Moral training in the public schools; the California prize essays

Preface

A citizen of California, who modestly withholds his name, recently offered a prize of five hundred dollars for the best essay on *' Moral Training in the Public Schools," and a second prize of three hundred dollars for the next best essay.

This offer was widely published in the educational, the religious, and the daily papers of the country, and over three hundred essays, many of them of high merit, were submitted.

The donor of the prize fund named as judges Rev. Charles R. Brown of Oakland, California, Dr. David Starr Jordan, President of Stanford University, and Professor Fletcher B. Dresslar of the Department of Education in the University of California.

The first prize was awarded to Mr. Charles Edward Rugh, Principal of the Bay School, Oakland, California, the second prize to Rev. T. P. Stevenson of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The three essays which stood next in rank according to the estimate of the committee, — submitted by Professor Edwin Diller Starbuck of the University of Iowa, Frank Cramer of Palo Alto, California, and Principal George E. Myers of the McKinley Manual Training School, Washington, D.C., — were possessed of so much value, and made such important contributions to the discussion of this vital

iii problem, that it seemed desirable to secure them for publication in the same volume which contained the two prize essays. Arrangements have accordingly been made with the writers so that the three other essays are here presented, the five essays constituting a useful volume for all who feel an interest in the moral output of our public-school system.

It is hoped that this book may be read not only by those directly engaged in educational work but by parents, citizens, clergymen, and others who recognize the seriousness of the problems here discussed.

The clear, popular style in which the essays are written, and the able manner in which the varied solutions are offered, make the volume most readable and profitable.

FLETCHER B. DRESSLAR

IV

Contents

Page

I. Charles Edward Rugh . . . . . .3

II. T. P. Stevenson 53

II The Necessity For Moral Training In The Public Schools

THIS necessity must be judged in view of the nature and purpose of the pubhc schools.

A public school is not a charity. Its direct object is not the benefit of the children. If it were, attendance, like accepting alms, would involve some loss of self-respect. . A public school, moreover, is not merely a form of cooperative or communal action on the part of parents, based on the fact that a number of families can educate their children more efficiently and more cheaply in a joint or common school than they can by acting independently of each other. If this were the basis of public education, school taxes ought in justice to be assessed only on property owners who have children to be taught. The fact that all property must contribute to the school funds in equal proportion proves that the true ground of public education must be found elsewhere. The school does not stand simply in loco parentis to the child, and therefore the parent is not the only and final arbiter as to what shall be taught to his children.

A public school is a school established by the state or nation^ to train the children of the nation for the

1 The words " state " and " nation " will be used interchangeably in this essay as denoting the civil society, and without reference to the distinction between our states and the general government. When the word "state " is used of a state in the American Union it will be printed with a capital letter.

responsibilities and duties of citizenship. In a republic, where all the people participate in the government, an ignorant and untrained citizenship is a public peril. The nation therefore undertakes the work of public education in the exercise of its inherent right of self-preservation. The Latin maxim, saliLs popiili sttprema lex — the safety of the people is the supreme law — affords the true ground for any system of public schools. What is necessary in the public schools must therefore be judged necessary with regard to the existence and welfare of the nation.

Is moral training necessary on this ground in the public schools }

I . The moral pozvers are an essential part of huma7i nature and cannot, therefore, be ignored in any adequate plan of public education. None will deny that man is a moral being. The power to discern between right and wrong, and the sense of moral obligation constitute the chief distinction between man and the lower orders of being. The man in whom the moral sense is wanting is a defective and abnormal man.

But the interests of the republic require that all her citizens, as far as possible, be normal and perfect men. There is no human faculty which may not at any time be called into the service of the state. And since conscience, or the sense of duty, is an essential human faculty, it cannot be consistently ignored in the training of the citizen.

We accept the application of this argument to other human powers. The nation has need of the physical powers of her people in subduing the wilderness, in cultivating and gathering the annual harvests, in increasing the national wealth, in accomplishing public improvements, and in resisting the ravages of disease. Therefore, that the

^ 54 physical tasks of the nation may be wrought successfully, and that the physical strength of the nation may not decline in successive generations, the study of physiology and physical exercises are properly embraced in public-school education. The state has still greater need of intelligence and mental power in her citizens, and her schools are properly adjusted to meet this need. By the same reasoning it appears that since the moral faculties are also a part of human nature they ought to be contemplated in any system of public education, and the school system which fails at this point is defective and incomplete.

