EDUCATION FOR CHARACTER

Ir is almost universally agreed that education should aim at the formation of character. The literature of education, past and present, abounds in statements concerning the importance of the moral aim and pleas for the subordination of other aims. No one knows how many plans have been devised and tried for teaching morals. Yet there is no aim of education, general or specific, unless it be the closely allied aim of development of æsthetic appreciation, concerning which we are so little certain of our theory or our practice. Creeds and systems have been taught dogmatically; or abstractions (virtues and vices arrayed like figures in a pageant) have been discussed and illustrated; or the school has relied on the habits it imposes, abandoning all effort to develop ethical insight or loyalty to ethical ideals. If it cannot be said that education has failed in its effort to affect character, it cannot be said that it has consciously succeeded.

In our own day, however, a new and more promising method of attack on this problem has begun to emerge. "Character" is an abstraction. Virtues and vices are abstractions. What the school seeks now is an intelligent devotion to the actual duties and obligations of life, an organization of conduct in terms of the definite purposes of effective membership in family, neighborhood, occupational groups, the state, and wider voluntary associations such as the church. We are beginning to see education

for character in terms of education for social living. And for this reason we are beginning to place more value on the results of play and the group activities of the school, and on teaching by projects. Direct moral instruction through the open discussion of issues that arise in school life is also growing in usefulness. Ethical insight is the power to discern what is required of us by our membership in society, and the power to act effectively toward our chosen purposes is developed by experience in thinking and working and playing with our fellows. If we “teach morals" less than formerly, it is because we are trying to make all education more valuable for the achievement of social aims. It is a long cry yet to clarity in theory or to certainty in results; but education for character, far from being forgotten, has become the central object of modern educational endeavor.

AN EDUCATIONAL EMERGENCY

EDWARD O. SISSON

I

No other age of the world has made such demands upon character as does the age in which we live. We talk about the sterling qualities of our Puritan ancestors and mourn over a supposed decadence of moral fibre in our days, forgetting that the colonist was virtuous by necessity, frugal through lack of the materials of luxury, free from the vast avarice of our time because there were no financial fields to furnish the requisite opportunity and temptation. He was offered the hard choice between industry and starvation, and endurance was thrust upon him by his very situation in the wilderness. It means no derogation of his place of honor in our memory, and of his value as a national ideal, to say that the character which sustained him in his primitive environment might break down in complete failure under the stress of modern temptation. In short, it is harder to be good to-day than it was in the time of Miles Standish and John Winthrop, and we can hope for conduct equal to theirs only by grace of character even stronger.

Effective character includes intelligence to know the right and the will to do it; on both of these the modern world lays new burdens. We live in a far more complex environment than did our forefathers, for we have left the simple paths where instinct was a sufficient guide for conduct, and are now dwelling in a world of man's own

creation, where instinct is not at home, and where problems can be solved only by the highest intelligence.

Our social philosophy is based upon that of the Greeks; but what a contrast exists between our social state and theirs! Their great political scientist declares that a state could not be conceived to embrace so many as a hundred thousand people. What would he have thought of cities inhabited by millions, gathered into states which in turn are combined into a nation nearly a thousandfold larger than his extreme limit? And are we not to-day watching the first clear beginnings of the world-state, the poet-prophet's "parliament of man, the federation of the world"? With this enormous increment of mere size in political units has come corresponding increase in complexity of structure and operation. The intelligence of thoughtful men stands aghast at the problems knocking at our doors, tariff and finance, conservation, raceconflicts, lawmaking and enforcement, administration of nation, state, and municipalities. The very clash of disagreement among honest thinkers concerning social questions proves the difficulty of the riddles thrust upon us by our day. Most serious and menacing of all perhaps are questions of industry of which the earlier world knew little. Greece and Rome and mediæval Europe kept these perplexities under the surface by a system of slavery or rigid caste; it is only in modern times that the Enceladus of human labor has succeeded in throwing off so much of the superincumbent Etna as to let the upper world of thought and intelligence become vividly aware of his existence, and of the promise and the menace of his upward struggle.

There is need, then, of a new socio-moral intelligence to grasp the new complexities of the world in which we live. "Who is my neighbor?" is a harder question now than it was in olden times: then a man dealt face to face with men he knew, and easily realized that his deeds fell on

their heads as well as on his own. Nowadays employer and employee, buyer and seller, especially producer and consumer, are too often cut off from each other by a gulf of separation which leads naturally to mutual ignorance, indifference, and even to hatred. Long and devious are the channels through which the product of industry circulates in its way from the painful and often degrading labor of production, to the comfortable consumer, who at first perhaps does not know whence come his ease and luxury, and later, when wedded to his comforts, does not care; or at least cares too little to face squarely his relation to his far-off and unknown neighbor. Never before in human history has it been so true that no man liveth unto himself, but never has it been so easy to lose sight of the truth.

Besides the new demands made by the modern world upon social and moral intelligence, there are new strains upon the will itself. The very abundance and variety of the products of art and manufacture render the old fundamental ideal of self-control more difficult than ever. The senses are solicited by stimuli unknown to the ancients; and every part of our world is flooded with the products of all other parts through the unlimited reach of modern commerce. It almost seems that we live to-day on a sort of second level of barbarism; for just as the barbarian lives in bondage to the material world of nature, so we tend to fall into the bondage of the material things of our own creation. Our thought and energies are usurped by providing, not for actual and legitimate needs, but for the kind of food and drink and raiment and dwellings which custom and fashion prescribe for us. Civilized man has failed signally to content himself with a simple material regimen, and has wasted upon the things that perish the energy which ought to have been devoted to the higher and truly human life.