An Educational Emergency

I

No other age of the world has made such demands upon character as does the age in which we live. We talk about the sterling qualities of our Puritan ancestors and mourn over a supposed decadence of moral fibre in our days, forgetting that the colonist was virtuous by necessity, frugal through lack of the materials of luxury, free from the vast avarice of our time because there were no financial fields to furnish the requisite opportunity and temptation. He was offered the hard choice between industry and starvation, and endurance was thrust upon him by his very situation in the wilderness. It means no derogation of his place of honor in our memory, and of his value as a national ideal, to say that the character which sustained him in his primitive environment might break down in complete failure under the stress of modern temptation. In short, it is harder to be good to-day than it was in the time of Miles Standish and John Winthrop, and we can hope for conduct equal to theirs only by grace of character even stronger.

Effective character includes intelligence to know the right, and the will to do it; on both of these the modern world lays new burdens. We live in a far more complex environment than did our forefathers, for we have left the simple paths where instinct was a sufficient guide for conduct, and are now dwelling in a world of man’s own creation, where instinct is not at home, and where problems can be solved only by the highest intelligence.

Our social philosophy is based upon that of the Greeks; but what a contrast exists between our social state and theirs! Their great political scientist declares that a state could not be conceived to embrace so many as a hundred thousand people. What would he have thought of cities inhabited by millions, gathered into states which in turn are combined into a nation nearly thousandfold larger than his extreme limit? And are we not to-day watching the first clear beginnings of the world-state, the poet-prophet’s ‘ federation of the nations, the parliament of man’? With this enormous increment of mere size in political units has come corresponding increase in complexity of structure and operation. The intelligence of thoughtful men stands aghast at the problems knocking at our doors, — tariff and finance, conservation, raceconflicts, law-making and enforcement, administration of nation, state, and municipalities. The very clash of disagreement among honest thinkers concerning social questions proves the difficulty of the riddles thrust upon us by our day. Most serious and menacing of all perhaps are questions of industry of which the earlier worId knew little. Greece and Rome and mediæval Europe kept, these perplexities under the surface by a system of slavery or rigid caste; it is only in modern times that the Enceladus of human labor has succeeded in throwing off so much of the superincumbent Etna as to let the upper world of thought and intelligence become vividly aware of his existence, and of the promise and the menace of his upward struggle.

There is need, then, of a new sociomoral intelligence to grasp the new complexities of the world in which we live. ‘ Who is my neighbor? ’ is a harder question now than it was in olden times: then a man dealt face to face with men he knew, and easily realized that his deeds fell on their heads as well as on his own. Nowadays employer and employee, buyer and seller, especially producer and consumer, are too often cut off from each other by a gulf of separation which leads naturally to mutual ignorance, indifference, and even to hatred. Long and devious are the channels through which the product of industry circulates in its way from the painful and often degrading labor of production, to the comfortable consumer, who at first perhaps does not know whence come his ease and luxury, and later, when wedded to his comforts, does not care; or at least cares too little to face squarely his relation to his far-off and unknown neighbor. Never before in human history has it been so true that no man liveth unto himself, but never has it been so easy to lose sight of the truth.

Besides the new demands made by the modern world upon social and moral intelligence, there are new strains upon the will itself. The very abundance and variety of the products of art and manufacture render the old fundamental ideal of self-control more difficult than ever. The senses are solicited by stimuli unknown to the ancients; and every part of our world is flooded with the products of all other parts through the unlimited reach of modern commerce. It almost seems that we live to-day on a sort of second level of barbarism; for just as the barbarian lives in bondage to the material world of nature, so we tend to fall into the bondage of the material things of our own creation. Our thought and energies are usurped by providing, not for actual and legitimate needs, but for the kind of food and drink and raiment and dwellings which custom and fashion prescribe for us. Civilized man has failed signally to content himself with a simple material regimen, and has wasted upon the things that perish the energy which ought to have been devoted to the higher and truly human life.

