the years that lie between, nevertheless the qualities that distinguish childhood, its freshness and spontaneity, its closeness to nature and

^ See, for example, Emile, book II, pp. 59-60, Firmin-Didot et Cie., Paris, 1894:

simple human life, give it a charm and meaning not equaled in the same way by later experience. How foolish then is all educational discussion that regards only what we wish to secure in maturity, without considering the worth and happiness of each moment of the child's life. Our aim should be to treat each child so that if life broke off at any point we could say of the chapter experienced by the child, it was happy and worth while. ^

On the other hand, if life should have as full a meaning as possible in each moment, it should also be an organic unity. As Wordsworth states it:

"The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety." ^

Nothing makes for general wretchedness more completely than a life in which each phase stands whimsically apart from all the rest, the individual following in every step of his experience the chance will-o'-the-wisp of the moment's desire. Each part of life should have its rational place in the whole, and one phase should lead naturally to the next;

• Compare Lecky, The Map of Life, pp. 239-240:

"Many a parent standing by the coffin of his child has felt with bitterness how much of the measure of enjoyment that short life might have known has been cut off by an injudicious education. And even if adult life is attained, the evils of an unhappy childhood are seldom wholly compensated. The pleasures of retrospect are among the most real we possess, and it is around our childish days that our fondest associations naturally cluster. An early overstrain of our powers often leaves. behind it lasting distortion or weakness, and a sad childhood introduces into the character elements of morbidness and bitterness that will not disappear."

* From My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold, Wordsworth, Complete Works, Globe edition, p. 171.

THE CHILD WORLD 15

for life is a developing process, and the joy and worth of one moment is dependent in no small measure upon its relation to the preceding moments and the use that has been made of those. This is well expressed in the doctrine of 'Karma/ which holds that the possibility of life at any point is the net resultant of all the actions and experiences that precede. Each moment is a new opportunity to live, but our power to utilize it depends upon what we have done in all the yesterdays. Apart from any theory of reincarnation, this statement may be much widened in meaning if we consider the relation of one life, through heredity, to those that precede and follow it. How much of both our power and weakness is due to this relation to the past; and while each life is an end in itself, we regard that individual as highly immoral who does not govern his own life in harmony with the good of all the descendants who follow him. Thus there was a certain Tightness in the mediaeval view of the relation of time and eternity. The individual life in this world loses its meaning unless it is lived in harmony with the whole of life, whatever that is regarded to be.^

Thus there are two balancing principles, each of which must be obeyed in harmony with the other. The present moment should be full and satisfying, yet in harmony with the best for all the moments that follow. Each phase of

' Compare Froebel, The Education of Man, translated by Hailmann, p. 27:

"It is highly pernicious to consider the stages of human development — infant, child, boy or girl, youth or maiden, man or woman, old man or matron — as really distinct, and not, as life shows them, as continuous in themselves, in unbroken transitions; highly pernicious to consider the child or boy as something wholly different from the youth or man, and as something so distinct that the common foundation (human being) is seen but vaguely in the idea and word, and scarcely at all considered in life and for life."

life should have its own value, yet prepare for those succeeding. And so we should keep the child's life joyous and in itself worth while, yet bring it into unison with the whole of life and make it prepare naturally for the most happy and effective manhood and womanhood. Nor are these principles opposed; on the contrary it is impossible to fulfill one on a high plane without obeying the other. We have seen that if we miss the meaning of the phase that passes we fail to prepare best for the subsequent life; and invariably we make a wrong use of the present moment when it is out of harmony with the whole. This, indeed, is one of the best tests for distinguishing false pleasure from true joy. A brutal intoxication may seem pleasurable for the time, but it as completely destroys the real worth of the moment as it separates the part from sane relation to the whole of life. Let me repeat: one of the best tests of the worth of the moment is that it prepare rationally for what follows; while one of the best ways of measuring the preparation is to estimate the growth, joy and worth of the present life. This point of view is fundamental in the chapters that follow.

II The Unity Of Human Life

The most important fact in education is that we are dealing always with a world of persons. Whatever aim we set before ourselves can be realized only in personality. It is this that makes it impossible for true education ever to become a mechanical process. As we are concerned with persons, and must seek to form them in harmony with some ideal, there will always be an element of the unpredicted and incalculable that no system can organize. It is the most promising mark in the ' new education ' that the heart of the whole movement is a deeper reverence for persons. Thus it is of first importance that we should see the nature and characteristics of the personal world.

The fact that we make any educational effort at all implies a recognition of one basal truth with reference to personality, namely, the likeness of one individual to all others in fundamental elements of life. It is solely because one is like all, that science in dealing with personality is possible. If each individual were entirely new and unparalleled, no body of law would be discoverable, no general principles could be laid down, and education would become mere artifice. Yet nothing is clearer than that human nature is law-abiding. Our recognition of this fact is the basis of half-a-dozen modern sciences; and most recently the studies of the minds of children have shown how entirely they obey great laws in their development.

