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Within a few years a strong demand has arisen for ethical teaching in the schools. Teachers themselves have become interested, and wherever they are gathered the question, “What shall this teaching be?” is eagerly discussed. The educational journals are full of it. Within a year there have been published seven books on the subject. Several of them—it would be hardly an exaggeration to say all—are books of marked excellence. Seldom does so large a percentage of books in a single year, in a single country, and on a single subject reach so high a level of merit. I shall not criticise them, however, nor even engage in the popular discussion of which they form a part. That discussion concerns itself chiefly with the methods by which ethics may be taught. I wish to go behind this controversy and to raise the previous question whether ethics should be taught to boys and girls at all.

Evidently there are strong reasons why it should be. Always and everywhere it is important that men should be good. To be a good man!—it is more than half the fulfilment of life. Better to miss 32 fame, wealth, learning, than to miss righteousness. And in America, too, we must demand not the mere trifle that men shall be good for their own sakes, but good in order that the life of the state may be preserved. A widespread righteousness is in a republic a matter of necessity. Where all rule all, each man who falls into evil courses infects his neighbor, corrupting the law and corrupting still more its enforcement. The question of manufacturing moral men becomes, accordingly, in a democracy, urgent to a degree unknown in a country where but a few selected persons guide the state.

There is also special urgency at the present time. The ancient and accredited means of training youth in goodness are becoming, I will not say broken, but enfeebled and distrusted. Hitherto a large part of the moral instruction of mankind has been superintended by the clergy. In every civilized state the expensive machinery of the Church has been set up and placed in the hands of men of dignity, because it has been believed that by no other engine can we so effectively render people upright. I still believe this, and I am pretty confident that a good many years will pass before we shall dispense with the ennobling services of our ministers. And yet it is plain that much of the work which formerly was exclusively theirs is so no longer. Much of it is performed by books, newspapers, and facilitated human 33 intercourse. Ministers do not now speak with their old authority; they speak merely as other men speak; and we are all asking whether in the immense readjustment of faith now going on something of their peculiar power of moral as well as of intellectual guidance may not slip away.

The home too, which has hitherto been the fundamental agency for fostering morality in the young, is just now in sore need of repair. We can no longer depend upon it alone for moral guardianship. It must be supplemented, possibly reconstructed. New dangers to it have arisen. In the complex civilization of city life, in the huge influx of untutored foreigners, in the substitution of the apartment for the house, in the greater ease of divorce, in the larger freedom now given to children, to women, in the breaking down of class distinctions and the readier accessibility of man to man, there are perils for boy and girl which did not exist before. And while these changes in the outward form of domestic life are advancing, certain protections against moral peril which the home formerly afforded have decayed. It would be curious to ascertain in how many families of our immediate time daily prayers are used, and to compare the number with that of those in which the holy practice was common fifty years ago. It would be interesting to know how frequently parents to-day converse with their 34 children on subjects serious, pious, or personal. The hurry of modern life has swept away many uplifting intimacies. Even in families which prize them most, a few minutes only can be had each day for such fortifying things. Domestic training has shrunk, while the training of haphazard companions, the training of the streets, the training of the newspapers, have acquired a potency hitherto unknown.

It is no wonder, then, that in such a moral crisis the community turns to that agency whose power is already felt beneficently in a multitude of other directions, the school. The cry comes to us teachers, “We established you at first to make our children wiser; we want you now for a profounder service. Can you not unite moral culture with intellectual?” It may be; though discipline of the passions is enormously more difficult than discipline of the mind. But at any rate we must acknowledge that our success in the mental field is largely staked on our success in the moral. Our pupils will not learn their lessons in arithmetic if they have not already made some progress in concentration, in self-forgetfulness, in acceptance of duty. Nor can we touch them in a single section of their nature and hope for results. Instruction must go all through. We are obliged to treat each little human being as a whole if we would have our treatment wholesome. And then too we have had such successes elsewhere that we 35 may well feel emboldened for the new task. Nearly the whole of life is now advantageously surveyed in one form or another in our schools and colleges; and we have usually found that advance in instruction develops swiftly into betterment of practice. We teach, for example, social science and analyze the customs of the past; but soon we find bands of young men and women in all the important cities criticising the government of those cities, suggesting better modes of voting, wiser forms of charity; and before we know it the community is transformed. We cannot teach the science of electricity without improving our street-cars, or at least without raising hopes that they may some day be improved. Each science claims its brother art. Theory creeps over into action. It will not stay by itself; it is pervasive, diffusive. And as this pervasive character of knowledge in the lower ranges is perceived, we teachers are urged to press forward its operation in the higher also. Why have we no school-books on human character, the highest of all themes? Once direct the attention of our pupils to this great topic, and may we not ultimately bring about that moral enlargement for which the time waits?