II

The demands upon moral character, then, were never so great as now; what of the emphasis upon moral character in education? No one would be apt to deny that character is the aim of education. This axiom is still a part of our formal pedagogy, and by many is supposed to govern our practice; it is proclaimed at educational gatherings, and appears regularly in books and articles. But in the woof and warp of educational thought and teaching it has no such place as it had in previous ages. The pages of Plato and Aristotle, Comenius, Montaigne, Milton, which deal with education, are dominated by the moral element. One of the most striking passages in the Republic is the one which insists that the literature selected for the curriculum shall ‘ be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue’; the philosopher unhesitatingly rejects those passages, even of the sacred Homer and Hesiod, which fail to inculcate true principles.

Does any school or college of today choose its classics with this primary regard for the promotion of virtue? Montaigne would have history taught in such a way that the teacher ’imprint not so much in his scholar’s mind the date of the ruin of Carthage, as the manners of Hannibal and Scipio; nor so much where Marcellus died, as because he was unworthy of his devoir he died there.’ Milton’s Tractate is so noble throughout, that it is hard to make selections. His very definition of education magnifies the moral aim:' I call, therefore, a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.’ His humanism never degenerates into mere linguistics, or literary æsthetics. In the classics, he says, ‘ the main skill and groundwork will be to temper the pupils with such lectures and explanations upon every opportunity as may lead and draw them into willing obedience, inflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue, stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God and famous to all ages.’

With Doctor Arnold of Rugby one ideal is always supreme, that of moral thoughtfulness and devotion to duty; all else is auxiliary and subordinate. The key to Horace Mann’s self-abnegation in the cause of the schools was the belief that education is the only force that could elevate character; his labors, his public addresses, and his writings, are all inspired and penetrated with the moral aim.

When we come to current educational discussion we find a surprising change of emphasis. The reader who will make comparison between the earlier writers and the leading formal treatises on education of our own time, will agree that far less stress is laid upon the moral element. Fortunately, we have excellent and rather impersonal evidence of this fact in the form of a number of well-known reports which embody the collective thought and conclusions of leading educational thinkers of the day.

The Report of the Committee of Ten is probably the best known and most authoritative educational document in America. It originated in the National Education Association, and occupied the attention of a series of committees and conferences from 1891 to 1893, when the Report was published. The original committee included among its ten members, all eminent, three whom it cannot be invidious to mention, — President Eliot, chairman; Dr. W. T. Harris, and President Angell. Nine sub-committees, or conferences, with ten members each, were appointed to deal with the branches of the secondary curriculum; thus the Report, is the work directly of one hundred eminent teachers and experts, chosen to represent the parts and aspects of the secondary school. The Educational Review said editorially: ‘No committee appointed in this country to deal with an educational subject has ever attracted so much attention as this one’; and later calls the work of the committee, ‘ the most systematicand important educational investigation ever undertaken in this country.’ It may safely be said that there is not a high school in the United States to-day that is not affected by the Report of this great committee; its total influence is beyond estimate.

Yet one might read the Report from cover to cover and hardly be reminded that there is such a thing as moral education. True, there are, out of the two hundred and forty-nine pages, a few sentences which touch this theme, some directly, more indirectly; but these could be assembled easily on three or four pages, and the other two hundred and forty-five be left without a trace; moreover, what is more significant, the removal would not affect the original unity one whit, but would rather seem to be an elimination of extraneous matter.

Lest any one, under the influence of just those prevalent conceptions which this paper aims to set forth, should say that the absence of the moral element is normal and legitimate in view of the general aim and nature of the Report, let us quote from the Report itself to show that it does not ignore the final values in education. For example, we read, ‘The secondary schools ... do not exist for the purpose of preparing boys and girls for college. . . . Their main function is to prepare for the duties of life.’ One of the most interesting (and extraordinary) parts of the general report is that which deals directly with values of studies. Indeed, the proposed doctrine of values calls forth a vigorous minority report from one of the leading members of the committee; and this minority report contains the most direct and pointed of all the few fragments that bear on moral character: ‘The training of observation, memory, expression, and (inductive) reasoning is a very important part of education, but is not all of education. The imagination, deductive reasoning, the rich possibilities of emotional life, the education of the will through ethical ideas and correct habit, all are to be considered in a scheme of learning. Ideals are to be added to the scientific method.’¹ It is clear then, and will be increasingly clear as one reads the pages of the Report, that the value and influence of the studies discussed formed an integral and essential part of the Report, and that no part of that value could be considered as excluded, except, perhaps, by its insignificance and minuteness.

