College Teaching Part 35

WENDT, G. _Didaktik und Methodik des deutschen Unterrichts, Handbuch der Erziehungs- und Unterrichtslehre fur hohere Schulen._

Footnotes:

[45] The sentences quoted are taken from the Report of this committee, which was published in December, 1914.

[46] See the articles of J. W. Hudson and others in the Bibliography.

[47] See Bibliography.

[48] See Professor Overstreet's Discussion mentioned in the Bibliography.

XV

THE TEACHING OF ETHICS

=Interest in the study of ethics determined by the aim of instruction=

Nowhere does academic tediousness work a more dire mischief than in the teaching of ethics. It is bad to have students forever shun the best books because of poor instruction in literature; the damage is worse when it is the subject of moral obligation which they a.s.sociate with only the duller hours of their college life. Not that the aim of a course in ethics is to afford a number of entertaining periods. The object rather is to help our students realize that here is a subject which seeks to interpret for them the most important problems of their own lives present and to come. Where this end is kept in view, the question of interesting them is settled. A sincere interpretation of life always takes the interest when once it is grasped that this is what is really being interpreted.

=Viewpoint in the past=

The procedure in the past (and still quite common) was to introduce the subject by way of its history. A book like Sidgwick's _History of Ethics_ was studied, with supplements in the shape of the students'

own reading of the cla.s.sics, or lectures, with quotations, by the teacher. That this method was frequently of much service is undeniable. Teachers there are with rare gifts of inspiration who can put freshness into any course which ordinary teachers leave hopelessly arid. But this should not blind us to the fact that certain modes of procedure are in general more likely to be fruitful than others.

=The business of right living the aim of ethics teaching=

These methods depend upon the aim; and the aim, we venture to hold, should be eminently practical. The content of ethics is not primarily a matter of whether Kant's judgments are sounder than Mill's or Spencer's. Its subject is human life and the business of right living: how should people--real people, that is, not textbook ill.u.s.trations--live with one another? This is the essential concern of our subject matter, and in it our student is intimately and practically involved. Charged with the fact, he may deny the impeachment. He refuses to worry over the merits of hedonism versus rigorism, the distinction between hypothetical and categorical imperatives, or the claim of ethics to be called a science. Ethics, that is, as an intellectual discipline through the survey of historic disputations is indeed remote from the concerns that touch his life. But all the time there is no subject of greater interest when approached from the side of its bearing on practical problems. Consider the earnestness with which the student will discuss with his friends such questions as these: What sense is there in a labor strike? Is a conscientious objector justified in refusing military service? Why should any one oppose easy divorce laws? May a lawyer defend a rogue whom he knows to be guilty? Can one change the nature with which he was born? Is violence justified in the name of social reform? If what is right in one age or place is wrong in another, is it fair to object when moral laws are broken? If a practice like prost.i.tution is common, what makes it wrong?

These do not sound like the questions likely to receive a welcome hearing in the cla.s.sroom; but it is precisely upon the interest in such topics as these that the course in ethics should build; for its subject is right living, a matter in which the student may indeed be a.s.sumed to feel a genuine concern. If the questions that he wants answered are not all as broad in their significance as the foregoing, there are others of a more immediate personal kind which arise in his life as a student, as a friend, as a son and brother, problems in which standards of fair play and "decency" are involved, and upon which it may be taken for granted that he has done some thinking, howsoever crude. These interests are invaluable. Out of them the finer product is to be created in the shape of better standards, higher ideals, and habits of moral thoughtfulness, leading in turn to still better standards and still worthier conduct. The course in ethics should be practical in the sense that both its starting point and its final object are found in the student's management of his life.

