Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene Part 12

Exercise comes after regimen, of which it is a special reform. Swedish gymnastics should be abandoned or reduced to a minimum of best points, because it is too severe and, in forbidding music, lays too little stress upon the rhythm element. Out-of-door walks and games should have precedence over all else. The principle sometimes advocated, that methods of physical training should apply to both boys and girls without regard to s.e.x, and with all the ordinary appliances found in the men's gymnasia introduced, should be reversed and every possible adjustment made to s.e.x. Free plays and games should always have precedence over indoor or uniform commando exercises. Boating and basket-ball should be allowed, but with the compet.i.tion element sedulously reduced, and with dancing of many kinds and forms the most prominent of indoor exercises. The dance cadences the soul; the stately minuet gives poise; the figure dances train the mind; and pantomime and dramatic features should be introduced and even specialties, if there are strong individual predispositions. The history of the dance, which has often been a mode of worship, a school of morals, and which is the root of the best that is in the drama, the best of all exercises and that could be again the heart of our whole educational system, should be exploited, and the dancing school and cla.s.s rescued from its present degradation. No girl is educated who can not dance, although she need not know the ballroom in its modern form.[10]

Manners, a word too often relegated to the past as savoring of the primness of the ancient dame school or female seminary, are really minor or sometimes major morals. They can express everything in the whole range of the impulsive or emotional life. Now that we understand the primacy of movement over feeling, we can appreciate what a school of bearing and repose in daily converse with others means. I would revive some of the ancient casuistry of details, but less the rules of the drawing-room, call and party, although these should not be neglected, than the deeper expressions of true ladyhood seen in an exquisite, tender and unselfish regard for the feelings of others. Women's ideal of compelling every one whom they meet to like them is a n.o.ble one, and the control of every automatism is not only a part of good breeding, but nervous health.

Regularity should be another all-pervading norm. In the main, even though he may have "played his s.e.x symphony too harshly," E.H. Clark was right. Periodicity, perhaps the deepest law of the cosmos, celebrates its highest triumphs in woman's life. For years everything must give way to its thorough and settled establishment. In the monthly Sabbaths of rest, the ideal school should revert to the meaning of the word leisure. The paradise of stated rest should be revisited, idleness be actively cultivated; reverie, in which the soul, which needs these seasons of withdrawal for its own development, expatiates over the whole life of the race, should be provided for and encouraged in every legitimate way, for, in rest, the whole momentum of heredity is felt in ways most favorable to full and complete development. Then woman should realize that to be is greater than to do; should step reverently aside from her daily routine and let Lord Nature work. In this time of sensitiveness and perturbation, when anemia and chlorosis are so peculiarly immanent to her s.e.x, remission of toil should not only be permitted, but required; and yet the greatest individual liberty should be allowed to adjust itself to the vast diversities of individual const.i.tutional needs. (See Chapter VII on this point.) The cottage home, which should take the place of the dormitory, should always have special interest and attractions for these seasons.

There should always be some personal instruction at these seasons during earlier adolescent years. I have glanced over nearly a score of books and pamphlets that are especially written for girls; while all are well meant and far better than the ordinary modes by which girls acquire knowledge of their own nature if left to themselves, they are, like books for boys, far too prolix, and most are too scientific and plain and direct. Moreover, no two girls need just the same instruction, and to leave it to reading is too indirect and causes the mind to dwell on it for too long periods. Best of all is individual instruction at the time, concise, practical, and never, especially in the early years, without a certain mystic and religious tone which should pervade all and make everything sacred. This should not be given by male physicians-and indeed most female doctors would make it too professional, and the maiden teacher must forever lack reverence for it-but it should come from one whose soul and body are full of wifehood and motherhood and who is old enough to know and is not without the necessary technical knowledge.

