By regulative instinct is meant the tendency on the part of every normal
human being to conform to custom, reason, principles, law. It includes
voluntary obedience to authority imposed upon the individual from
without, but it is more than that; it is an inward recognition that such
obedience is fitting and obligatory. It impels even further. It leads
the individual to _impose upon himself_ laws and standards of action
even in the absence of outward authority. It is thus a tacit recognition
of moral law and of religious obligation.
Not much reflection on the teacher’s part will be needed to convince him
that if the outward authority to which the child has been subjected at
home has been arbitrary, vacillating, tyrannical, or fitful, the child’s
ideals as to what is right and what is wrong will have become sadly
jumbled long before he enters school, where the teacher has the
difficult task of straightening out the tangles. Or again, if the
standards of action, which the child more or less unconsciously imposes
upon himself, happen to conflict with the teacher’s ideals of what right
conduct on the pupil’s part should be, then, also, is there likelihood
of a clash between teacher and pupil.
Too often when this occurs the teacher is satisfied to secure outward
conformity to regulation without, at the same time, attempting to change
the inward ideal. In such a case there is the anomalous condition of
apparent obedience to a rule in which the child does not believe. The
body yields to coercion but the mind rebels. Half the child obeys, the
other half inwardly disobeys.
How disintegrating to the real moral life of a child such a double-faced
procedure must be, can best be realized by the teacher if he imagines
himself placed in a similar position where he is compelled by principal
or school board to carry on a course of action which is either highly
repugnant to himself or which he believes to be absolutely wrong. Only
half-hearted responses at best will result from such coercion in the
case of either pupil or teacher. The question, then, of how to secure
the obedience of the _whole child_, not merely the physical half,
becomes one of great seriousness. Obviously it can never be accomplished
by methods which systematically arouse antagonism toward the person who
commands. The true method of control must seek to substitute a better
ideal for the crude one held by the child. Coercion may sometimes be
necessary, but the teacher should not feel that the act of obedience is
completed until the mind of the child has been swayed to _voluntary_
submission.
In the treatment of the regulative instincts which follows, the chapter
on Obedience, strictly speaking, should be included; because of the
great importance of the subject of obedience it has been given a
Division, by itself (Part I). While, however, the more abstract phases
of the subject are dealt with in that chapter the present treatment aims
to be more concrete. Furthermore, what immediately follows has reference
mainly to the lower grades, because there the child’s school habits are
formed, but the teacher who is on the alert for principles that are
fundamental will be quick to perceive that whatever laws are basal in
the control and discipline of children in primary grades, are equally so
for older pupils because they are laws that apply to all humanity.
With these preliminary remarks, we pass, then, to the consideration of
methods of regulation of conduct in the primary grades and especially in
the first.