Parents and children

by Charlotte M. Mason

CHAPTER XI

FAITH AND DUTY

Reviews
I

Education, properly understood, is the science of life, and every attempt to formulate this science is to be hailed with interest, and with a measure of gratitude in proportion to its success. Thinking minds everywhere are engaged in furnishing their quota towards this great work, in one or another of its aspects, physical, social, religious. We see at once the importance of every attempt to solve social problems or problems of faith, as helping us to understand those “laws of nature” and “ways of men,” the love, and dutiful attitude of the will towards which Mr. Huxley considers to be the sole practical outcome of education. We have before us three important works[9] on these lines. One deals with the problems of “secular” morality from an American point of view; the second with the whole problem of national education from a French and “scientific” standpoint. The third is not professedly an educational work. It deals with “the ways of men,” but with the ways of men as they are concerned with the ways and will of God. That is, it deals with the deep-seated springs out of which are the issues of life. As the true educationalist works from within outwards, he will probably find much aid in a work whose outlook on life is from the standpoint of “faith.”

Mr. Felix Adler, in “The Moral Instruction of Children,” undertakes a by no means easy task in setting himself to solve the problem of unsectarian moral instruction. He brings unusual qualifications to the work—a wide outlook, philosophic training, and that catholic love of literature and knowledge of books which is essential to the teacher of morals. The work before us is one which should find a place on every educated parent’s bookshelves, not perhaps to be swallowed whole as a “complete guide,” but to be studied with careful attention and some freedom of choice as to which counsel of perfection is worthy to be acted upon, and which other counsel may be rejected as not fitting in with that scheme of educational thought which the parent has already made for himself. Mr. Adler is most seriously handicapped at the outset. He writes for American schools, in which the first condition of moral instruction is that it must be unsectarian. This he, rightly or wrongly, interprets, to exclude all theistic teaching whatever; that is to say, the child he writes for has no sanctions beyond those he finds in his own breast. For example: “It is the business of the moral instructor in the school to deliver to his pupils the subject-matter of morality, but not to deal with the sanctions of it. He says to the pupil, ‘Thou shalt not lie.’ He takes it for granted that the pupil feels the force of this commandment, and acknowledges that he ought to yield obedience to it. For my part, I should suspect of quibbling and dishonest intention any boy or girl who would ask me, Why ought I not to lie? I should hold up before such a child the ought in all its awful majesty. The right to reason about these matters cannot be conceded until after the mind has attained a certain maturity.”

Where does the ought get its awful majesty? That there is in the human breast an infallible sense of “ought” is an error prolific of much evil. It is a popular idea to-day that it is right to do that which the doer holds to be right; or, as it is popularly expressed, a man does all that can be expected of him when he acts according to his “lights.” Now, a very slight acquaintance with history demonstrates that every persecution and most outrages, from the Inquisition to Thuggee, are the outcome of that same majesty of “ought,” as it makes its voice heard in the breast of an individual or of a community. To attempt to treat of morals without dealing with the sanctions of morality is to work from the circumference instead of from the centre.

Moses, Moses und immer Moses! says a German pedagogue of the modern school, who writes in hot disdain of the old school system, in which ten or twelve, and, in some of the German States, fifteen or sixteen hours a week were devoted to Bible-teaching. We in England, and they in America, also rebel against the Bible as a class-book. Educationalists say there is so much else to be learned, that this prolonged study of sacred literature is a grievous waste of time; and many religious persons, on the other hand, object on the ground that it is not good to make the Bible common as a class-book. But it is singular that so few educationalists recognise that the Bible is not a single book, but a classic literature of wonderful beauty and interest; that, apart from its Divine sanctions and religious teaching, from all that we understand by “Revelation,” the Bible, as a mere instrument of education, is, at the very least as valuable as the classics of Greece or Rome. Here is poetry, the rhythm of which soothes even the jaded brain past taking pleasure in any other. Here is history, based on such broad, clear lines, such dealing of slow and sure and even-handed justice to the nations, such stories of national sins and national repentances, that the student realises, as from no other history, the solidarity of the race, the brotherhood—and, if we may call it so—the individuality of the nations. Here is philosophy which, of all the philosophies which have been propounded, is alone adequate to the interpretation of human life. We say not a word here of that which is the raison d’être of the Bible—its teaching of religion, its revelation of God to man; but, to say only one word more, all the literatures of the world put together utterly fail to give us a system of ethics, in precept and example, motive and sanction, complete as that to which we have been born as our common inheritance in the Bible.

For 1700 years, roughly speaking, the Bible has been the school-book of modern Europe; its teaching, conveyed directly or indirectly, more or less pure, has been the basis upon which the whole superstructure of not only religious but ethical and, to some extent, literary training rested. Now, the Bible as a lesson-book is tabooed; and educationalists are called upon to produce what shall take its place in the origination of ideas and the formation of character. This is the task to which Mr. Adler sets himself; and that he is at all successful is obviously due to the fact that his own mind is impregnated with the Bible-lore and the sacred law which he does not feel himself at liberty to propound to his students. But this prepossession of the author’s makes his work very helpful and suggestive to parents who desire to take the Bible as the groundwork and the sanction of that moral teaching which they are glad to supplement from other sources.

May we recommend the following suggestion to parents:—

“Parents and teachers should endeavour to answer such questions as these: When do the first stirrings of the moral sense appear in the child? How do they manifest themselves? What are the emotional and the intellectual equipments of the child at different periods, and how do these correspond with its moral outfit? At what time does conscience enter on the scene? To what acts or omissions does the child apply the terms right or wrong? If observations of this kind were made with care and duly recorded, the science of education would have at its disposal a considerable quantity of material, from which, no doubt, valuable generalisations might be deduced. Every mother, especially, should keep a diary in which to note the successive phases of her child’s physical, mental, and moral growth, with particular attention to the moral; so that parents may be enabled to make a timely forecast of their children’s character, to foster in them every germ of good, and by prompt precautions to suppress, or at least restrain, what is bad.”