NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.

No. CCCXXI.

AUGUST, 1883.

MORAL INSTRUCTION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

REV. DR. NEWTON.

THE supreme need of ethical education in our public schools ought surely to need no assertion. In any rational theory of education everything should lead up to character and conduct. The individual's own development finds its completion in a noble character. The interests of society are not secured in a system which turns out brains minus a conscience. Educational authorities have always recognized character as the end of education. When Socrates had been shown a beautiful youth he wanted to know whether his soul was equally beautiful. Plato said: "I mean by education that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue in children." ("Laws," Book II., 653.-Jowett.) Locke declared: "It is virtue then, direct virtue, which is the head and invaluable part to be aimed at in education." ("Thoughts on Education.") Milton, in characteristically beautiful language, writes: "The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents, by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue." ("Tractate on Education.") VOL. CXXXVII.-NO. 321. 8

With Pestalozzi and Froebel character was the good supremely and passionately sought. Herbert Spencer's work on education treats of it as "Intellectual, Moral, and Physical."

The lack of proper provision for ethical education in our public schools is painfully patent.* This defect our public schools share with our private schools. The task of ethical education is so delicate and fine that the wisest may well hesitate over it. Job work here is worse than no work. Prigs and pharisees are the products turned out from poor character

* General provisions for moral education are found in the legislation of some of the States, and in the schedules of studies and directions for teachers issued by many local Boards of Education. The Legislature of Massachusetts, in 1789, directed teachers "to impress on the minds of children and youth committed to their care and instruction, the principles of piety, justice, and a sacred regard to truth, love to their country, humanity, and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry and frugality, chastity, moderation and temperance, and those other virtues which are the ornament of human society and the bases upon which a republican institution is founded." Philadelphia enumerates "morals and manners," among the studies to be pursued in its schools. In the "directions to teachers," its Board of Education observes: "Remarks upon morals and manners should follow the reading of the Bible by the principal. These remarks should be made in the presence of the whole school, and as frequently as the incidents of the school may suggest." These occasional instructions are urged as a means of school discipline: "Respectfulness to superiors, obedience to parents and teachers; honesty and truthfulness thus enforced and impressed upon the mind of the pupils will be found a powerful auxiliary to the discipline of the school." The Board of Education of New-York (1867) places "manners and morals" among the studies of the primary schools, and directs as follows for the several grades: Sixth grade-"Instruction is to be given in manners and morals, and illustrated by means of the incidents of school and home"; fifth grade-ditto; fourth grade—“Instruction for cultivating love to parents, kindness, obedience, neatness, truthfulness, and politeness, to be illustrated by examples, incidents, and anecdotes"; third grade-ditto; second grade"Improve opportunities in the daily exercises of the schools by conversations upon the subjects of the reading lesson and all appropriate incidents to inculcate respectfulness, obedience to parents, honesty, and truthfulness"; first grade-" Instruction by means of school incidents and anecdotes, so conducted as to aid in the discipline of the school." In the schedules for the grammar schools no reference is made to the subject. The Chicago Board of Education has some admirable instructions to its teachers, worthy of a place in the directions of all School Boards. See "Barnard's Journal of Education," vol. xix., p. 552.

Few of our School Boards offer any detailed directions; the work is one that cannot show for itself as does other teaching; so that practically this whole subject comes to be left very much to each individual principal and teacher.

factories, and no fashion for uglinesses is likely to bring them into favor. It is so easy to spoil a soul in handling it! Stil, something needs to be done, as carefully as may be. That something must be done in the people's schools. There is no other institution to which the State may safely trust this most important task. The Sunday-school is too amateurish to achieve a thorough ethical culture. An hour and a half once a week can impart but little instruction, and can secure no training. With the present pre-occupation of orthodox Sunday-schools in dogmatic and institutional religion, even their limited possibilities as ethical educators are largely wasted. Were the Sunday-school an ideal institution, as such it would still labor under the fatal defect of divorcing ethical from intellectual culture. Division of labor cannot be carried so far as to exempt our day-schools from the care of character. A child cannot be cut up into bits and jobbed-out to different specialists, and then be made up under the hands of a Master of Morals. Morality must be learned in school, as in actual life, amid secular activities. The State must assume her rightful function in the culture of character. How, then, can our present system be led or into this highest office of education?

Ethical education may be carried on in three ways: through direct instruction, through training, and through the influence of the spiritual atmosphere created in the school.

