But this is, of course, preliminary. Great as is the need, the practical difficulties in the way are very great. First, there are not only no good text-books in ethics, but no good manual to guide teachers. Some give so many virtues or good habits to be taught per term, ignoring the unity of virtue as well as the order in which the child's capacities for real virtue unfold. Advanced text-books discuss the grounds of obligation, the nature of choice or freedom, or the hedonistic calculus, as if pleasures and pains could be balanced as measurable quantities, etc., so that philosophic morality is clearly not for children or teachers. Secondly, evolution encourages too often the doubt whether virtue can be taught, when it should have the opposite effect. Perversity and viciousness of will are too often treated as constitutional disease; and insubordination or obstinacy, especially in school, are secretly admired as strength, instead of being vigorously treated as crampy disorders of will, and the child is coddled into flaccidity. Becomes the lowest develops first, there is danger that it will interfere with the development of the higher, and thus, if left to his own, the child may come to have no will. The third and greatest difficulty is, that with the best effort to do so, so few teachers can separate morality from religious creed. So vital is the religions sentiment here that it is hard to divorce the end of education from the end of life, proximate from ultimate grounds of obligation, or finite from infinite duties. Those whose training has been more religious than ethical can hardly teach morality per se satisfactorily to the noli me tangere [Touch me not] spirit of denominational freedom so wisely jealous of conflicting standards and sanctions for the young.
How then can we ever hope to secure proper training for the will?
More than a generation ago Germany developed the following method: Children of Lutheran, Catholic and Jewish parentage, which include most German children, were allowed one afternoon a week for several years, and two afternoons a week for a few months preceding confirmation, to spend half of a school day with instructors of these respective professions, who were nominated by the church, but examined by the state as to their competence. These teachers are as professional, therefore, as those in the regular class work. Each religion is allowed to determine its own course of religious instruction, subject only to the approval of the cultus minister or the local authorities. In this way a rupture between the religious sentiments and teaching of successive generations is avoided and it is sought to bring religious training to bear upon morals. These classes learn Scripture, hymns, church service,—the Catholics in Latin and the Jewish in Hebrew,—the history of their church and people, and sometimes a little systematic theology. In some of these schools, there are prizes and diplomas, and the spirit of competition is appealed to. A criticism sometimes made against them, especially against the Lutheran religious pedagogy, is that it is too intellectual. It is, of course, far more systematic and effective from this point of view than the American Sunday School, so that whatever may be said of its edifying effects, the German child knows these topics far better than the American. This system, with modifications, has been adopted in some places in France, England and in America, more often in private than in public schools, however.
The other system originated in France some years after the Franco-Prussian War when the clerical influence in French education gave way to the lay and secular spirit. In these classes, for which also stated times are set apart and which are continued through all the required grades under the name of moral and civic instruction, the religious element is entirely absent, except that there are a few hymns, Bible passages and stories which all agree upon as valuable. Most of the course is made up of carefully selected maxims and especially stories of virtue, records of heroic achievements in French history and even in literature and the drama. Everything, however, has a distinct moral lesson, although that lesson is not made offensively prominent. We have here nearly a score of these textbooks, large and small. It would seen as though the resources of the French records and literature had been ransacked, and indeed many deeds of heroism are culled from the daily press. The matter is often arranged under headings such as cleanliness, acts of kindness, courage, truthfulness versus lying, respect for age, good manners, etc. Each virtue is thus taught in a way appropriate to each stage of childhood, and quite often bands of mercy, rescue leagues and other societies are the outgrowth of this instruction. It is, of course, exposed to much criticism from the clergy on the cogent ground that morality needs the support of religion, at the very least, in childhood. This system has had much influence in England where several similar courses have been evolved, and in this country we have at least one very praiseworthy effort in this direction, addressed mainly, however, to older children.