=Ill.u.s.trations of the problems of right living=

Consider, for example, how his interest in problems of friendship may be used as the point of departure for an extremely important survey over general questions of right relationship. Just because friendship is so vital a concern of adolescent years, he can be led to read what Aristotle, Kant, Emerson, have to say upon this subject and be introduced as well to that larger life of ideal relationships from which these writers regard the dealings of friends. The topic of right att.i.tudes toward a friend broadens out readily into such considerations as treating persons aright for their own sake or regarding them as ends _per se_, a dead abstraction when approached as it is by Kant, but a living reality when the students get Aristotle's point about magnanimous treatment of friends. They can then proceed by way of contrast to note, for example, how this magnanimity was limited to friends in the upper levels of Athenian society, and went hand in hand with approval of slave labor and other exploitations which a modern conscience forbids. To give sharper edge to the conception of man as deserving right treatment for his own sake, the cla.s.s might go on to examine other notable violations of personality in past and present; e.g., slavery (read for instance Sparr's _History of the African Slave Trade_) or the more recent cruelties toward the natives in the rubber regions of the Congo and the Amazon. Reference may also be made (without undue emphasis) to the white-slave traffic of today and the fact be noted that a right sense of chivalry will keep a man from partnership in the degradation which creates both the demand for white slavery and ultimately its supply. We mention this to show how a common practical interest can be employed to introduce the students to so fundamental an ethical conception as the idea of inviolable human worth. It may, no doubt, be highly unconventional for them to begin with a discussion of friendship and after a few periods find themselves absorbed in these other questions; but if care is exercised to sum up and to emphasize the big conceptions underlying the topic, we may be sure that their grasp of the subject will be no less firm than under the older method. Their acquaintance with a study requiring hard, abstract thinking will surely not be hurt, to say the least, by an introduction which is concrete and practical.

Or take another matter of real concern to the student at this period of his life. He is certain to be giving some thought to the matter of his future vocation; and here again is a topic which, properly handled, broadens out into the most far-reaching inquiries. It is to be regretted that as yet the vocational-guidance movement has been occupied in the main with external features--comparing jobs, making objective tests of efficiency, and so on. The central ethical conceptions are usually slighted. That one's vocation is a prime influence in the shaping of personality in oneself, in one's fellow workers, in the public served (or disserved) by one's work, in the world of nations in so far as war and peace are connected with commerce and other interchange of vocational products--all this is matter for the teacher who wishes the ethics course to work over into better living.[49] Nor again, as will be noted later in the chapter, need the claims of the subject as a scholarly discipline suffer from such treatment. Questions of the nature of moral standards, of the distinction between expedient and right, etc., can be taken up more profitably when, instead of dealing with the academic questions forming the stock in trade of most textbooks, the course examines a few vocations, let us say, business, teaching, art, law, medicine,--in the light of such standards as these: A history of the calling; e.g., what has it contributed to the elevation of mankind, to the development of the arts and sciences, and to specific kinds of human betterment? What is the best service it can accomplish today? What traits does it require in those who pursue it? What traits is it likely to encourage in them for better and for worse? Report on great leaders in the calling, with special reference to what their work made of them. What are the darker sides of the picture? What efforts are being made today to raise the moral code in this vocation? Sum up the ideal rewards.

We do not mean, of course, that the only problems are those which center around the demands of today for a more just economic and social order. On the contrary, we believe that the movement for social justice is greatly in need of precisely that appreciation of the claims of moral personality which it is the main business of ethical study to promote. But we shall never get our students to profit from their work in social ethics, or in ethical theory, or in any branch of the subject whatever, unless we keep fresh and close the contact with their own experiences and ambitions.

Indeed, we venture to a.s.sert that unless this connection is kept unbroken, the subject is not ethics at all but an abstraction which ought to take some other name. Ethics deals with human volitions; but the latter term is meaningless to the student save as he interprets it by his own experiences in the preference of better ways to lower. He knows the difficulties that arise in his own group-a.s.sociations,--his home or his cla.s.s or his club, for example,--the conflicts of ambitions, the readiness to shirk one's share of common responsibility, the discordant prides and appet.i.tes of one sort and another which lead to overt injustices. All these should be used to throw light upon the living moral problems of group-life in the vocations, in the civic world, in the international order.