But our argument rises easily to higher ground than this. Not only is conscience, or the moral sense, one among other faculties of man, but it is the most important faculty, because it is the regulative faculty, and on its right action depends the right and beneficent action of all the other faculties. All education increases or multiplies power. But why should we increase power unless we also provide for the wise and beneficent use of that power } We teach a child to write. In so doing we enlarge his powers. But if he employs that acquisition of power in forging his neighbor's signature with fraudulent intent, it would have been better for himself and better for the community if he had never learned to write. Or as Rufus King, the lawyer, said in the celebrated school case in Cincinnati : "Why should I be taxed to educate my neighbor's child if the education you give him only makes the little rascal twice as sharp, without any additional protection to my throat .? "

2. For the service which the nation demands of her citizens^ moral qtcalifications are of paramount importance. There are four great tasks which are regularly devolved upon American citizens, each one of which illustrates the paramount necessity for moral qualifications. These tasks are (i) to give testimony in courts of justice, (2) to serve as jurors, (3) to vote at elections, (4) to hold ofhce when elected. For the due discharge of these civil duties intelligence and a measure of mental training are imperatively necessary. Public justice is absolutely dependent on intelligent testimony from the witnesses in court ; without intelligence and the ability to weigh evidence the juror is incompetent and valueless ; without mental training how can the citizens judge of the questions at issue on election day and of the merits and claims of parties and candidates ? Nor can even the humblest office, much less the higher, be filled to the advantage of the people by men who arc ignorant and untrained. The state docs well to educate intellectually her whole people in order that these civil duties may be well performed. But if intelligence and mental culture are necessary in these premises, is it not self-evident that moral principle and moral character are infinitely more important ? What avails the intelligence of the witness if he purposely gives false testimony .? or any mental training of the juror if he knowingly brings in an unjust verdict ? or of the voter if he sells his vote ? or of the officeholder if he is incapable of being bound by his oath of office .? The education which has not instructed the citizen in these moral obligations, and developed his moral sense to be conscious of their supremacy, has not fitted him for the responsibilities of citizenship.

3. T/ie evils fi'om which the natio7i suffers most, mid the dangers which she chiefly dreads, are moral evils a7id dangers. To a certain extent we fear and suffer from physical or material ills. Poverty, sickness, the operation of natural forces such as fire and flood, the earthquake and the thunderbolt, excite the apprehensions of all, and it is the manifest duty of government to guard the people, as far as possible, against these ills. Hence public education is wisely adapted to assist man's mastery of the forces of nature ; to teach the people to use these forces and bend them to their service, — to harness the waters to their burdens and train the lightnings to carry their messages. But to every thoughtful mind the ravages of vice and crime are immeasurably more detrimental to human happiness and welfare than are all other causes of loss and suffering. When we think of the misery entailed by these moral evils upon the innocent, as well as of the retributions visited upon the guilty ; of the tears shed by parents over filial ingratitude and disobedience ; of the lives destroyed by dissipation as well as by the hand of violence ; of the homes ruined by adultery and seduction and of the murders which so often follow ; of the shames and miseries, the social pollutions, and the consequences to children often involved in even one divorce case, and of the fearful aggregate of these evils involved in the tens of thousands of divorce cases which pass through our courts in a single year ; when we consider our occasional exposures of social, commercial, and political corruption, and ask ourselves, '' If these things appear on the surface, what must the depths conceal?" — we must admit that the whole sum of human suffering caused by physical agencies is not worthy to be named in comparison with the results of our moral evils. Moreover, our physical ills are, in large measure, traceable ultimately to moral causes, being the retribution which follows sin under the moral government of God.

Moral corruption, when it becomes widespread, threatens the very existence of governments and nations. The nations which have perished in the past have perished because of their vices and crimes. It is not written that any nation ever perished through mere material calamities.

