Moral Education By Edward Howard Griggs Author of The New Humanism and A Book of Meditations THIRD EDITION "Welche unendliche Operationen Natur und NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH 1905 11-11-32AVM PREFACE It is now widely recognized in America that the chief aim of education is to develop noble manhood and womanhood. The absorption, natural to our pioneer period, in sharpening the tools of the mind and equipping the individ ual for personal success, is being rapidly replaced by the effort to mold the moral personality that will use the mind's instruments for the great ends of human life, in harmony with the good of the whole. Nor is this movement confined to our own country. The struggle to recover from the disaster of 1870 in France, the influence of the educational reformers in Germany, the enthusiastic awakening of the nation in Italy, the growth of social and humanitarian sentiment in England, have led to interesting experiments in moral education in the countries named. We have still much to learn from these experiments, especially in France and Germany, but it is in our own country that the greatest awakening to the moral aim of education has occurred. Yet while the end is thus generally, if vaguely, recognized, there is still the greatest confusion as to what it implies and as to the means by which it can be attained. Character is often conceived in a purely negative way, as the avoidance of evil, while the problem of moral culture is at times even interpreted to mean assigning a school period in which to teach 'morals and manners' as one would teach arithmetic. Moreover, much of the literature of the subject is singularly dreary and barren. I have long puzzled over the 148264 cause of this. Certainly, in practice, ethical problems are the most absorbingly interesting of all we must meet, and it would seem that moral education should be the most interesting, as it is the most important part of the whole process of culture. Yet many of the books on the subject are filled with a wearisome repetition of the conventional analysis of duties, and the commonplace, trite maxims that are fruitless for man or child. I have been able to discover three reasons for this barren ness: 1. Ethical teachers have too often yielded to the temptation to inculcate what they considered useful without much regard to its truth. Where they have allowed their desire to be helpful to supplant their reverence for reality the result is always hypocrisy and artificiality. 2. It is necessary to take a point of view that is not merely of the time, if one's work is to escape triviality. This explains why so much of the literature of moral education that once had a value is useless after twenty years, while the artistic literature contemporaneous with it is permanent in worth. If we lose the eternal in the transient, life ceases to have a meaning; if we live perfectly in the moment we realize the eternal. So Plato and Spinoza are as useful today, almost, as when they wrote, while the ephemeral books born of their hour load our libraries with barren stuff. 3. Deeper than both of these causes is the fact that so much of the literature dealing directly with ethical problems is born of the study rather than the world, evidencing an habitual detachment from human life that,involves a loss of appreciation of its concrete problems. While the resulting theory may be logical and satisfying to the intel lect, it helps us little in dealing with the real problems of human living. Therefore, if we can keep close to the process of life itself, asking always reverently what is the truth, and seeking to find the eternal in the best life of the moment, we may hope to retain, both in our study and in the practical work of moral education, something of the deep interest that ethical problems possess in our experience. Thus I have thought it worth while to attempt a study, as exhaustive as I could make it, of the whole problem of moral culture: its purpose in relation to our society and all the means through which that purpose can be attained. My aim has been sanity and not novelty. In education as in life we are led astray by brilliant half-truths. It is not difficult to detect and avoid what is merely false, but wisdom means putting half-truths in their place, viewing each element in widest relation and therefore truest perspective, seeing life, as Matthew Arnold said Sophocles saw it, 'steadily and whole.' Today, particularly, it is sanity we most need in education. The tides of thought come with ebb and flow; just now we are in the flood-tide of what is somewhat mythically called "the new education." We have turned from duty to interest, from form to content, from discipline to nutrition, from instruction to expression, from prescription to election. In all this is much gain, but only if we avoid extreme reaction and keep the good of the old in the new. To assume that the novel must be the best, to despise the old because it is old, and regard only the most recent theories as worthy of enthusiastic following, is to mistake a tidal wave for the Gulf Stream and invite a reaction to the extreme of the very elements against which we have been |