But some one may ask. Did not the majority of the conferences deal with subjects which have no influence upon character, as Latin, Greek, Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, German and French, Geography and Biology?

Well, in truth we are not much troubled over this question, so far as our argument is concerned, although somewhat grieved that it should have to be raised at all. We shall be glad if most of our readers say here that the writer has set up a straw man, and that no one would think of denying ethical value, at least to some of these studies. At all events, we are willing to waive the charge of the complete absence of the moral element from these parts of the reports for the present, asking only one question: What of a secondary curriculum in which the subject-matter of seven out of nine conferences has to be excused from an examination as to moral value?

But we still have two inalienable fields left: English and History. Here we are on very solid ground, for we do not need Milton to tell us that these subjects are the very soul of the ethical power of the school; and moreover, in both cases, the conferences state in no uncertain terms their own conception of the aims. In the case of English we cannot do better than quote: ‘ The main direct objects of the teaching of English in schools seem to be two: (1) to enable the pupil to understand the expressed thoughts of others, and to give expression to thoughts of his own; and (2) to cultivate a taste for reading, to give the pupil some acquaintance with good literature, and to furnish him with the means of extending that acquaintance. Incidentally, no doubt, a variety of other ends may be subserved by English study, but such subsidiary interests should never be allowed to encroach on the two main purposes just indicated.’ No one who reads the conference report through will suspect the writers of any sins against their final injunction in the foregoing quotation; the anonymous incidental ends, including practically all the ideals most dear to the old Greeks and the humanists, especially those of our own race, are simply and absolutely ignored. Who could possibly divine that the branch of study with which this part of the Report deals includes such works as Shakespeare’s Macbeth, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with the American Colonies, and Carlyle’s profound and pathetic Essay on Burns?

The report on History must be credited with the largest proportion of ethical matter. Out of twenty-five pages, we find distinct or implied reference to character in about one whole page. It may seem invidious to detract from this praise; yet we cannot but be struck with the fact that the moral element does not enter into the main aim, but that, instead, we find a supplementary paragraph entitled, ‘ Other Advantages,’ and in this are grouped the education of a citizen, training in literary expression, and, last of all, moral training. Finally, the objects are summed up in a passage in which moral training is excluded from any direct and explicit mention, thus losing even the humble place it had gained among the subsidiary aims.

In the field of elementary education the neglect of the moral side is far less serious than in the secondary school; nevertheless, we cannot help feeling that even in the elementary school neither theory nor practice fully recognizes the claims of the moral side of training. The best document at hand to illustrate this is the so-called Report of the Committee of Fifteen, issued in 1895, which, it must be admitted, is both far less representative and less influential than the Report of the Committee of Ten, The second part of the Report of the Committee of Fifteen deals with the values and correlation of studies in the elementary curriculum, and is the work of five eminent authorities. The body of the Report was written by the chairman, the late Dr. W. T. Harris, then United States Commissioner of Education; while each of the other four appended a minority report setting forth dissent and additions. We freely admit that Dr. Harris’s Report by no means ignores ethical culture, particularly in dealing with literature and history, but we think he gives it still too small a place. In view of the rather common belief that definite moral instruction has no proper place in the school, it should be noted that the Report does not take this position, but says distinctly that it ought to be given; what then is its place?

Dr. Harris discusses at length the ' staple branches, — Grammar, Literature, Arithmetic, Geography, and History ’; then he names some ‘ other branches of instruction that may lay claim to a place,’ and after Drawing, Natural Science, Physiology and Hygiene, Manual Training and Physical Culture, come ‘morals and manners,’ — to which is devoted a very short half page, largely consumed in explaining how unimportant the subject is! The paragraph begins with a definition that condemns the subject in advance, by speaking of moral culture as ‘ a theory of the conventionalities of polite and pure-minded society,’ and closes with a sophism of the sort that is too often used to excuse our neglect of the moral aim: ‘The higher moral qualities of truth-telling are taught in every class exercise that lays stress on accuracy of statement.’ Moreover, although the Committee makes extended recommendations as to each subject, and sketches a programme for the whole eight years of the school course, poor ‘ morals and manners ’ are quite forgotten. It is another case of giving a dog a bad name and hanging him.

