What can the schools do for the better training of the social
conscience? (I use the word "training" in the double sense of
habituation and enlightenment). It is evident that that question needs
more space than can be given to it here. A few words must suffice.
In the first place, teachers can recognize--that is, they can
gradually be brought to recognize--that the training of the social
conscience is the great work they have to do; that it is more
important than anything else. A general recognition of that fact would
itself have a highly stimulating effect. It would clarify ideas,
furnish criteria of value that would be independent of personal or
local whim, divert attention from piddling questions of routine, and
so do something to elevate the business of teaching in the public
estimation. It is now commonly spoken of as a noble profession, but
only a very few really think of it in that light. In the better
atmosphere I am thinking of, the teacher would not be a drill-sergeant
bossing the details of a mental lock-step, but the physician of the
social conscience. And, in harmony with the new drift in medicine, our
physician would pin his faith to preventive treatment. He would not be
able to avoid some punishment of the wrong-doer, but he would see his
highest mission in the development of a sensitive conscience that
would inhibit wrong-doing. This means skillful and well-paid teachers
for children, not too many pupils to the teacher, and much friendly
study of the individual pupil in school and out.
Then again teachers could put into practise far more generally than
has been attempted hitherto, what has been found out by scientific men
with regard to the social conscience and the way it works. They could
appeal in every possible way to the social instinct, and make use of
its well-known rewards and inhibitions. The foundation principle would
be to make the penalty for misbehavior take the form, so far as
possible, of social disapproval, with consequent suffering in
self-esteem. To be effective, a penalty needs to be quick-acting and
sure. It should depend as little as possible on the accident of
getting caught. If a potential miscreant is taught to fear punishment
at the hands of some authority outside of and above his own life, and
if then he does wrong, and nothing unpleasant happens, he soon begins
to enjoy the game of matching his wits against the law. Pretty soon he
is really being schooled in the exciting art of law-breaking. Somehow
he must learn to dread the disapproval of his mates and the prick of
his own conscience.
Another principle, hardly less fundamental, would be to make the
learner see that the rules he is called on to obey, at work or at
play, are for the general good, _including his own_. Of course
difficulty would be created by the young anarchist, the imp who
refuses to play the game in accordance with the rules, is insensitive
to communal opinion, and enjoys the excitement of beating the law.
Such a mental twist is generally due to a vicious environment in home
or street, where the standards are different from those of the school.
How to deal with such cases, when they have reached the advanced stage
of criminality, has always been one of the hardest problems of the
civilized man, and no very satisfactory solution of it has yet been
found. Down to quite recent time, our forbears put their faith in the
deterrent effect of harsh and public punishments; and the rod of the
schoolmaster kept pace, so to speak, with the stern decrees of the
criminal law. It was found not to work very well, a humaner epoch set
in, and with that too the schools have kept pace. We have come to
feel that society itself is to blame for the miscreant, because it
creates and perpetuates the conditions that make him. Meanwhile
society is experiencing the disastrous effects of dealing gently with
the criminal, and the schools are breeding up a generation to which
anything like stern discipline is on the whole rather repugnant.
The one hopeful idea on the horizon is the idea of prevention. The
potential miscreant must be caught and cured in the early stages of
his making. It is unfortunately true that even the most enlightened
and single-minded efforts of the school will produce but lame results
so long as society permits criminals to breed with their kind, and
tolerates the economic conditions which create for decently born
children a hopelessly bad environment outside the schoolroom. It is
for society to remedy these conditions as fast as it can. Meanwhile
much would be gained if we could once clearly see, and begin to act on
the principle, that the _chief end_ of popular education should be,
not a smattering of knowledges, but the development of social-minded
character.