I have stated somewhat at length the considerations in behalf of ethical instruction in the schools because those considerations on the whole appear to me illusory. I cannot believe such instruction 36 feasible. Were it so, of course it would have my eager support. But I see in it grave difficulties, difficulties imperfectly understood; and a difficulty disregarded becomes a danger, possibly a catastrophe. Let me explain in a few words where the danger lies.

Between morals and ethics there is a sharp distinction, frequently as the two words are confused. Usage, however, shows the meaning. If I call a man a man of bad morals, I evidently mean to assert that his conduct is corrupt; he does things which the majority of mankind believe he ought not to do. It is his practice I denounce, not his intellectual formulation. In the same way we speak of the petty morals of society, referring in the phrase to the small practices of mankind, the unnumbered actions which disclose good or bad principles unconsciously hidden within. It is entirely different when I call a man’s ethics bad. I then declare that I do not agree with his comprehension of moral principles. His practice may be entirely correct. I do not speak of that; it is his understanding that is at fault. For ethics, as was long ago remarked, is related to morals as geometry to carpentry: the one is a science, the other its practical embodiment. In the former, consciousness is a prime factor; from the latter it often is absent altogether.

Now what is asked of us teachers is that we invite our pupils to direct study of the principles of 37 right conduct, that we awaken their consciousness about their modes of life, and so by degrees impart to them a science of righteousness. This is theory, ethics; not morals, practice; and in my judgment it is dangerous business, with the slenderest chance of success. Useless is it to say that the aim of such instruction need not be ethical, but moral. Whatever the ultimate aim, the procedure of instruction is of necessity scientific. It operates through intelligence, and only gets into life so far as the instructed intelligence afterward becomes a director. This is the work of books and teachers everywhere: they discipline the knowing act, and so bring within its influence that multitude of matters which depend for excellent adjustment on clear and ordered knowledge. Such a work, however, is evidently but partial. Many matters do not take their rise in knowledge at all. Morality does not. The boy as soon as born is adopted unconsciously into some sort of moral world. While he is growing up and is thinking of other things, habits of character are seizing him. By the time he comes to school he is incrusted with customs. The idea that his moral education can be fashioned by his teacher in the same way as his education in geography is fantastic. It is only his ethical training which may now begin. The attention of such a boy may be called to habits already formed; he may be led to dissect those habits, to pass judgment 38 on them as right or wrong, and to inquire why and how they may be bettered. This is the only power teaching professes: it critically inquires, it awakens interest, it inspects facts, it discovers laws. And this process applied in the field of character yields ethics, the systematized knowledge of human conduct. It does not primarily yield morals, improved performance.

Nor indeed is performance likely to be improved by ethical enlightenment if, as I maintain, the whole business of self-criticism in the child is unwholesome. By a course of ethical training a young person will, in my view, much more probably become demoralized than invigorated. What we ought to desire, if we would have a boy grow morally sturdy, is that introspection should not set in early and that he should not become accustomed to watch his conduct. And the reason is obvious. Much as we incline to laud our prerogative of consciousness and to assert that it is precisely what distinguishes us from our poor relations, the brutes, we still must acknowledge that consciousness has certain grave defects when exalted into the position of a guide. Large tracts of life lie altogether beyond its control, and the conduct which can be affected by it is apt—especially in the initial stages—to be rendered vague, slow, vacillating, and distorted. Only instinctive action is swift, sure, and firm. For this reason 39 we distrust the man who calculates his goodness. We find him vulgar and repellent. We are far from sure that he will keep that goodness long. If I offer to shake hands with a man with precisely that degree of warmth which I have decided it is well to express, will he willingly take my hand? A few years ago there were some nonsense verses on this subject going the rounds of the English newspapers. They seemed to me capitally to express the morbid influence of consciousness in a complex organism. They ran somewhat as follows:

The centipede was happy, quite,

Until the toad for fun

Said, “Pray which leg comes after which?”

This worked her mind to such a pitch

She lay distracted in a ditch.

Considering how to run.

And well she might! Imagine the hundred legs steered consciously—now it is time to move this one, now to move that! The creature would never move at all, but would be as incapable of action as Hamlet himself. And are the young less complex than centipedes? Shall their little lives be suddenly turned over to a fumbling guide? Shall they not rather be stimulated to unconscious rectitude, gently led into those blind but holy habits which make goodness easy, and so be saved from the perilous perplexities of marking out their own way? So 40 thought the sagacious Aristotle. To the crude early opinion of Socrates that virtue is knowledge, he opposed the ripened doctrine that it is practice and habit.