I. Instruction. This should be at first, not talking about virtue, but talking up virtue; not the giving of scientific knowledge concerning goodness, but the presentation of goodness in forms that will cause children to fall in love with it. Nature's order is first the concrete and then the abstract, first the example of the law and then the principle of it. The grammar of ethics should come later. Natural, unconscious action of the moral sense, responsive to the forms of beautiful goodness presented to it, makes healthier children than any elaborate studies in ethics in the best of scientific manuals. Casuistry forms good conscience-calisthenics for tougher years.

The opening exercises of the schools might include choice ethical readings, brief accounts of noble men and women, tales of brave and fine actions, golden sayings, parables and allegories of great teachers, illustrating character and conduct. There is no lack of material for such readings in righteousness. Plutarch's sketches of the grand old Greeks and Romans are full of nutri

ment for a noble high-mindedness. Froissart's "Chronicles," and Fuller's "Worthies of England" would yield choice material for the early periods of the modern world. More modern history abounds in tales of noble manhood and womanhood. What a text-book of patriotism is the story of Garibaldi! Our own history is rich in great characters, only less conspicuous than Washington and Lincoln. Every form of personal goodness, every phase of social righteousness finds ample illustration in the recorded anecdotes of actual men and women. The daily incidents of the newspapers furnish affecting models of heroism and tragic examples of the consequences of vice. The sagas of the ancients abound in ethical parables, nature-myths woven into heroic legends. Kingsley's "Heroes" and Hawthorne's "WonderBook" are charming specimens of the ethical power of these old stories. Scenes and sketches from our great novelists, and passages from the great poets, might well form part of such readings. Between the equally irrational clamorings of the advocates and opponents of "The Bible in the School," there is no chance probably, as yet, for the still, small voice of reason. Experience may be trusted to convince men of open minds that in the world of letters there are no writings so effective in the culture of character as portions of the sacred books of the Hebrews-the people whose specialty was ethical passion-and of the Christians. Matthew Arnold has divined this, with characteristic sagacity, and, in the "Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration," has prepared the noble poetry of the second section of Isaiah for use as a primer in schools. One of the prime benefits to follow from a rational conception of the Bible is the ability of men of different religious opinions to consider practically this question of the ethical use of the Bible-writings.

The golden words of the other great Bibles of humanity should be utilized in the same way. These righteousness-readings might pursue a systematic order, covering in the course of a school year, several times, all the great personal and social virtues, without necessarily laying bare to the children the framework of the classification. For such readings there should, of course, be prepared a rich Anthology, as a basis on which each principal could build his own selection.

Instruction could also be given, and perhaps with most effectiveness, in an indirect manner, through some of the special departments. Indirect ethical instruction insinuates itself most

readily into the mind. An oblique line is the line of greatest power in communicating this knowledge. As Emerson says: "It is the things of which we do not think, that educate us." The "readers" of the younger children might be still more entirely captured for the purposes of character-building, and be made to consist chiefly, as they do now in part, of choice passages of ethical value. History, as now studied, has little or nothing of an ethical character. Without displacing its really important instruction as to past affairs, it might be made to throw character into the foreground. American and English history afford just as fine a field for character-studies as Hebrew history, if we had the dominant desire of the ancient Jews to study character. The ethical aspects of great men and the moral bearings of great events should be kept ever in mind by a wise teacher, and would afford constant opportunities of exercising the child-conscience in a natural and interesting way.

The physical sciences are, without any conscious aim in this direction on the part of the teacher, a constant instruction in some valuable moral qualities-humility, openness of mind, love of truth and reality, patience, judgment, etc. They can be made to further the culture of character directly. The universal reign of law can be pointed out, and its double action in beneficence or maleficence, according as we intelligently understand and loyally obey it, or as we ignorantly neglect and willfully defy it. Moral laws can be shown to be grounded in nature; to be no mere arbitrary impositions of society, no illusions of the imagination, but part of "the order and constitution of things." The great ethical principles can be traced in terms of physics, in the life of the bird and beast. The bee-hive and the ant-hill can be made text-books in social ethics, parables of a true commonwealth and a real republic. That most difficult and delicate of didactic tasks, that of inducting the child-mind into pure and reverent thought concerning the sexual relations, may, perhaps, best be achieved through a poetic reading of the loves of the flowers. Thus it was, as we know from his own pen, that Froebel caught sight of the great law which runs through all life, and lifts the reproductive function into sacredness. These side-lights may reveal to the child the infinite mystery of order in which we live, and move, and have our being; and may place him in the rightful attitude of reverence toward law and of glad consent to it, which is the soul of virtue.