Besides this, two ways suggest themselves. First, we may try to assume, or tediously enucleate a consensus of religious truth as a basis of will training, e.g., God and immortality, and, ignoring the minority who doubt these, vote them into the public school. Pedagogy need have nothing whatever to say respecting the absolute truth or falsity of these ideas, but there is little doubt that they have an influence on the will, at a certain stage of average development, greater and more essential than any other; so great that even were their vitality to decay like the faith in the Greek or German mythology, we should still have to teach God and a future life as the most imperative of all hypotheses in a field where, as in morals, nothing is so practical as a good theory; and we should have to fall to teaching the Bible as a moral classic, and cultivate a critical sympathy for its view of life. But this way ignores revelation and supernatural claims, while some have other objections to emancipating or "rescuing" the Bible from theology just yet. Indeed, the problem how to teach anything that the mind could not have found out for itself, but that had to be revealed, has not been solved by modern pedagogy, which, since Pestalozzi, has been more and more devoted to natural and developing methods. The latter teaches that there must not be too much seed sown, too much or too high precept, or too much iteration, and that, in Jean Paul's phrase, the hammer must not rest on bell, but only tap and rebound, to bring out a clear tone. Again, a consensus of this content would either have to be carefully defined and would be too generic and abstract for school uses, or else differences of interpretation, which so pervade and are modified by character, culture, temperament, and feeling, would make the consensus itself nugatory. Religious training must be specific at first, and, omitting qualifications, the more explicit the denominational faith the earlier may religious motives affect the will.
This is the way of our hopes, to the closer consideration of which we intend to return in the future, though it must be expected that the happiest consensus will be long quarantined from most schools. Meanwhile a second way, however unpromising, is still open. Noble types of character may rest on only the native instincts of the soul or even on broadly interpreted utilitarian considerations. But if morality without religion were only a bloodless corpse or a plank in a shipwreck, there is now need enough for teachers to study its form, drift, and uses by itself alone. This, at least, is our purpose in considering the will, and this only.
The will, purpose, and even mood of small children when alone, are fickle, fluctuating, contradictory. Our very presence imposes one general law on them, viz., that of keeping our good will and avoiding our displeasure. As the plant grows towards the light, so they unfold in the direction of our wishes, felt as by divination. They respect all you smile at, even buffoonery; look up in their play to call your notice, to study the lines of your sympathy, as if their chief vocation was to learn your desires. Their early lies are often saying what they think will please us, knowing no higher touchstones of truth. If we are careful to be wisely and without excess happy and affectionate when they are good, and saddened and slightly cooled in manifestations of love if they do wrong, the power of association in the normal, eupeptic child will early choose right as surely as pleasure increases vitality. If our love is deep, obedience is an instinct if not a religion. The child learns that while it can not excite our fear, resentment or admiration, etc., it can act on our love, and this should be the first sense of its own efficiency. Thus, too, it first learns that the way of passion and impulse is not the only rule of life, and that something is gained by resisting them. It imitates our acts long before it can understand our words. As if it felt its insignificance, and dreaded to be arrested in some lower phase of its development, its instinct for obedience becomes almost a passion. As the vine must twine or grovel, so the child comes unconsciously to worship idols, and imitates bad patterns and examples in the absence of worthy ones. He obeys as with a deep sense of being our chattel, and, at bottom, admires those who coerce him, if the means be wisely chosen. The authority must, of course, be ascendancy over heart and mind. The more absolute such authority the more the will is saved from caprice and feels the power of steadiness. Such authority excites the unique, unfathomable sense of reverence, which measures the capacity for will-culture, and is the strongest and soundest of all moral motives. It is also the most comprehensive, for it is first felt only towards persons, and personality is a bond, enabling any number of complex elements to act or be treated as whole, as everything does and is in the child's soul, instead of in isolation and detail. In the feeling of respect culminating in worship almost all educational motives are involved, but especially those which alone can bring the will to maturity; and happy the child who is bound by the mysterious and constraining sympathy of dependence, by which, if unblighted by cynicism, a worthy mentor directs and lifts the will. This unconscious reflection of our character and wishes is the diviner side of childhood, by which it is quick and responsive to everything in its moral environment. The child may not be able to tell whether its teacher often smiles, dresses in this way or that, speaks loud or low, has many rules or not, though every element of her personality affects him profoundly. His acts of will have not been choices, but a mass of psychic causes far greater than consciousness can estimate have laid a basis of character, than which heredity alone is deeper, before the child knows he has a will. These influences are not transient but life-long, for if the conscious and intentional may anywhere be said to be only a superficial wave over the depths of the unconscious, it is in the sphere of will-culture.