How, then, can a nation most effectually combat the moral evils and dangers which beset and threaten her } Not by force ; mere force has no place on these moral battlefields. Methods of repression which consist chiefly in the application of force tend rather to spread and intensify moral evils. Moral evils can be combated only by moral forces. Every moral evil grows up out of some falsehood, and the only instrument with which to extirpate it is truth. In her system of public schools, reaching to every hamlet and gathering the children from every home, holding them under instruction during the plastic and formative period of youth, the state has an incomparable agency for resisting and destroying the moral evils which threaten her life and welfare. It was long since a German maxim, " What you would have appear in the life of a nation you must put into its schools." An American educator has said, "The school is society shaping itself." These maxims and these arguments point to the same conclusion, — that if these moral evils are to disappear from the life of the nation, and if American society is to "shape itself" into a purer and nobler national character, it must be through the agency of public education devoted definitely and of set purpose to the moral training of our citizens.

4. It is the imquestionable right and the imperative duty of the nation to perpettiate her moral character by training her citizens into that character. A nation's right to transmit her actual character to the nation of the future by impressing that character on the coming generation is one of the undisputed principles of statesmanship. Every nation does it in many different ways, — by the institutions she estabhshes, and which tend to perpetuate themselves ; by the monuments she sets up and the inscriptions she places upon them ; by her instruments of government and state papers and by the sentiments they contain. She could not avoid exercising this molding power even if she would. And if she may do so in these other ways, then still more may she do so in the most pervasive and efficient of all ways, — through her public schools.

We do this constantly, zealously, as to our republicanism. In season and out of season, through all our channels of influence upon the minds of the people, we inculcate the superiority of repubhcan institutions. Nor do we hesitate because some of our own citizens, or of our immigrant population, may possibly have differing convictions. We feel, we know, that we no more wrong or injure a monarchist who may be resident among us by teaching our republicanism than we do by being republican ; we have the same right to inculcate the superiority of our form of government that we have to establish it.

Now the American nation has a certain well-defined moral character. It is not a perfect character ; it is still in process of development ; but, in so far as we have a moral character, with certain well-defined features, we have the right to train the generation that is coming after us to believe in and to practice the virtues which compose it. The moral character of this nation includes such traits as these : obedience to law, regard for the rights of men, love of liberty, regard for the sanctity of oaths, respect for the monogamous family, abhorrence of drunkenness and of social vice, public faith or the keeping of treaties and compacts, and respect for the day of rest and worship. That multitudes among us are not possessed of these virtues, and that the people as a whole, through their State and national governments, have often disregarded them, is no objection to our argument. The fact remains that these virtues are commanded in our laws, they are enforced in our courts, they have wrought as vital forces in our history, they have given tone to our literature, and the nation believes they lie at the foundation of our national prosperity. We rightly deem them of supreme importance ; we could better allow all our wealth, the accumulation of centuries of toil and self-denial, to perish in one fell disaster than allow ourselves to be robbed of these elements in our moral character as a nation. Whether we shall in years to come be a numerous people, — reckoning our population by hundreds of millions, — or a wealthy people, or a learned and scholarly people, or a refined people adorned with the graces of intellectual and aesthetic culture, are all of infinitely less importance than the question whether we shall be a virtuous, law-abiding, incorruptible. God-fearing, faith-keeping people. The foundation of all public welfare is the virtue of the people ; this has been the chief factor, heretofore, in our national welfare and progress. If we lose this, and become prevailingly a corrupt and vicious people, nothing can sustain the fabric of our unparalleled material prosperity and our general social happiness. Possessing a certain well-defined moral character, and having these convictions as to its importance, the nation has the unquestionable right, and is under the most solemn obligations, to train her future citizens in that moral character and in those underlying principles in which our national morality has its roots and out of which it springs.

The force of this argument is greatly enhanced with the American people when we consider the heterogeneous multitudes of immigrants who are flocking to our shores. Last year we received from foreign countries an addition of 1,026,499 persons to our population. Some of these bring strength and help to the best forces in our national life. All who are refugees from oppression and from burdensome social conditions abroad we cordially welcome, even though we know that many of them are not in accord with the distinctive moral features of our national character. Many of them antagonize laws designed to elevate the character and improve the morals of the people. Their attitude makes slower and more difficult the uplift and moral progress of the whole nation.

