IV
What can the schools do for the better training of the social conscience? (I use the word "training" in the double sense of habituation and enlightenment). It is evident that that question needs more space than can be given to it here. A few words must suffice.
In the first place, teachers can recognize—that is, they can gradually be brought to recognize—that the training of the social conscience is the great work they have to do; that it is more important than anything else. A general recognition of that fact would itself have a highly stimulating effect. It would clarify ideas, furnish criteria of value that would be independent of personal or local whim, divert attention from piddling questions of routine, and so do something to elevate the business of teaching in the public estimation. It is now commonly spoken of as a noble profession, but only a very few really think of it in that light. In the better atmosphere I am thinking of, the teacher would not be a drill-sergeant bossing the details of a mental lock-step, but the physician of the social conscience. And, in harmony with the new drift in medicine, our physician would pin his faith to preventive treatment. He would not be able to avoid some punishment of the wrong-doer, but he would see his highest mission in the development of a sensitive conscience that would inhibit wrong-doing. This means skillful and well-paid teachers for children, not too many pupils to the teacher, and much friendly study of the individual pupil in school and out.
Then again teachers could put into practise far more generally than has been attempted hitherto, what has been found out by scientific men with regard to the social conscience and the way it works. They could appeal in every possible way to the social instinct, and make use of its well-known rewards and inhibitions. The foundation principle would be to make the penalty for misbehavior take the form, so far as possible, of social disapproval, with consequent suffering in self-esteem. To be effective, a penalty needs to be quick-acting and sure. It should depend as little as possible on the accident of getting caught. If a potential miscreant is taught to fear punishment at the hands of some authority outside of and above his own life, and if then he does wrong, and nothing unpleasant happens, he soon begins to enjoy the game of matching his wits against the law. Pretty soon he is really being schooled in the exciting art of law-breaking. Somehow he must learn to dread the disapproval of his mates and the prick of his own conscience.
Another principle, hardly less fundamental, would be to make the learner see that the rules he is called on to obey, at work or at play, are for the general good, including his own. Of course difficulty would be created by the young anarchist, the imp who refuses to play the game in accordance with the rules, is insensitive to communal opinion, and enjoys the excitement of beating the law. Such a mental twist is generally due to a vicious environment in home or street, where the standards are different from those of the school. How to deal with such cases, when they have reached the advanced stage of criminality, has always been one of the hardest problems of the civilized man, and no very satisfactory solution of it has yet been found. Down to quite recent time, our forbears put their faith in the deterrent effect of harsh and public punishments; and the rod of the schoolmaster kept pace, so to speak, with the stern decrees of the criminal law. It was found not to work very well, a humaner epoch set in, and with that too the schools have kept pace. We have come to feel that society itself is to blame for the miscreant, because it creates and perpetuates the conditions that make him. Meanwhile society is experiencing the disastrous effects of dealing gently with the criminal, and the schools are breeding up a generation to which anything like stern discipline is on the whole rather repugnant.
The one hopeful idea on the horizon is the idea of prevention. The potential miscreant must be caught and cured in the early stages of his making. It is unfortunately true that even the most enlightened and single-minded efforts of the school will produce but lame results so long as society permits criminals to breed with their kind, and tolerates the economic conditions which create for decently born children a hopelessly bad environment outside the schoolroom. It is for society to remedy these conditions as fast as it can. Meanwhile much would be gained if we could once clearly see, and begin to act on the principle, that the chief end of popular education should be, not a smattering of knowledges, but the development of social-minded character.