SCHOOL ECONOMY AND MORAL TRAINING

 

         The administration of schools, the organization of courses of instruction and their goals should be entirely in the hands of persons who themselves are simultaneously either teaching or otherwise productively engaged in cultural life. In each case, such persons, guided by a set of principles called School Economy, would divide their time between actual teaching (or some other form of cultural productivity) and the administrative control of the educational system. The peculiar vitality and energy of soul required for directing a school will be called forth only in someone actively engaged in teaching or in some sort of cultural creativity.

         School Economy treats of the methods of organizing and managing a school. It embraces five groups of functions:

         1. School Preparation (regarding the following particulars: school-sites, grounds, grades, study branches, rooms, furniture, apparatus, records);

         2. School Organization (involving provisions in regard to study and provisions in regard to order);

         3. School Employments (defining the legitimate employments of the pupils while in school: study, recitation, exercise as play, regulated exercise);

         4. School Government (embracing issues of: school-ethics, retributions, school-legislation, administration);

         5. School Authorities (qualifications and duties of the agents who devise, direct, and control the whole machinery of school: the teacher, school officers, other people related with education).

         Ends of School Economy. As implied by these functions, we may state the ends of School Economy as:

         1. To provide favorable conditions for an effective instruction to take place.

         2. To economize time and effort on the part of both teacher and pupil, by rightly shaping the mechanics of the school.

         3. To produce a right disposition towards instruction, and so make control more easy and effective.

         4. To produce in the school a social environment which will tend to establish those habits and dispositions which constitute moral character.

         Moral Training. This last end, developing moral character in pupils, is, after all, the greatest problem of the educator. How shall the school accomplish its high aim of character‑building?

         The method to develop moral virtues can not be the traditional one of catechizing, reading the Scriptures, or formal participation in church services, for morals can not be "taught."

         For the development of character, three factors or constituents are essential; first, the genesis of right and inspiring ideals; second, the activity of will involved in yielding allegiance to these ideals; third, the consolidation of right impulse and resolve into habit. High ideals and a good will flowering into habit, these are the ends sought in moral training.

         The Creation of Ideals. First, then, how shall worthy and uplifting ideals be infused into the minds and hearts of youth? All such ideals are a result of the conjunction of intelligence, imagination, and sensibility. The youthful mind must, by every possible means, be moved and stimulated towards a true conception of the perfect man, the ideal life; which will induce the longing of aspiration, and vital effort towards at least its partial realization.

         If the youth can not be quickened into admiration of the good and morally heroic, education must be accounted a failure in his case. For such admiration, kindling discontent with his own present self, is the first step towards the goal of character. All the teaching of the school should help in this direction, but especially that in history and literature, through their portrayal of the leaders of the race and the ideal characters created by novelist and poet.

         But the most immediate agency of all in this direction will be found in the personality of the forceful and worthy teacher. The first and highest requisite, then, for moral inspiration is that the teacher shall be in his own life and character that which he wishes his pupils to become. The matter of the teacher's moral standards and habits becomes, therefore, of the most vital importance to all charged with the selection and appointment of teachers.

         The Cultivation of Moral Judgment. It was said above that high ideals are a combined result of intelligence, imagination, and sensibility. By intelligence is meant: firstly, such knowledge of life and its issues, of the natural and inevitable consequences of certain modes of life and conduct, as will furnish the basis for rational choice between objects of desire and lines of action, and for the exercise of self‑restraint and the inhibition of dangerous and unworthy impulses; secondly, the power and habit of deliberation and reflection upon the far‑reaching consequences of action, even that which may seem at the time trivial, and the ability to "see straight" as a result of such deliberation. In other words, the training of the judgment to caution and clear insight in dealing with moral questions, whether related to one's own personal behavior or to the problems of society, is a most important factor in character building.

         Here, all good teaching, which must aim always towards the cultivation of accurate judgment and clear conception, will conduce towards the development of sound moral judgments. The unconscious outcome of really good instruction and its constant demand for thoughtfulness and critical analysis is not likely to be overestimated. On the other hand, the moral mischief engendered by loose, superficial, or inaccurate teaching is correspondingly great and insidious.

         Character and Habit. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) had given currency to the apothegm that character is three-fourths conduct. It might be added with perhaps equal truth that conduct is three‑fourths habit. Right habit is the steering-wheel of a worthy life, holding it true to its chosen course. It is right habit which saves us from the perversity of sudden impulse and moral accident; and it is equally true that wrong habit imposes that slavery to evil impulse and appetite whose chains are strong as links of steel.