But command and obedience must also be specific to supplant nature. Here begins the difficulty. A young child can know no general commands. "Sit in your chair," means sit a moment, a sort of trick, with no prohibition to stand the next instant. Any just-forbidden act may be done in the next room. All is here and now, and patient reiteration, till habit is formed, and no havoc-making rules which it cannot understand or remember, is our cue. Obedience can, however, be instinct even here, and is its chief virtue, and there is no more fear of weakening the will by it than in the case of soldiers. As the child grows older, however, and as the acts commanded are repugnant, or unusual, there should be increasing care, lest authority be compromised, sympathy ruptured, or lest mutual timidity and indecision, if not mutual insincerity and dissimulation, as well as parodied disobedience, etc., to test us, result. We should, of course, watch for favorable moods, assume no unwonted or preternatural dignity or owlish air of wisdom, and command in a low voice which does not too rudely break in upon the child's train of impressions. The acts we command or forbid should be very few at first, but inexorable. We should be careful not to forbid where we cannot follow a untrusty child, or what we can not prevent. Our own will should be a rock and not a wave. Our requirements should be uniform, with no whim, mood, or periodicity of any sort about them. If we alternate from caresses to severity, are fields and capricious instead of commanding by a fixed and settled plan, if we only now and then take the child in hand, so he does not know precisely what to expect, we really require the child to change its nature with every change in us, and well for the child who can defy such a changeable authority, which not only unsettles but breaks up character anew when it is just at the beginning of the formative period. Neglect is better than this, and fear of inconsistency of authority makes the best parents often jealous of arbitrariness in teachers. Only thus can we develop general habits of will and bring the child to know general maxims of conduct inductively, and only thus by judicious boldness and hardihood in command can we bring the child to feel the conscious strength that comes only from doing unpleasant things. Even if instant obedience be only external at first, it will work inward, for moods are controlled by work, and it is only will which enlarges the bounds of personality.
Yet we must not forget that even morality is relative, and is one thing for adults and often quite another for children. The child knows nothing of absolute truth, justice, or virtues. The various stimuli of discipline are to enforce the higher though weaker insights which the child has already unfolded, rather than to engraft entirely unintuited good. The command must find some ally, feeble though it be, in the child's own soul. We should strive to fill each moment with as little sacrifice or subordination, as mere means or conditions to the future, as possible, for fear of affectation and insincerity. But yet the hardier and sounder the nature, the more we may address training to barely nascent intuitions, with a less ingredient of immediate satisfaction, and the deeper the higher element Of interest will be grounded in the end. The child must find as he advances towards maturity, that every new insight, or realization of his own reveals the fact that you have been there before with commands, cultivating sentiments and habits, and not that he was led to mistake your convenience or hobby for duty, or failed to temper the will by temporizing with it. The young are apt to be most sincere at an age when they are also most mistaken, but if sincerity be kept at its deepest and best, will be least harmful and easiest overcome. If authority supplement rather than supersede good motives, the child will so love authority as to overcome your reluctance to apply it directly, and as a final result will choose the state and act you have pre-formed in its slowly-widening margin of freedom, and will be all the less liable to undue subservience to priest or boss, or fashion or tradition later, as obedience gives place to normal, manly independence.
In these and many other ways everything in conduct should be mechanized as early and completely as possible. The child's notion of what is right is what is habitual, and the simple, to which all else is reduced in thought, is identified with the familiar. It is this primitive stratum of habits which principally determines our deepest belief which all must have over and above knowledge—to which men revert in mature years from youthful vagaries. If good acts are a diet and not a medicine, are repeated over and over again, as every new beat of the loom pounds in one new thread, and sense of justice and right is wrought into the very nerve-cells and fibers; if this ground texture of the soul, this "memory and habit-plexus," this sphere of thoughts we oftenest think and acts we oftenest do, is early, rightly and indiscerptibly wrought, not only does it become a web of destiny for us, so all-determining is it, but we have something perdurable to fall back on if moral shock or crisis or change or calamity shall have rudely broken up the whole structure of later associations. Not only the more we mechanize thus, the more force of soul is freed for higher work, but we are insured against emergencies in which the choice and deed is likely to follow the nearest motive, or that which acts quickest, rather than to pause and be influenced by higher and perhaps intrinsically stronger motives. Reflection always brings in a new set of later-acquired motives and considerations, and if these are better than habit-mechanism, then pause is good; if not, he who deliberates is lost. Our purposive volitions are very few compared with the long series of desires, acts and reactions, often contradictory, many of which were never conscious, and many once willed but now lapsed to reflexes, the traces of which crowding the unknown margins of the soul, constitute the organ of the conscious will.