III
MORAL INSTRUCTION IN THE SCHOOLS
The preceding paper has discussed sufficiently the negative side of moral education. It has shown how children should not be approached. But few readers will be willing to leave the matter here. Are there no positive measures to be taken? Is there no room in our schools for any teaching of morality, or must the most important of subjects be altogether banished from their doors? There is much which might lead us to think so. If a teacher may not instruct his pupils in morality, what other concern with it he should have is not at once apparent. One may even suspect that attention to it will distract him from his proper work. Every human undertaking has some central aim and succeeds by loyalty to it. Each profession, for example, singles out one of our many needs and to this devotes itself whole-heartedly. Such a restriction is wise. No profession could be strong which attempted to meet the requirements of man as a whole. The physician accordingly selects his little aim of extirpating suffering and disease. His studies, his occupation, his aptitudes, his hopes of gain, his dignity as a public character, all have reference to this. 50 Whatever is incompatible with it, of however great worth in itself, is rightly ignored. To save the soul of a patient may be of larger consequence than to invigorate his body. But the faithful physician attends to spiritual matters only so far as he thinks them conducive to bodily health. Or again the painter, because he is setting ocular beauty before us, concerns himself with harmonies of color, balance of masses, rhythms of line, rather than with history, anecdote, or incitements to noble living. I once heard a painter say, “There is religion enough for me in seeing how half a dozen figures can be made to go together,” and I honored him for the saying. So too I should hold that the proper aim of the merchant is money-making and that only so much of charity or public usefulness can fairly be demanded of him as does not conflict with his profits. It is true that there are large ways and petty ways of acquiring gain, and one’s own advantage cannot for long be separated from that of others. Still, the merchant rightly desists from any course which he finds in the long run commercially unprofitable.
What, then, is the central aim of teaching? Confessedly it is the impartation of knowledge. Whatever furthers this should be eagerly pursued; and all that hinders it, rejected. When schoolmasters understand their business it will be useless for the public to call to them, “We want our children to be patriotic. 51 Drop for a time your multiplication table while you rouse enthusiasm for the old flag.” They would properly reply, “We are ready to teach American history. As a part of human knowledge, it belongs to our province. But though the politicians fail to stir patriotism, do not put their neglected work upon us. We have more than we can attend to already.”
Now in my previous paper I showed how a theoretic knowledge of good conduct had better not be given to children. By exposition of holy laws they are not nourished, but enfeebled. What they need is right habits, not an understanding of them: to become good persons rather than to acquire a critical acquaintance with goodness. What moral function then remains for the schools? To furnish knowledge of morality has been proved dangerous. For teachers to turn away from imparting knowledge and devote their scanty time to fashioning character is to abandon work which they alone are fitted to perform. Yet to let them send forth boys and girls alert in mind and loose in character is something which no community will long endure.
Until one has clearly faced these alternative perplexities he is in no condition to advise about grafting morality into a school curriculum; for until then he will be pretty sure to be misled by the popular notion of morality as a thing apart, demanding 52 separate study, a topic like geography or English literature. But the morality nutritious for school-children is nothing of this kind. No additional hour need be provided for its teaching. In teaching anything, we teach it. A false antithesis was therefore set up just now when we suggested that a teacher’s business was to impart knowledge rather than to fashion character. He cannot do the one without the other. Let him be altogether true to his scientific aims and refuse to accommodate them to anything else; he will be all the better teacher of morality. Carlyle tells of a carpenter who broke all the ten commandments with every stroke of his hammer. A scholar breaks or keeps them with every lesson learned. So conditioned on morality is the process of knowing, so inwrought is it in the very structure of the school, that a school might well be called an ethical instrument and its daily sessions hours for the manufacture of character. Only the species of character manufactured will largely depend on the teacher’s acquaintance with the instrument he is using. To increase that acquaintance and give greater deftness in the use of so exquisite an instrument is the object of this paper. Once mastered, the tools of his own trade will be more prized by the earnest teacher than any additional handbook of ethics.
