MORAL EDUCATION.
In considering moral education we must recollect that there are three agents in this matter—the child himself, the influence of his grown-up friends, and that of his contemporaries. All that his grown-up friends tell him in the way of experience goes for very little, except in palpable matters. They talk of abstractions which he cannot comprehend: and the “Arabian Nights” is a truer world to him than that they talk of. Still, though they cannot furnish experience, they can give motives. Indeed, in their daily intercourse with the child, they are always doing so. For instance, truth, courage, and kindness are the great moral qualities to be instilled. Take courage, in its highest form—moral courage. If a child perpetually hears such phrases (and especially if they are applied to his own conduct), as, “What people will say,” “How they will look at you,” “What they will think,” and the like, it tends to destroy all just self-reliance in that child’s mind, and to set up instead an exaggerated notion of public opinion, the greatest tyrant of these times. People can see this in such an obvious thing as animal courage. They will avoid over-cautioning children against physical dangers, knowing that the danger they talk much about will become a bug-bear to the child which it may never get rid of. But a similar peril lurks in the application of moral motives. Truth, courage, and kindness are likely to be learnt, or not, by children, according as they hear and receive encouragement in the direction of these pre-eminent qualities. When attempt is made to frighten a child with these worldly maxims, “What will be said of you?” “Are you like such a one?” and such things, it is meant to draw him under the rule of grown-up respectability. The last thing thought of by the parent or teacher is, that such maxims will bring the child under the especial guidance of the most unscrupulous of his contemporaries. They will use ridicule and appeal to their little world, which will be his world, and ask, “What will be said” of him. There should be some stuff in him of his own to meet these awful generalities.