As we face this problem, it is clear that among the agencies which the nation can employ directly, the public school must be our main reliance. The adult immigrant will not be easily or quickly changed ; his habits are fixed ; his opinions have crystallized ; but his children, in their formative years, go into the pubUc school, there to be assimilated to the national character. If the most important elements in our national character are moral elements, then our pubUc schools must give a foremost place to the moral elements in education. We plant ourselves on the unassailable principle that every nation has the unquestionable right and is bound by the highest duty to transmit to future generations those elements in her own moral character which she deems dutiful and vakiable, and which she would preserve and develop.

Again, our argument rises easily and naturally to still higher ground when we consider our fifth point.

5. Every nation has the right and is in duty bound to lift her moral character toward still higher standards. She has no right to be content with the simple transmission of her character as it exists at any given period in her history. In the remedial dispensation under which we live, it is man's privilege and duty to strive ever toward perfection. This is as true of man socially as of each individual man. Every nation ought to be able to say, "One thing I do ; forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press on toward the goal," — of moral perfection. To this end, — the production of a nobler race, — a nation's laws and her courts, her activities and her aspirations, her struggles and her conflicts, ought all to be consciously and purposely directed. All her material successes and enrichments ought to be held and used as means to this higher end. The natural desire of parents that it may be better with their children than it has been with themselves finds in this moral progress of the nation its highest and worthiest fulfillment. The philanthropist's hopes for mankind rest largely on the hope that all nations will yet, one after another, accept the moral improvement of their people as the one goal toward which all will strive in generous emulation and with self-denying devotion. But in this noblest of all national enterprises the nation has at command no instrument, no agency, which for wide extent and for efficiency can be compared with the public schools.

We have a fine example of a nation's aspiration and effort toward the moral uplifting of her people in the scientific temperance instruction laws now to be found on the statute books of every State in the American Union. In this way, through the action of their legislatures and their public schools, the American people are striving to free themselves in future years from the curse of drink. Standing calmly on the ground of facts scientifically ascertained, and making these facts the content of her instruction, the nation is not deterred by the differing opinions of many of her citizens, nor by the opposition of some parents to the teaching of these facts to their children, nor by the clamor of interests which may be adversely affected by the results of such instruction. Already the beneficent results of this wise legislation are apparent in the fife of the nation. Is it not then the highest wisdom of statesmanship to proceed further along this line, to attack other moral evils with the same weapons, and to sweep the whole field of ascertained knowledge in the search for arguments wherewith to enforce such moral instruction }

On the strength of these five arguments the necessity of moral training for the citizen in the public schools is securely established, unless this manifest need can be supplied as well from some other source. To break the force of these arguments, however, it is claimed that the family and the church are the proper agencies for the moral training of children, and that the training received at their hands is sufficient for the needs of the state.

It is freely granted that the family is under a grave responsibility for the moral training of its children, as is also the church ; but since the state, as well as the church and the family, is an independent and divinely instituted society, has she not her own independent responsibility and her own unquestionable rights ? May she do nothing toward the moral training of her own citizens ? We have seen, in a previous paragraph, that she cannot avoid this training if she would. She cannot enact laws and punish crime without educating in morals the people who are under these laws. And what she does thus indirectly, has she not the right to do directly in her public schools .? If she undertakes the work of education at all, may she not give a complete, well-rounded education, and train the whole man, with all his powers, for her service ?

Besides, how many children there are who are destitute of any proper family training, — the children of criminals, of vicious and broken homes, orphan children, and children whose lot is worse than orphanage ! How many families there are which have no connection with the church, and whose children receive no training in her Sabbath schools or her sanctuaries ! Can the state do nothing to provide against the public danger involved in such facts as these .?

Under the American doctrine of the separation of church and state, the state ought not to lean directly on the church for anything which is vital to her life and welfare. If the state is to depend on the church for the moral training of her citizens, then she must depend on all churches alike, on the Mormons with their teaching in favor of polygamy, and on every other so-called church, however nondescript or forbidding, and even on the atheist, whose faith, or want of faith, develops naturally and logically into anarchy. Amid all this confusion has the American nation no moral code, with adequate sanctions to support it, which she can teach authoritatively to all her future citizens ?

The true doctrine is, that the need is so great, and the peril from neglect or failure is so urgent, that all the forms of human society, — the family, the church, and the state, — must work together to supply the need and avert the peril. Each of these is free to do its work without dictation or interference from either of the others. The family and the church will do well if they discharge their own responsibilities. They must not be asked to undertake, in addition, the responsibilities of the state.