Not quite so clear and concrete, yet more significant, is the fact that the Committee does its main work, that of correlation, without any aid from the ideas of moral education. This is too complicated a matter to discuss here, further than to recall those words of the first great philosopher and prophet of the elementary school, Comenius. His method of solving the problem of correlation was very different from any of the logical, psychological, or pedagogical methods proposed by the Committee, but, when interpreted broadly, very like the principle of correlation in Plato and Aristotle, Milton and Ascham, Arnold and Horace Mann. All studies and methods and discipline were, he maintained, to teach the child ‘to know and rule himself,and to direct his steps toward God.’² Such is the only true correlation of studies, and only under such a conception can character receive its due.

The more specialized and less widelyknown reports will, in general, manifest the same emphasis; the discussion of History in the Report of the Committee of Eight may be cited as a striking example, inasmuch as it deals with the one subject in the whole curriculum that is richest in ethical matter and most fruitful in possible moral education. Compare, if you will, the attitude of Montaigne, of Milton, and of Dr. Arnold, regarding the teaching and use of History, with that embodied or implied in this modern report.

The prevailing neglect of the moral element is shown no less strikingly by a comparison of modern text-books with those of the past. I have in my possession one of the most widely-used Readers of the early part of the nineteenth century in America, Murray’s English Reader. We might well transcribe the table of contents entire, for almost every title shows the contrast between this Reader of the days of our grandfathers and the Reader of today. Out of the eighty-four prose selections in the first part of the volume, fifty-four are distinctly and avowedly moral; eighteen others are religious; of the remaining twelve all, with scarcely an exception, have a moral or religious motive. The poetical selections have the same strongly ethical character.

Now, let the reader take in hand a typical modern Reader, or inspect the list of classics prescribed for high schools. The contrast with the old Murray will be striking. The distinctly and avowedly ethical and religious is conspicuous by its absence. The great majority of the selections are nonmoral: narratives to entertain or amuse, historical matter to inform and instruct, essays to whet the wit and cultivate the literary taste (would that they actually did!), and a good admixture of the humorous, or even ludicrous.

Of course, Murray’s Reader of 1835 is not a good text-book for our schools to-day. The complete absence of the humorous from its pages would alone suffice to condemn it, and its whole tone is painfully pietistic and goody-goody. But it is imbued from beginning to end with a profound and ever active desire to train the moral natures of the pupils; that purpose is always in the focus of attention and never takes a second place. Truly, ‘ we have changed all that,’ but with the error of the old letter, may we not have cast away some of the excellence of the old spirit? In our dread of the goody-goody, may we not have shut the door on that all-surpassing end of education, the Good?

Let us consider one more manifestation of the lapse of attention to moral education, found in another part of the educational field, the college and the university.

Whither has the old-time college chapel vanished? Within the memory of many of us who are not yet old, it was the custom in American colleges, not excepting state institutions, for students and faculty to meet regularly and frequently for a religious and moral exercise. The ears of the youth were at least accustomed to the words of Holy Writ and the voice of prayer, and the serious counsel and admonition of their elders. We have heard not a few who passed through college in those days declare that no part of the college training was more beneficent in its influence than the chapel.

How have the times changed, in all save a constantly diminishing and apologetic minority of colleges! The voluntary chapel exercise still maintained in some colleges impresses one mainly by the pitiful smallness of its attendance, and by the certainty that those who most need its ministrations are elsewhere. In most institutions, especially the larger, the students seldom come together at all; probably never in anything like their full numbers. When they do assemble in large numbers it is usually for anything but a religious or ethical occasion; most often, as everyone knows, for an athletic rally. Now, no sensible man is opposed to athletics: we have not too much athletics, but too little, and that but indifferently distributed; and no prudent man desires to get into a controversy with the supporters of college athletics; but no friend of education can look with unconcern upon a condition in which the assembly that was used by our fathers for the nurture of character in the maturing youth is abandoned to the excitation of athletic furor and the perfection of practice in ‘ rooting.’ The old chapel service was doubtless often lacking in a sense of the fitness of things, and perhaps sometimes injured the cause it desired to aid; but the work aimed at in the college chapel has not passed away, and will never pass away; the vital question is this: Having discarded the instrument our fathers trusted to for moral culture, have we created anything to take its place, or are we ignoring the task which should be the crown of our educational purpose?

