A man may be thoroughly acquainted with the highest moral laws and yet
have a very weak character.—Hughes.
If the above statement is true, and we believe it to be so, then the
futility of trying to make people good merely by teaching them
principles of goodness, is immediately apparent. Some more effective
means of training must be found and those means undoubtedly should be
experience and habit. Especially is this true of little children. To
them principles and laws are mere words; experience is everything. With
adults the precept is more effective, not because they are so different
from children, but because they already have had experiences by means of
which they are able to interpret and apply the principle, or proverb, or
law. Principles, proverbs, laws, are only deductions from experiences.
If real morality is the outgrowth of experience, it follows of
necessity, that the best and surest and indeed the only way to teach
anything more than the outward form, is to give to pupils opportunities
for performing moral acts. There must be self-guidance, there must be a
yielding of one’s own desires to the rights of others, there must be
coöperation, teamwork.
The kindergarten, better than any other branch of our school system, has
realized the necessity for this type of social training. There the aim
is to have children learn, through give-and-take relations with
associates, what sort of conduct will best promote the happiness of all.
Instead of exhortations about the obligations of children to parents,
the little ones dramatize those relations, thus gaining just those
experiences which enable them to comprehend the obligations. So with the
industries, the wild animals, the busy bees, the birds, even the flowers
and trees. One by one, the life of each is “tried on,” so to speak, in
play, and inner relations of man to man and of man to his environment
are thus discovered.
It goes without saying that these inner relations, upon an understanding
of which all true morality is based, cannot be discovered all at once.
Years of “trying on” of racial experiences and relations are necessary,
and even then the comprehension of obligation will be just as narrow as
experience has been. Meanwhile the inexperience of the child must be
supplemented by the larger knowledge of the adult. The right outward
form of action must be stimulated by approval, expectation, suggestion,
substitution of better forms for the child’s crude, impulsive act, and
coöperation on the teacher’s part in such activities as will lead toward
higher forms of altruistic action than the child is able yet to fully
comprehend. The teacher must never lose sight of the fact that moral
insight depends upon a process of growth; nor must he be discouraged if
the moral horizon of his pupils is extremely limited. It is as wide as
experience has been. The remedy for narrowness is to supply the
experience that will furnish the wider outlook.
[Sidenote: Appealing to Reason]
(1) _Infancy and early childhood._ Many parents and teachers make the
sad mistake of beginning the rational training of their children before
the period of rational thought has arrived. An amusing example of common
sense and the lack of it occurred one day in a family which consisted of
a mother, who had imbibed some ill-digested, sentimental ideas of
rational training, her eight-year-old son, and her three-year-old
daughter.