Another principle should be to broaden by r.e.t.a.r.ding; to keep the purely mental back and by every method to bring the intuitions to the front; appeals to tact and taste should be incessant; a purely intellectual man is no doubt biologically a deformity, but a purely intellectual woman is far more so. Bookishness is probably a bad sign in a girl; it suggests artificiality, pedantry, the lugging of dead knowledge. Mere learning is not the ideal, and prodigies of scholarship are always morbid. The rule should be to keep nothing that is not to become practical; to open no brain tracts which are not to be highways for the daily traffic of thought and conduct; not to overburden the soul with the impedimenta of libraries and records of what is afar off in time or zest, and always to follow truly the guidance of normal and spontaneous interests wisely interpreted.

Religion will always bold as prominent a place in woman's life as politics does in man's, and adolescence is still more its seedtime with girls than with boys. Its roots are the sentiment of awe and reverence, and it is the great agent in the world for transforming life from its earlier selfish to its only really mature form of altruism. The tales of the heroes of virtue, duty, devotion, and self-sacrifice from the Old Testament come naturally first; then perhaps the prophets paraphrased as in the pedagogic triumph of Kent and Saunders's little series; and when adolescence is at its height then the chief stress of religious instruction should be laid upon Jesus's life and work. He should be taught first humanly, and only later when the limitations of manhood seem exhausted should His Deity be adduced as welcome surplusage. The supernatural is a reflex of the heart; each sustains and neither can exist without the other. If the transcendent and supernal had no objective existence, we should have to invent and teach it or dwarf the life of feeling and sentiment. Whatever else religion is, therefore, it is the supremest poetry of the soul, reflecting like nothing else all that is deepest, most generic and racial in it. Theology should be reduced to a minimum, but nothing denied where wanted. Paul and his works and ways should be for the most part deferred until after eighteen. The juvenile well as the cyclone revivalist should be very carefully excluded; and yet in every springtime, when nature is recreated, service and teaching should gently encourage the revival and even the regeneration of all the religious instincts. The mission recruiter should be allowed to do his work outside these halls, and everything in the way of infection and all that brings religion into conflict with good taste and good sense should be excluded, while esthetics should supplement, reenforce, and go hand in hand with piety. Religion is in its infancy; and woman, who has sustained it in the past, must be the chief agent in its further and higher development. Orthodoxies and all narrowness should forever give place to cordial hospitality toward every serious view, which should be met by the method of greater sympathy rather than by that of criticism.

Nature in her many phases should, of course, make up a large part of the entire curriculum, but here again the methods of the s.e.xes should differ somewhat after p.u.b.erty. The poetic and mythic factors and some glimpses of the history of science should be given more prominence; the field naturalist rather than the laboratory man of technic should be the ideal especially at first; nature should be taught as G.o.d's first revelation, as an Old Testament related to the Bible as a primordial dispensation to a later and clearer and more special one. Reverence and love should be the motive powers, and no aspect should be studied without beginning and culminating in interests akin to devotion. Mathematics should be taught only in its rudiments, and those with special talents or tastes for it should go to agamic schools. Chemistry, too, although not excluded, should have a subordinate place. The average girl has little love of sozzling and mussing with the elements, and cooking involves problems in organic chemistry too complex to be understood very profoundly, but the rudiments of household chemistry should be taught. Physics, too, should be kept to elementary stages. Meteorology should have a larger, and geology and astronomy increasingly larger places, and are especially valuable because, and largely in proportion as, they are taught out of doors, but the general principles and the untechnical and practical aspects should be kept in the foreground. With botany more serious work should be done. Plant-lore and the poetic aspect, as in astronomy, should have attention throughout, while Latin nomenclature and microscopic technic should come late if at all, and vulgar names should have precedence over Latin terminology. Flowers, gardening, and excursions should never be wanting. Economic and even medical aspects should appear, and prominent and early should come the whole matter of self cross-fertilization and that by insects. The moral value of this subject will never be fully understood till we have what might almost be called a woman's botany, constructed on lines different from any of the text-books I have glanced at. Here much knowledge interesting in itself can be early taught, which will spring up into a world of serviceable insights as adolescence develops and the great law of s.e.x unfolds.