Another marked symptom of our lack of interest in the moral side of education is our indifference respecting the religious and moral instruction that is practically universal among other peoples. For the purpose of the argument, let our ignorance and unconcern respecting the religious instruction in European schools be excused on the ground of our strenuous secularism in education; but France, a sister republic, equally committed to a non-sectarian public school, has for nearly thirty years been carrying on a vast experiment in moral and civic instruction. Can anything justify our almost complete apathy toward this great national experiment and its possible lessons for us?

III

We must next ask after the causes which have led to this comparative neglect of the moral aim in education.

Without pretending to anything like a complete comprehension of the question, we venture to point out some forces that have contributed to the present situation. The first of these has already been hinted at: the place formerly belonging to moral training is now occupied by intellectual work. Moral education has not been deliberately rejected, nor recklessly thrown away; it has been crowded out. The intellectual content of the curriculum has grown to such vast proportions that it has usurped almost the whole attention and energy of the school. Consider the increase and expansion which have taken place in recent times, and are still in full tide of advance in every field of human knowledge. Who can grasp the contrast between our own day and the time of the Attic philosophers, with respect to the mere quantity of knowledge in the possession of the race.? Davidson tells us that Aristotle probably knew all that was worth knowing in his day! Socrates turned his attention first to natural science, or rather to nature; but he found nothing worth knowing there, — all was uncertainty, guesswork, disorder, contradiction. Consider the brevity and simplicity of the history possessed by the Greeks; they knew less of their own race and of their predecessors than we know, and the great part of what we know as history was not yet enacted, let alone recorded. Their literature, priceless in quality, was beautifully small in quantity, so that one man might easily be familiarly acquainted with all of it.

As for Natural Science, since its birth in the seventeenth century, it seems to increase in a sort of geometrical ratio, without any sign of pause or retardation. Moreover, as has been implied on a previous page, modern man has created a new and vast field of knowledge in the form of his own achievements in art, industry, and especially in social and political life.

It would seem that from the earliest times men have hoped that, the progress of knowledge would render easy the task of comprehending the universe, but the opposite is the fact; the world was never so hard to understand. Science has banished, not mysteries, but many illusions and superstitions that served for easy solutions; it rarely solves one problem without laying bare two harder ones. We are confronted with a sort of Frankenstein monster of intellectual complexity, so that one almost wonders whether the spirit of man shall prove equal to the task set before it by its own ceaseless and cumulative creation.

But this sort of catalogue of contrasts is tiresome to the reader, and not complimentary to his intelligence; let him rather survey for himself the field of human knowledge and see how in every part the older world possessed a mere fragment of what we possess to-day. Intellectually, we drag an ever-lengthening chain; and these accessions to our knowledge, indispensable though they are to the upward movement of the race, are yet a veritable load upon our backs.

Now, the school is the special organ of society for the intellectual part of education. Not that the school is to neglect the moral aim, but its work is peculiarly on the side of intellect, and it is to accomplish its moral ends largely through thought and knowledge. Hence the school has been driven to the front in the task of mastering the intellectual content of modern times, and has unconsciously become engrossed and absorbed in this intellectual task. As the task has grown with the years, and as the demands upon the school have become heavier and more insistent, the school has been forced to drop other lines of effort one by one, and bend every energy upon this. To bring the matter down to actual school-room work, how many a teacher is so put to it to ‘ cover the ground ’ of the course of study that she has little time or strength for any attention to the bearing which knowledge has upon life, or to the inculcation of righteousness and judgment!