The possibility of any science of humanity depends upon the fact that Hfe is universal in its nature, being made of few and simple elements. There are not many great types of experience in human life; and most of us pass through them all in some form. Birth and death, love, work, hunger to see truth and appreciate beauty, struggle and joy, failure and suffering: these are the characteristic aspects of life common to all men. Consider how few are the problems upon which all novels and dramas rest. Half at least of these works of art deal with the adjustment of one personality to another, in love; while the rest treat the struggle in the vocation, the effort for culture, or the problem of religious faith. Each human being begins at the beginning and must travel over much of the same path of life as all others. We come out of the dark into the light; we live a little while in a dream-world, where all forms and shapes seem larger than they are and life is transfigured by a golden or gray atmosphere; we pass from play that is an imitation of life to a vigorous awakening of personality in the serious business of living; we find or sorrowfully fail to find our work; we form a few personal relations that bring us unguessed joy and pain; we travel some way down the hill of life, while the visions of the great world drop away more and more, as we draw toward the shadowy valley of ebbing memories that dims to the night; and so we pass again into the gloom. The story may be shortened, syncopated; the end may be in any scene, and whole chapters may be blotted out; but how much the same it is for all!

It is this unity of the human spirit that makes life centre in each individual in every place in the world. How often as one travels in a railway train and passes some straggling

THE UNITY OF HUMAN LIFE 19

group of houses huddled together with a few trees, in the midst of a dreary plain or in some lonely valley shut in by the hills, one feels that life would be impossible in such a place. We feel that we should suffocate were we doomed to live there, cut off from the great world, with no sense of the sweep of its forces. But go to such a place for one week, and how utterly the feeling changes. Nearly everything in human life is there. Not only love and work, ambition and failure, but relations that ramify to the last corner of the earth. Look into the post-bag and see where the letters are to go and whence they come, and you begin to realize that the village is a nerve-centre, a little one it is true, not a great central brain like New York or London, but a true centre nevertheless, from which ramify nerves of connection, motor and sensor, throughout the human world. Thus life becomes not only endurable but intensely interesting, in the most isolated community, when once these nerves of communication are established for the individual. Indeed, if one be not awakened to the need of the larger world-life, the unity of human experiences and the vividness with which they are realized in limited environment may give the local community a charm to the native dweller that no vaster centre can equal. I remember the story told me by a merchant of Florence who employed seventy-five expert wood-carvers in Prato, ten miles away. He suggested to the foreman that the workmen should move with their families to Florence and thus be in closer touch with the business, with a saving of expense to all concerned. "Oh, that would be impossible," the foreman replied, "our men are all campanilisti;" that is, they would die of homesickness if they tried to live out of sight of the bell-tower of Prato! Of course such an incident is characteristic of Italy rather than America today; but it serves to show in extreme form how completely life centres in the little place for the one who has established the relations of his personality there.

Everyone who has gone up and down the Third Avenue Elevated in New York must have looked pityingly into the windows of the cheap lodging-houses the train passes, at the forlorn groups of shipwrecked men, huddled in winter about the one stove that heats the putrid air of the lounging-room. How lost they seem — stranded here on the edge of things for a moment, before they are swept down in the pitiless but all-hiding sea. Yet could we enter the consciousness of any one of them we should find that each is the centre of a world as important to him as any other's world can be to that other. Here is a whole network of relations ramifying in all directions, ambitions broken or half-fulfilled, service of some loved one, disappointment in failure, grief at death or separation, faint reaching toward larger hope, and dumb brooding over the dark mystery of it all: life is absolute in meaning to each man who lives.

The charm of many a novel of the hour, dealing with out-of-the-way lives, is in its revelation of this fact that all life centres in each one. I take an illustration at random : The Biography of a Prairie Girl, by Eleanor Gates. ^ A simple story of a little girl growing up on a remote Dakota farm; nothing unusual in it: merely affection for mother and brothers; first-hand contact with a rude nature world, now kindly, now treacherous; intense desire for knowledge and thirst for humanity: yet how it brings the tears to one's eyes and stirs the pulses with the thrill of the common wonder of human life.

» The Century Co., New York, 1902.

THE UNITY OF HUMAN LIFE 21

One is like all, life is a unity, humanity is much the same in all its expressions. This, indeed, has been the cry of the pessimist everywhere. It is because "there is no new thing under the sun," that life seems to him such a vanity and weariness. The same round is repeated over and over again. ^ We must accept this premise of the pessimist, but we need not accept his conclusion. On the contrary, this likeness of one to all is the sole basis of our understanding each other. Without it, there would be no possibility of converting the experience of one into terms of another's life. Thought, emotion and will are known only in thinking, feeling and doing. We divine in another an activity we know already in ourselves, by recognizing external signs of it with which we are familiar.