         It is beyond the power of the child to know or comprehend what habits it is for his eternal interest to form; his view of life is too limited. The teacher, unaided, might also be at a loss as to what habits he ought to make a point of establishing. But society, or the common judgment of civilized men, has very largely settled that question, and the problem of what habits are good and what are injurious need not occasion the educator any great perplexity. It is the process of habit‑forming which needs his most careful attention. 

         Formation is easier than reformation: the inculcation of some of the most desirable habits must begin so early that the duty belongs to the home. The primary teacher comes next. Personal habits that are merely physical, so far as any habit can be purely physical, manners, postures, the manipulation of muscles as in the holding of the pen, language habits, and the more specifically moral habits, such as kindness, truthfulness, obedience, etc., all fall to the primary teacher as most important field of attention and effort. In later grades of elementary education, with the greater development of memory and language power and the advent of textbooks, the chief work of the pupil is the formation of a host of intellectual habits. The multiplication table, for instance, must become a habit. And the teacher should understand and remember that an unwearied vigilance and persistence in the enforcing right practice to the end of right habits, is an indispensable part of moral training. 

         The Forming of the Will for Character-Building. But, so far, we have been only skirting around the center of the great problem of moral education. We come now, of necessity, to the core of the problem. Between ideals, on the one hand, based on "intelligence, imagination, and sensibility," and habit, on the other hand, resulting from instruction and repetition, lies the great force which must accept ideals and transmute them into moral habits, the good will. How shall "the soul's power of self‑direction towards chosen ends" be enlisted in the establishment of a noble character, outwardly expressed in worthy deeds? 

         An act of will involves a choice, and the choice must, after all and always, be the pupil's own. He must wish, for the moment at least, to do the right thing, and the wish must, if it lapses, be capable of renewal upon fit occasion. An action can not be called moral unless the child has chosen to do it. It is the teacher's task then, to furnish such occasions, to envelop the pupil in such an atmosphere as will make right choices seem rational and easy, to appeal to his highest ideals and purest sympathies, and to remove or reduce as far as possible conflicting or hindering motives and influences.

         What are the possible methods by which influence can be brought to bear upon pupils in school for the creation of high ideals, the training of moral judgment, and the determination of the will to those attitudes which will result in right life‑habits?

         At least five more or less distinct lines of practical effort may be advocated, all of which have been employed to a greater or lesser extent in good schools of the past. A brief presentation of these seems profitable at this point.

         1. The Personal Example of the Teacher. If the teacher is a person of high character and engaging personality, one who acts from principle, with evident sincerity and sympathetic interest in his pupils, his unconscious personal influence will be more effective than his conscious efforts.

         2. Incidental Instruction and Discipline, as Conditions Necessitate. The personality of the teacher will do its beneficent work not merely through the bare force of example, but it will naturally and necessarily find expression in the daily discipline of the school. A wise dealing with school offenses and the moral shortcomings of pupils furnishes occasion for the most practical kind of instruction in the bases of conduct, the reasons for right action and the evil consequences of wrongdoing. Here we have morality in the concrete; and here is the place for the teacher, avoiding all unnecessary antagonisms, to press home the principles of right conduct, by instruction, argument, and appeal. 

         Application of prompt and just punishment against wayward conduct will serve as an objective expression of turpitude, embodying the judgement, not of the teacher alone but of society at large. Children learn to estimate the moral quality of acts by noting, or experiencing, what is done about them by the ruling power. The result of this incidental and objective instruction in connection with discipline, as occasion requires, in the making of character will of course depend upon the wisdom and personal force of the teacher in charge. Punishment, wisely administered, emphasizes in the most impressive manner the opinion of good society with regard to reckless, lawless, or vicious acts, and gives greater vitality to the precepts and prohibitions of the school. It is thus an effective aid toward the formation of right habits of action. 

         3. The Power of Regular School Activities to Impress Moral Habits and Ideals. The regular ongoing of the school life with its routine of class work, its organized movements, its games and athletics, and its daily intercourse under authoritative supervision, furnish an unconscious moral discipline.

         4. Indirect Moral Instruction in Connection with School Subjects. Certain of the school studies furnish material and occasion for an incidental and indirect cultivation of the moral sense. Mathematics and natural science, by their insistence on absolute accuracy, are thought to exert an unconscious influence in favor of truthfulness. Other studies, especially history and literature, unquestionably offer a most favorable opportunity for the development of high ideals of human efficiency and character. Under skillful teaching, the youthful mind may be kindled into enduring enthusiasms by the high examples which history records and literature creates. Who can measure the silent influence which has been exerted through the generations by the historical figures, historical anecdotes, etc. And the creations of poetry and fiction, stories, myths, legends, great novels, etc. afford admirable opportunities for character analysis and the exercise of moral judgment without personal bias.