Temperamentally, to be sure, the teacher may be inclined to handle his subject in what he prefers to regard as academic detachment. But where the subject is ethics and not dead print, complete aloofness is out of the question. There would be no textbooks in ethics if the men whose convictions are there recorded had not grappled earnestly with problems of vital moment to their day and generation. The crucial questions raised by a changing Athenian democracy were no matters of air-born speculation to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. Nor is it an accident that the philosopher who so sought to vindicate the worth of man as an end _per se_ should have sent from his apparently isolated study in Konigsberg his glad acclaim of the French Revolution. The abounding interest of the English Utilitarians in the economics, the politics, the social reform, of the nineteenth century needs no comment. There are texts for study today because the men who wrote them were keenly concerned about a n.o.bler mode of life for mankind. To invite the student to share their reflections without expecting worthier conduct is to ignore the essential purpose by which those reflections were prompted.

=Governing aim in ethics teaching=

Hence our first recommendation--that the _content of the ethics courses be determined by the princ.i.p.al aim of so interpreting the experiences and interests of the student as to stimulate worthier behavior through a better understanding of the general problem of right human relationships_.

Our second recommendation as to aims is suggested by certain extremes in the practice of today. Reference to problems of immediate concern does not mean that ultimate considerations are to be shelved. Indeed, it must rather be stressed that such discussions miss their best object, _if they fail to lead to searching reflection upon ultimate standards_. The temptation to forego such inquiry today is strong. In their desire to be practical and up-to-date, many teachers are altogether too ready to rest the case for moral obligation upon a kind of easy-going hedonism, the fallacy of provisionalism, as Professor Felix Adler calls it. Tangible "goods" like happiness or "social values" are held up as standards, as if these values were ends in themselves and the problem of an ultimate human worth were irrelevant.

It may very well be a modest att.i.tude to say that we can no longer busy ourselves with the nature of ultimate ends and that we can best employ our energies in trying to define the various goods which contribute now and here to human betterment. Let the effort be made, by all means. But when the last of empirical goods have been examined and appraised (a.s.suming for the moment that we can indeed appraise without possessing ultimate norms) the cardinal question still waits for answer: To what are all these goods instrumental? What kind of life is best? What is it that permits man, with all his faults, his sordid appet.i.tes, his meannesses and gross dishonors, to hold his head erect as one yet worthy of the tribute implied in the fact that we have duties toward him?

An answer satisfying to all may never be reached; but to evade these questions is to abdicate the teacher's function. Many young people are led by the biologic teachings of the day to regard man as the utterly helpless product of his environment. Or they are so impressed with the obvious and immediate needs of whole ma.s.ses for better food, better homes, greater opportunities for culture, that they do not stop to ask whether these goods are worth while in themselves, or if not, what is the deeper purpose to which they should minister. A conception of personality is needed, sufficiently exalted to permit the various immediate utilities to find their due place as tributes to the ideal excellence latent in man; and on the other hand there is need for a view of the spiritual life free from the misuse to which that term is put by the various cults evoked by reaction against modern mechanism.

Painstaking inquiry into the grounds upon which the a.s.surance of human dignity can justify itself, has never been more urgently required.[50]

=Ideals and tendencies in ethics teaching=

Let us beware of surrendering to the common but often pernicious demand of our swift-moving America that in order to receive consideration a new idea should prove itself capable of yielding immediate dividends. There seems to be a certain hesitancy today among some in our educated cla.s.ses about speaking of "ideals." Ideals connote a long look ahead. They imply a sense that there is something perfect even though the steps toward embodying or approximating it will be many and arduous, perhaps discouragingly hard. They betoken the likelihood of appearing before men as the victims of ultimately unworkable dreams. In refreshing contrast is the seeming practicability of encouraging present tendencies. Your tendency is no far-off projection of mere thought; it is something solid and "real,"

here and now, respected at the bank, in the newspaper office, and other meeting places of those whose heads are hard. Tendencies turn elections; ideals carry no such palpable witness of their power.

"Hence let us study tendencies."

