of thought, nor any sacrifice of the true interests of the intellectual life, but more warmth of genuine and appropriate feeling and more stimulation and guidance of the will. In brief, we must fit our practice to Herbart's great formula, that the chief business of education is the ethical revelation of the universe.

AN EDUCATIONAL EMERGENCY

DR. EDWARD O. SISSON, who is professor of philosophy at Reed College, has had a comprehensive experience in education. He has been a teacher, principal, college professor, college president, and commissioner of education. His books and essays on education are numerous.

Points of View

1. IF morals should be taught, ought we to undertake the task by discussing, in formal classroom exercises, the various virtues and vices of human beings? This has been tried. Why is it unlikely to help in making a child actively "good"? Is it better to discuss the issues of conduct that actually arise in school life?

2. Plan definitely to take an occasion to develop a moral lesson in the course of teaching one of the usual subjects of the school. How can you tell whether your effort has accomplished anything?

3. If morality is to be an aim of education in actual practice, must religion be taught in schools? Can it be taught effectively in public schools? What plans have been proposed and tried for doing so?

4. Can morality be an aim to be achieved by incidental means, yet not neglected, but actually realized? How?

ATHLETICS AND MORALS

ELLERY SEDGWICK

AMONG the impersonal forces which mould the character of the boys at boarding-school athletics takes first rank. At college this dominance, although less complete, still persists. Yet it is not too much to say that, if the current standard of athletic honor were applied to other undergraduate interests, the training of American youth would border on demoralization. Sit among the college "rooters" and listen to the running comments on the game; join a gymnasium group of schoolboy coaches, and you will gauge the influences at work. In many schools and colleges, particularly in the East, there has been of late years intermittent but decided improvement. Certain brutalities of football have been expunged or modified. The personnel of baseball teams has been confined more closely to the body of genuine students. But it may be soberly stated that underhand, perverted, and dishonest practices are, with honorable exceptions, still part and parcel of undergraduate athletics.

School and college are not mere tiny subdivisions of society. They bear no relation to the natural universe. They are separate worlds, as artificially administered as any laboratory. Outside the barriers of youth, we are accustomed to base the laws we make on public opinion; within them, the community is compelled to accept an alien code, but its opinion remains its own and the two are in sharp contrast. Nor does public opinion within school or college

bear any relation to opinion in the world at large. The product of an artificial system, it is wholly artificial itself, based on a curious medley of prejudice and idealism, of romantic honor and highly technical discrimination. Of schools it may be said, with no disrespect to teachers, that the body of boyish opinion teaches lessons beyond their power to impart. And of colleges a similar statement would not be far from accurate. To shape this opinion, or rather to use it wisely and with discretion, is, I believe, the larger part of the unsolved problem of education.

Youth is radical, and, at the same time, it is conservative beyond the furthest reach of Toryism. Was there ever a collegian who turned his hat up and his trousers down when custom prescribed a contrary procedure? It is hard to realize the fixity of student opinion once it has run into the mould. A code of behavior may be established in a year; in two it becomes a mark of caste; in four it is immemorial precedent. And yet, a sudden shaft of idealism will transfix a school or college and alter opinion overnight. The tonic effect of an honest captaincy upon a school team is one of the most exhilarating phenomena of school life.

So much is familiar to those who have kept young by knowing youth. It is in the light of these conditions that I should like to consider the question of athletics and morals.

It is a rule, with few exceptions, that the standard of school and college athletics runs level with the standard of public opinion in school and college. Coaches may introduce dirty tricks; an occasional team may be willing to buy a victory at any price; but, in the last analysis, undergraduate policy and action are determined by social rewards and social penalties. If the feeling once gets abroad that a championship has been too dearly bought, the high price will not be paid a second time.

Not many years ago, standards of honor in the classroom were not much higher than those on the athletic field to-day. The problem then was much like the problem now. It was solved, not by imposing additional regulations upon the students, but by allowing them to regulate themselves. The tone of student honesty conforms to the public opinion set in the last analysis by a small group of older and abler boys. If you subject that group to the influences of the larger body, you will have a public opinion less strained and more responsive to the healthy reaction of the normal mind. Thanks to social discipline, the honor system has triumphed in the examination room. If athletics were generally under the supervision of student councils, directly responsible to the student body, discussion would take a different turn and honesty would follow fast. Dishonesty never throve on publicity, and never will.

Consider for a moment the condition of the student mind regarding athletics. If a boy moves his golf ball ever so gently and thereby improves its lie, detection in the act means social annihilation. But note the delicate gradation of the criminal code. If the same boy habitually plays off-side at hockey, he incurs a dislike. But if he trips his opponent at football, or saves a run at baseball by blocking, why, then it is merely a question for the umpire to decide.

The memory of men still young is not taxed to recall the time when technical distinctions of like nicety generally prevailed in college tests. To cheat for a "gentleman's pass" was one thing; to cheat for honors, quite another. In the latter instance you might be defrauding a competitor; in the former you were simply justifying your right to live. To lie to the Dean seemed about as reprehensible as thanking your hostess for a dull party.

Much blame to-day is showered on the professional

coaches. Statistics in such matters are naturally not available, but I gravely question whether, when a man's professional career is involved, there is not less danger of dishonest instruction than when a graduate is called upon to pull a team together for a single season. Again, when popular indignation does pursue an infringement of athletic integrity, it commonly concerns itself with the academic status of the players. If a college athlete uses his single talent and plays ball for a living during the summer vacation, then the amateur spirit is troubled as tricking the umpire never troubles it. I do not defend the encroachment of the professional into the amateur field; I deplore it; but I maintain that our American spirit of sport concerns itself more with technicalities than with that single-minded devotion which gives to the word "amateur" the full significance of the lover who follows sports for sport's own sake.

I have spoken of the moral technicalities of athletics. Even persons with a maturer moral code than student honor may well be puzzled by them. In one of his admirable essays on athletics and decency, Dean Briggs gives an amusing instance of a Harvard end-rush, in the pink of condition, who limped through a hard game, allowing his knee to impersonate, so to speak, the injured joint of the other end whose weakness had been heralded in the enemy's camp, and, by his acting, deluded his adversaries into attacking his line at its strongest instead of its weakest point. A stratagem not dissimilar won eternal renown for the last of the Horatii some twenty-five hundred years before. But, against the deceitful end, it can now be argued that sport is not war, whether it seems like it or not; and that the kind of strategy he practised is as far outside the proper domain of football as would be the screech of a tennis-player, calculated to distract his adversary at a critical moment.