The conclusions thus far reached may be compactly stated thus : Public schools are established to prepare the citizens for the duties of citizenship. Right moral character is the chief element in good citizenship ; the life and welfare of the nation are dependent upon it. This element cannot be adequately supplied from any other source ; therefore the public schools must regard moral training as a principal part of their work.

THE RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTY IN THE UNITED STATES; VARIOUS PROPOSED SOLUTIONS

The religious difficulty in the way of moral training in the public schools arises from the connection of morality with religion. The general moral character of the American people has been determined by the religious ideas which have prevailed among the people. These religious ideas are not the possession of any one church, but are common to all churches, and are shared by multitudes who belong to no church. They include such primary religious tenets as belief in the being of God ; the character of God as infinitely holy, just, loving, and merciful ; the moral law as the expression of his will ; the certainty of sin's punishment ; the coming of a Saviour who died for men, and the offer of forgiveness and of eternal life. These beliefs have made us the kind of people we are : they have molded our individual character, and have given form to our laws and other institutions. If we had been a Mohammedan people, all our laws respecting the family would have been different from what they are ; so our laws against blasphemy, laws relating to the day of rest, guarding the sacredness of human life, restraining licentiousness, providing for public charities, with many others, would never have been enacted by a people influenced by any other than the Christian religion.

The Christian people of the United States, however, are divided into various churches or sects. These are naturally rivals and are jealous of each other. A large part of the population belong to no church and profess no religion. Hence arises the fear that the state, in teaching morality in the schools, together with the logical basis on which morality rests, may throw the weight of her influence and authority in favor of some one sect to the disadvantage or disparagement of the others.

The fear is natural. It is based largely upon the wrongs, oppressions, and cruelties which have been perpetrated in other lands and in other days in behalf of churches ''established " by the civil power. The American people will not lightly surrender their religious liberties, purchased with a great price, or allow themselves to be " entangled again in the yoke of bondage" to ecclesiastical despotism. In all our discussions we must hold this to be common ground on which all parties stand and which all will equally, and at any cost, defend.

Various solutions of the educational problem have been proposed in order to escape the religious difficulty.

I. The Secular Theory of Public Education

The advocates of this theory say : The American people are agreed as to the importance of intellectual and physical culture, but they are hopelessly divided in their religious opinions. The only possible course of action, therefore, is to put into the schools those things about which they are agreed and to leave out the things about which they differ. Let all religious ideas, even the most elementary, be barred from the schoolroom. Morality may be taught, but only as a system of human conventions, and no argument enforcing it may be drawn from the realm of religion. The evils which are condemned must be condemned because of the injury they bring to man and not because they are sins against God.

To this theory there are several invincible objections : I . // does not take into account the religious nature of the child. Man is not only a moral but a religious being. His moral sense, or his perception of right and wrong, is directly related to his belief in God. Conscience is the sense of duty, but duty implies some one to whom duty is due. If there is no moral governor over man, man's own will is his supreme law. It is difficult to see how there can be any sense of moral obligation in a mind which really denies the being of God. Conscience, or the moral sense, is therefore related to God much as the eye is related to light. The Christian idea of God is of a being of absolute goodness, immutable truth, unvarying justice, unchanging faithfulness, and perfect love, — as well as of infinite wisdom and power. This God is our Creator, Preserver, and Saviour ; we stand in personal relations to him ; we love him, and know that he loves us. The reverent and affectionate contemplation of such a being transforms man into his likeness. The sense of his authority, the desire for his favor, the fear of his displeasure, the longing to be at one with him, — these are the most powerful regulative and uplifting forces known to men. These sentiments have made the American people what they are and have made our institutions what they are. They are not the views of any one church or of church people only, but the convictions of the great majority of the American people. Is it wise, or is it necessary, for the state, in laboring to transmit her own character to coming generations, to ignore the chief forces which have wrought in the formation of that character } Is the moral uplifting and guidance of a great nation, numbering already nearly a hundred millions of souls and destined perhaps within a century to include from five hundred to a thousand millions, so light a task that the nation can afford to ignore and neglect the chief instrument for its accomplishment .? In endeavoring to impress her own morality upon her future citizens, may the nation make no account of the very soil into which that morality has sent down its roots and from which it has drawn its nourishment ?