This characterization is perhaps extreme, but the danger to which it refers is all too frequent. A strike, for instance, sets most of us to discussing ways by which this particular disturbance can be ended quickly. It is only the few who are willing to hold in mind both terms of the problem, namely the procedure for tomorrow morning and the positive ideal toward which all our vocational life should set its face even if the distant tomorrow is still so far ahead. So of our conceptions of political life. A given election may indeed involve an immediate moral issue; but even the issue of next month can be faced properly only when it is related to an ideal of public life which may have to wait long years for appreciation by the majority. Nothing is more necessary in a democracy than a leadership trained in the long forward look, trained in distinguishing morally right and morally wrong from expedient, and best from merely better, trained in the courage to champion a distant ideal in the face of clamor to accept some inferior but belligerently present subst.i.tute.

In short, the student should be offered every encouragement to thinking out the ultimate obligations of his own life and of his various groups and to reaching the conviction that there is such a reality as a permanent human worth, a fundamentally right way for men and women to seek, a rightness whose authority is undiminished by the blunders of the human mind in trying to define it. An ever more earnest attempt to find that way, and to find it by practice illumined by all the knowledge that can be brought to bear, should be the leading object. Not a series of definitions and quotations, nor yet a little information about the social movements of our time, but a truer understanding of life as the result of interpreting it in terms of the obligation to create right human adjustments--such an aim saves college ethics alike from dryness and from superficial attempts to sprinkle interest over a subject of inherent and intense practical importance.

It is not essential that an introductory course in ethics should enter into the philosophy of religion. This may be left to other agencies, like the church, or to later courses, with every confidence that the outcome will be sound if mind and soul and will (to use the old formula) are first enlisted in behalf of n.o.ble conduct. Whatever thinking the student may do along these lines will be the better if its nurture is drawn first from moral thinking and moral practice.[51]

=Course in ethics prescribed, and early in college course=

From the foregoing it follows that the ethics course should be taken by all the students. The earlier it can be given the better, inasmuch as its demands upon their conduct apply to all the years of their life, and because the whole career at college is more likely to benefit from beginning early such reflections as this study particularly invites.

=Sequence determined by development of the student=

The sequence of courses will perhaps be best determined by remembering the need of following the natural growth of the student. Experiences come first and then the interpretations. Hence the insistence upon the practical content of the introductory courses. Theory and history should follow, not precede. n.o.body is interested in the history or the theory of a thing unless he is interested in the thing itself.

Furthermore, we must bear in mind the needs of those students who are not likely to care enough for the more theoretical aspects to continue the subject. If the introductory course is to be all that they take, obviously the more practical we can make it the better.

=In teaching ethics follow the maxim from the concrete to the abstract=

As to method, a variety of profitable ways abounds if only the contact with life is kept close and the principles studied are tested by their outcome in the life which the student knows best. In general, the best procedure is to work back from concrete instances to the principles underlying the problem, formulate the principles and test them in other fields. Our ill.u.s.trative strike, for instance, can be used to throw light upon the actual and the ideal principles involved in human relationship in some such manner as the following:

=Method of procedure ill.u.s.trated=

What do the employers want? What do they mean by liberty? What were the circ.u.mstances under which Mill formulated his principle of "liberty within the limits of non-infringement?" What have been the consequences in America of reliance upon this formula? Why does it break down in practice? Compare it with the theory of the balance of power in international relations. What is likely to be the effect of the possession of power upon the possessor himself?

Restate the ideal of liberty in terms of duty, not of privilege. What are the obstacles to the fulfillment of such an ideal in industry? In homes? What are the personal obstacles to clear understanding of the meaning of right?

What do the workers want? Examine each of their demands--shorter hours, more pay, recognition of the union, etc. What should the granting of these demands contribute to their lives? Give instances to show whether "better off" means better persons or not.

Compare the working man's use of the word "liberty" with that of the employer. Why do workers often become oppressors when they themselves become employers? What is the difference between demanding a redress of your grievance and making a moral demand? What makes the cry of fraternity as uttered by the workers repugnant to those who otherwise would accept fraternity as an ideal?

How would you formulate the ideal for the vocational life of the factory worker? Apply it to other vocations--journalism, law, teaching. Sum up the ideal rewards of work.

Make tentative definitions of liberty, rights, duty, justice.