But not only has the moral training been crowded out, as it were by indirection, through the pressure of the intellectual burden of the school: it has also suffered more direct attacks. The chief of these may be summed up as a reaction against the pietism and the strictness of earlier periods, and an emphasis upon the right of the child to grow up in accordance with the springs and impulses of his own nature. It is true that this very movement must be credited with some of the best elements in modern education: it forms the essence of the message of Pestalozzi, Froebel, and many lesser leaders in educational reform, all dating back, it hardly need be said, to Rousseau himself. But it is a commonplace that movements of progress swing, pendulum-like, to extremes, and the‘childcentric ’ movement in education is no exception. The fact is that we are stricken with a plague of Rousseauism. Rousseau did not know how to tell ‘nothing but the truth’; he dealt habitually in hyperbole of an extreme kind. As an example, take the famous dictum: ‘Do not command the pupils; never, on any conceivable subject! ’ This extraordinary injunction is but one grain of the kind of seed found abundantly in the most widely read book on education the modern world possesses, written by one who knew how to make the ears of his readers tingle. Rousseau was of course merely the eloquent and powerful voice in which the Spirit of the Age spoke; thousands of fathers and mothers and teachers who have never read a line in the Emile are influenced by its ideas in their attitude toward their children and pupils.

There is a terrible harmony between Rousseau’s absurd ‘ Never command a child ’ and the suggestive gibe that there is just as much family government to-day as ever, but that it has passed from the hands of the parents into the hands of the children. In our recoil from the harshness and pietism of the days of our great-grandfathers, and our enthusiasm for the rights of the child, have we not drifted into a policy of laissez-faire in moral training? Young people nowadays must not be preached to; even the sermon for children is so completely sugar-coated with humor and entertainment that our ancestors would never have called it a sermon at all. Morally, we expect our young people to grow, like Topsy; strange indeed, when we consider how much care and attention we devote to their intellectual development, and how much deliberate and methodical instruction is spent upon the culture of their powers of thought!

In the home the laissez-faire policy has been encouraged wonderfully by the absorption of the time and attention of parents by other things than the training of the children. This is especially true of fathers in the business and professional classes. The intensity of competition and the growing complexity of modern occupations have gradually encroached upon the time and available powers of the man until he almost ceases to figure in the education of his children. Every high-school principal is familiar with the case of the lad who has outgrown the control of the mother and is going to the bad because his father is too busy even to know what is happening. Few indeed are the fathers who seem to understand that in order to keep control of their sons they must actually spend time with them and maintain genuine intimacy. Teachers constantly observe that the boy whose father keeps in close touch with him has little trouble in school, and gives bright promise for the future. The serious cases of discipline, leading finally to suspension and expulsion, almost invariably arise where the father is too busy to do his part.

The emergency in moral education is rendered the more serious by the situation of religion. Especially is this true in our own country. So far as we know, history has no instance of a national character built up without the aid of religious instruction, or of such character long surviving the decay of religion. Without for a moment desiring the introduction into American schools of a religious instruction such as is common in Europe, we do urge upon the consideration of every thoughtful American the suggestive fact that we have the only great; school system the world has ever seen which does not include a definite and formal instruction in religion, — with the single exception, France, which relinquished it in 1882; and France has put in place of its religious instruction, the most systematic and thorough moral and civic instruction the world has ever seen, and is to-day working with unflagging zeal to make the moral instruction the most efficient and vital part of its whole curriculum. Deeper than the mere absence of religious instruction from our own public schools is the world-wide unrest and uncertainty in religious matters; a topic too familiar to need treatment here, further than by emphasizing the peril to moral education which results from the unsettling of religious sanctions. When the mature man finds himself slipping away from moorings he had thought secure, is it any wonder that the growing youth looks with scant success for a firm attachment for his life principles?

This then is the emergency as we see it: increased demand upon character, and diminished care for the cultivation of character. As M. Marion, French Minister of Education, has said: ‘The truth is that we have not yet seriously comprehended that the whole political and social problem is one of education. Henceforth education alone, absolutely that alone, can rescue our modern societies from the perils that threaten them. I do not know anybody who is not convinced of that. But those who know it best too seldom reflect upon it, and we act almost as if we knew it not.’

Fortunately signs are not wanting of a widespread awakening to the seriousness of the situation. We are beginning to realize that what has been merely an article in our educational creed must become a working principle in our educational practice; that the final question regarding education is whether it avails to produce the type of character required by the republic and the race. To accomplish this we need, not less clearness and accuracy of thought, nor any sacrifice of the true interests of the intellectual life, but more warmth of genuine and appropriate feeling and more stimulation and guidance of the will. In brief, we must fit our practice to Herbart’s great formula, that the chief business of education is the ethical revelation of the Universe.