This, then, is the inexpugnable objection to the ethical instruction of children: the end which should be sought is performance, not knowledge, and we cannot by supplying the latter induce the former. But do not these considerations cut the ground from under practical teaching of every kind? Instruction is given in other subjects in the hope that it may finally issue in strengthened action, and I have acknowledged that as a fact this hope is repeatedly justified. Why may not a similar result appear in ethics? What puts a difference between that study and electricity, social science, or manual training? This: according as the work studied includes a creative element and is intended to give expression to a personal life, consciousness becomes an increasingly dangerous dependence. Why are there no classes and text-books for the study of deportment? Is it because manners are unimportant? No, but because they make the man, and to be of any worth must be an expression of his very nature. Conscious study would tend to distort rather than to fashion them. Their practice cannot be learned in the same way as carpentry.

But an analogy more enlightening for showing the 41 inaptitude of the child for direct study of the laws of conduct is found in the case of speech. Between speech and morals the analogies are subtle and wide. So minute are they that speech might almost be called a kind of vocal morality. Like morality, it is something possessed long before we are aware of it, and it becomes perfect or debased with our growth. We employ it to express ourselves and to come into ordered contact with our neighbor. By it we confer benefits and by it receive benefits in turn. Rigid as are its laws, we still feel ourselves free in its use, though obliged to give to our spontaneous feelings forms constructed by men of the past. Ease, accuracy, and scope are here confessedly of vast consequence. It has consequently been found a matter of extreme difficulty to bring a young person’s attention helpfully to bear upon his speech. Indirect methods seem to be the only profitable ones. Philology, grammar, rhetoric, systematic study of the laws of language, are dangerous tools for a boy below his teens. The child who is to acquire excellent speech must be encouraged to keep attention away from the words he uses and to fix it upon that which he is to express. Abstract grammar will either confound the tongue which it should ease, or else it will seem to have no connection with living reality, but to be an ingenious contrivance invented by some Dry-as-dust for the torture of schoolboys.

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And a similar pair of dangers await the young student of the laws of conduct. On the one hand, it is highly probable that he will not understand what his teacher is talking about. He may learn his lesson; he may answer questions correctly; but he will assume that these things have nothing to do with him. He becomes dulled to moral distinctions, and it is the teaching of ethics that dulls him. We see the disastrous process in full operation in a neighboring field. There are countries which have regular public instruction in religion. The argument runs that schools are established to teach what is of consequence to citizens, and religion is of more consequence than anything else. Therefore introduce it, is the conclusion. Therefore keep it out, is the sound conclusion. It lies too near the life to be announced in official propositions and still to retain a recognizable meaning. I have known a large number of German young men. I have yet to meet one whose religious nature has been deepened by his instruction in school. And the lack of influence is noticeable not merely in those who have failed in the study, but quite as much in those who have ranked highest. In neither case has the august discipline meant anything. The danger would be wider, the disaster from the benumbing influence more serious, if ethical instruction should be organized; wider, because morality underlies religion, and insensitiveness to the moral 43 claim is more immediately and concretely destructive. Yet here, as in the case of religion, of manners, or of speech, the child will probably take to heart very little of what is said. At most he will assume that the text-book statement of the rules of righteousness represents the way in which the game of life is played by some people; but he will prefer to play it in his own way still. Young people are constructed with happy protective arrangements; they are enviably impervious. So in expounding moral principles in the schoolroom, I believe we shall touch the child in very few moral spots. Nevertheless, it becomes dulled and hardened if it listens long to sacred words untouched.