It will be easiest to point out the kind of moral instruction a school is fitted to give, if we distinguish 53 with somewhat exaggerated sharpness its several lines of activity. A school is primarily a place of learning; it is unavoidably a social unit, and it is incidentally a dependent fellowship. No one of these aspects is ever absent from it. Each affords its own opportunity for moral training. The combination of them gives a school its power. Yet each is so detachable that it may well become the subject of independent study.
I. A school is primarily a place of learning, and to this purpose all else in it is rightfully subordinated. But learning is itself an act, and one more dependent than most on moral guidance. It occurs, too, at a period of life whose chief business is the transformation of a thing of nature into a spiritual being. Several stages in this spiritual transformation through which the process of learning takes us I will point out.
A school generally gives a child his first acquaintance with an authoritatively organized world and reveals his dependence upon it. By nature, impulses and appetites rule him. A child is charmingly self-centred. The world and all its ordered goings he notices merely as ministering to his desires. Nothing but what he wishes, and wishes just now, is important. He relates all this but little to the wishes of other people, to the inherent fixities of things, to his own future states, to whether one wish is compatible 54 with another. His immediate mood is everything. Of any difference between what is whimsical or momentary and what is rational or permanent he is oblivious. To him dreams and fancies are as substantial as stars, hills, or moving creatures. He has, in short, no idea of law nor any standards of reality.
Now it is the first business of instruction to impart such ideas and standards; but no less is this a work of moralization. The two accordingly go on together. Whether we call the chaotic conditions of nature in which we begin life ignorance or deficient morality, it is equally the work of education to abolish them. Both education and morality set themselves to rationalize the moody, lawless, transient, isolated, self-assertive, and impatient aspects of things, introducing the wondering scholar to the inherent necessities which surround him. “Schoolmasters,” says George Herbert, “deliver us to laws.” And probably most of us make our earliest acquaintance with these impalpable and controlling entities when we take our places in the school. There our primary lesson is submission. We are bidden to put away personal likings and see how in themselves things really are. Eight times nine does not permit itself to be seventy-three or sixty-four, but exactly and forever seventy-two. Cincinnati lies obstinately on the Ohio, not on the Mississippi, and it is nonsense 55 to speak of Daniel Webster as a President of the United States. The agreement of verbs and nouns, the reactions of chemical elements were, it seems, settled some time before we appeared. They pay little attention to our humors. We must accept an already constituted world and adjust our little self to its august realities. Of course the process is not completed at school. Begun there, it continues throughout life; its extent, tenacity, and instantaneous application marking the degree which we reach in scientific and moral culture. Let a teacher attempt to lighten the task of himself or his pupil by accepting an inexact observation, a slipshod remembrance, a careless statement, or a distorted truth, and he will corrupt the child’s character no less than his intelligence. He confirms the child’s habit of intruding himself into reality and of remaining listless when ordained facts are calling. Education may well be defined as the banishment of moods at the bidding of the permanently real.
But to acquire such obedient alertness persistence is necessary, and in gaining it a child wins a second victory over disorderly nature. By this he becomes acquainted not merely with an outer world, but with a still stranger object, himself. I have spoken already of the eagerness of young desires. They are blind and disruptive things. One of them pays small heed to another, but each blocks the other’s way, 56 preventing anything like a coherent and united life. A child is notoriously a creature of the moment, looking little before and after. He must be taught to do so before he can know anything or be anybody. A school matures him by connecting his doings of to-day with those of to-morrow. Here he begins to estimate the worth of the present by noticing what it contributes to an organic plan. Each hour of study brings precious discipline in preferring what is distantly important to what is momentarily agreeable. A personal being, in some degree emancipated from time, consequently emerges, and a selfhood appears, built up through enduring interests. The whole process is in the teacher’s charge. It is his to enforce diligence and so to assist the vague little life to knit itself solidly together.