         The teacher of history, no matter how learned his expositions or how wide his references for research, fails, after all, of his chief mission if he neglects this opportunity for eliciting the admiration of his pupils for admirable characters and their critical judgment on those which furnish warning rather than example for imitation. Yet it will behoove the teacher not to let his moral purpose become too evident; for youth reacts against preaching and especially against the "rubbing in" of moral precept or admonition.

         5. Systematic instruction through principle and precept, i.e. purely theoretical instruction in ethics, will have little, if any, room in education before adult age.

         School Discipline as Adapted to Secure Moral Education. The pillars on which school education rests are right behavior and adequate scholarship. The first requisite to ensure both is Order; each pupil must be taught, first and foremost, to conform his behavior to a general standard. Only thus can the school as a community exist and fulfill its functions.

         Among living things man alone can resist his immediate impulses. If we do not encourage this capacity in the child, we make it harder for him to attain self‑discipline necessary to achieve any worthwhile end. The vast majority of students attain personal control only through voluntary submission to discipline intelligently imposed by the teacher.

         In the outset, therefore, a whole family of virtues are taught to the pupil, and these are taught so thoroughly, and so constantly enforced, that they will become fixed in his character. The duty of being a well‑behaved pupil is not a vague generality; it divides into specific and well‑defined duties or virtues: Punctuality, regularity, reflectiveness, truthfulness, justice, humanity, industry, obedience.

         These school virtues are, withal, the cardinal virtues of social life; these are the moral habits essential to civilized life. But while the good, well-ordered school works constantly and silently towards the development of self‑control and considerateness, it must not be imagined that every school will automatically produce these fruits of the spirit. Punctuality, regularity, reflectiveness, truthfulness, justice, humanity, industry, obedience are not so instinctive that they will sprout up of themselves in the soil of school life. The discipline of the school, by the teacher, must continually and wisely press towards these results. 

         All moral habits must be acquired by repeated acts of choice on the part of the individual. And in school, as elsewhere, that choice must be, finally, a free choice on the pupil's part. Even where punishment impends as an alternative, obedience must result from a voluntary surrender of the pupil's will. Here, then, is the great problem of the teacher's daily, and hourly, life, how to secure a succession, unbroken if possible, of right choices by each and every pupil. Whether these be secured by instruction and precept, by personal example, by the inspiration of historic characters, by direct appeal, or by the steadying force of penalties, or all combined, the work will demand vigor, firmness, sympathy, much study of individual cases, and eternal vigilance on the teacher's part; and no amount or kind of machinery will altogether relieve him from the exercise of all these attributes and more.

         A good school may seem to run itself, but it never does. And the disorderly, ill‑kept school may cultivate vices rather than virtues. In order to create an orderly environment in school, a student government, in the form of a prefect system must be established. The reasons for this self‑government are threefold: a) to impress the idea of responsibility for the welfare of the School on individual students, b) to perform a great deal of minor disciplinary and administrative work and thus aid school authorities in the maintenance of discipline, through the monitoring function of prefects in order to prevent evil arising, and c) to motivate children for high achievement as the offices of a highly prized prefect system would be obtained through outstanding academic and disciplinary achievement. However, prefects should never be granted as much power as were granted in old English boarding schools. And "fagging," a conspicuous element of the English prefect system, should not be used. Fagging -requiring a student to perform menial tasks for an upperclassman- can be the source of most of the abuses in a student government. However, rules of disciplinary courtesy, such as saluting and properly addressing seniors, should be vigorously enforced.       

         Encouraging smart outward behavior of students, promoting a good bodily posture in every activity, and insisting on neatness and propriety of their uniforms are not only worthy goals in themselves but also good vehicles to secure discipline in school. A standard uniform, with insignia designating school emblem, school grades, and prefect orders, is an indispensable measure to prevent distraction and to secure utmost attention of students on education. 

         The Moral Training of the Playground. While allowing due weight to all the activities of the classroom, in both instruction and discipline, we must not overlook the fact that, from the standpoint of moral training, the playground is a very important part of the school. It is there that children train themselves into the possibilities and habit of concerted action. Choices are freer than in the schoolroom, but rights are asserted and must be regarded; self must be in a measure subordinated in order that the "team‑work" of games may be learned and practiced.

         Here it is, too, that vicious instincts are liable to be given free rein; here the bully flourishes and the corrupted mind spreads its contagion. No greater mistake can be made by the teacher than to assume that the burden of responsibility has slipped from his, or her, shoulders when the children are "turned loose" for play.