But the benumbing influence is not the gravest danger; analogies of speech suggest a graver still. If we try to teach speech too early and really succeed in fixing the child’s attention upon its tongue, we enfeeble its power of utterance. Consciousness once awakened, the child is perpetually inquiring whether the word is the right word, and suspecting that it is not quite sufficiently right to be allowed free passage. Just so a momentous trouble appears when the moral consciousness has been too early stirred. That self-questioning spirit springs up which impels its tortured possessor to be continually fingering his motives in unwholesome preoccupation with himself. Instead of entering heartily into outward 44 interests, the watchful little moralist is “questioning about himself whether he has been as good as he should have been, and whether a better man would not have acted otherwise.” No part of us is more susceptible of morbidness than the moral sense; none demoralizes more thoroughly when morbid. The trouble, too, affects chiefly those of the finer fibre. The majority of healthy children, as has been said, harden themselves against theoretic talk, and it passes over them like the wind. Here and there a sensitive soul absorbs the poison and sets itself seriously to work installing duty as the mainspring of its life. We all know the unwholesome result: the person from whom spontaneity is gone, who criticises everything he does, who has lost his sense of proportion, who teases himself endlessly and teases his friends—so far as they remain his friends—about the right and wrong of each petty act. It is a disease, a moral disease, and takes the place in the spiritual life of that which the doctors are fond of calling “nervous prostration” in the physical. Few countries have been so desolated by it as New England. It is our special scourge. Many here carry a conscience about with them which makes us say, “How much better off they would be with none!” I declare, at times when I see the ravages which conscientiousness works in our New England stock, I wish these New Englanders had never heard moral 45 distinctions mentioned. Better their vices than their virtues. The wise teacher will extirpate the first sproutings of the weed; for a weed more difficult to extirpate when grown there is not. We run a serious risk of implanting it in our children when we undertake their class instruction in ethics.

Such, then, are some of the considerations which should give us pause when the public is clamoring at our schoolhouse doors and saying to us teachers, “We cannot bring up our children so as to make them righteous citizens. Undertake the work for us. You have done so much already that we turn to you again and entreat your help.” I think we must sadly reply, “There are limits to what we can do. If you respect us, you will not urge us to do the thing that is not ours. By pressing into certain regions we shall bring upon you more disaster than benefit.”

Fully, however, as the dangers here pointed out may be acknowledged, much of a different sort remains also true. Have we not all received a large measure of moral culture at school? And are we quite content to say that the greatest of subjects is unteachable? I would not say this; on the contrary, I hold that no college is properly organized where the teaching of ethics does not occupy a position of honor. The college, not the school, is the place for the study. It would be absurd to maintain that all 46 other subjects of study are nutritious to man except that of his own nature; but it is far from absurd to ask that a young man first possess a nature before he undertakes to analyze it. A study useless for developing initial power may still be highly profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. Youth should be spontaneous, instinctive, ebullient; reflection whispers to the growing man. Many of the evils that I have thus far traced are brought about by projecting upon a young mind problems which it has not yet encountered in itself. Such problems abound in the later teens and twenties, and then is the time to set about their discussion.

But even in college I would have ethical study more guarded than the rest. Had I the power, I would never allow it to be required of all. It should be offered only as an elective and in the later years of the course. When I entered college I was put in my freshman year into a prescribed study of this sort. Happily I received no influence from it whatever. It passed over and left me untouched; and I think it had no more effect on the majority of my classmates. Possibly some of the more reflective took it to heart and were harmed; but in general it was a mere wasting of precious ointment which might have soothed our wounds if elected in the senior year. Of course great teachers defy all rules; and 47 under a Hopkins, a Garman, or a Hyde, the distinctions of elective and prescribed become unimportant. Yet the principle is clear: wait till the young man is confronted with the problems before you invite him to their solution. Has he grown up unquestioning? Has he accepted the moral code inherited from honored parents? Can he rest in wise habits? Then let him be thankful and go his way untaught. But has he, on the other hand, felt that the moral mechanism by which he was early guided does not fit all cases? Has he found one class of duties in conflict with another? Has he discovered that the moral standards obtaining in different sections of society, in different parts of the world, are irreconcilable? In short, is he puzzled and desirous of working his way through his puzzles, of facing them and tracking them to their beginnings? Then is he ripe for the study of ethics.

Yet when it is so undertaken, when those only are invited to partake of it who in their own hearts have heard its painful call, even then I would hedge it about with two conditions. First, it should be pursued as a science, critically, and the student should be informed at the outset that the aim of the course is knowledge, not the endeavor to make better men. And, secondly, I would insist that the students themselves do the work; that they do not passively listen to opinions set forth by their instructor, but 48 that they address themselves to research and learn to construct moral judgments which will bear critical inspection. Some teachers, no doubt, will think it wisest to accomplish these things by tracing the course of ethics in the past, treating it as a historical science. Others will prefer, by announcing their own beliefs, to stimulate their students to criticise those beliefs and to venture on their own little constructions. The method is unimportant; it is only of consequence that the students themselves do the ethicizing, that they trace the logic of their own beliefs and do not rest in dogmatic statement. Yet such an undertaking may well sober a teacher. I never see my class in ethics come to their first lecture that I do not tremble and say to myself that I am set for the downfall of some of them. In every such studious company there must be unprepared persons whom the teacher will damage. He cannot help it. He must move calmly forward, confident in his subject, but knowing that because it is living it is dangerous.

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