Zoology should always be taught with plenty of pets, menagerie resources, and with aquaria, aviaries, apiaries, formicaries, etc., as adjuncts. It should start in the environment like everything else. Bird and animal lore, books, and pictures should abound in the early stages, and the very prolific chapter of instincts should have ample ill.u.s.tration, while the morphological nomenclature and details of structure should be less essential. Woman has domesticated nearly all the animals, and is so superior to man in insight into their modes of life and psychoses that many of them are almost exemplifications of moral qualities to her even more than to man. The peac.o.c.k is an embodied expression of pride; the pig, of filth; the fox, of cunning; the serpent, of subtle danger; the eagle, of sublimity; the goose, of stupidity; and so on through all the range of human qualities, as we have seen. At bottom, however, the study of animal life is coming to be more and more a problem of heredity, and its problems should have dominant position and to them the other matter should grade up.

This shades over into and prepares for the study of the primitive man and child so closely related to each other. The myth, custom, belief, domestic practises of savages, vegetative and animal traits in infancy and childhood, the development of which is a priceless boon for the higher education of women, open of themselves a great field of human interest where she needs to know the great results, the striking details, the salient ill.u.s.trations, the basal principles rather than to be entangled in the details of anthropometry, craniometry, philology, etc.

All this lays the basis for a larger study of modern man-history, with the biographical element very prominent throughout, with plenty of stories of heroes of virtue, acts of valor, tales of saintly lives and the personal element more prominent, and specialization in the study of dynasties, wars, authorities, and controversies relegated to a very subordinate place. Sociology, undeveloped, rudimentary, and in some places suspected as it is, should have in the curriculum of her higher education a place above political economy. The stories of the great reforms, and accounts of the const.i.tution of society, of the home, church, state, and school, and philanthropies and ideals, should to the fore.

Art in all its forms should be opened at least in a propaedeutic way and individual tastes amply and judiciously fed, but there should be no special training in music without some taste and gift, and the aim should be to develop critical and discriminative appreciation and the good taste that sees the vast superiority of all that is good and cla.s.sic over what is cheap and fustian.

In literature, myth, poetry, and drama should perhaps lead, and the knowledge of the great authors in the vernacular be fostered. Greek, Hebrew, and perhaps Latin languages should be entirely excluded, not but that they are of great value and have their place, but because a smattering knowledge is bought at too high a price of ignorance of more valuable things. German, French, and Italian should be allowed and provided for by native teachers and by conversational methods if desired, and in their proper season.

In the studies of the soul of man, generally called the philosophic branches, metaphysics and epistemology should have the smallest, and logic the next least place. Psychology should be taught on the genetic basis of animals and children, and one of its tap-roots should be developed from the love of infancy and youth, than which nothing in all the world is more worthy. If a woman Descartes ever arises, she will put life before theory, and her watchword will be not cogito, ergo sum, [I think, therefore I am] but sum, ergo cogito [I am, therefore I think]. The psychology of sentiments and feelings and intuitions will take precedence of that of pure intellect; ethics will be taught on the basis of the whole series of practical duties and problems, and the theories of the ultimate nature of right or the const.i.tution of conscience will have small place.

Domesticity will be taught by example in some ideal home building by a kind of laboratory method. A nursery with all carefully selected appliances and adjuncts, a dining-room, a kitchen, bedroom, closets, cellars, outhouses, building, its material, the grounds, lawn, shrubbery, hothouse, library, and all the other adjuncts of the hearth will be both exemplified and taught. A general course in pedagogy, especially its history and ideals, another in child study, and finally a course in maternity the last year taught broadly, and not without practical details of nursing, should be comprehensive and culminating. In its largest sense maternity might be the heart of all the higher training of young women.

Applied knowledge will thus be brought to a focus in a department of teaching as one of the specialties of motherhood and not as a vocation apart. The training should aim to develop power of maternity in soul as well as in body, so that home influence may extend on and up through the plastic years of p.u.b.escence, and future generations shall not rebel against these influences until they have wrought their perfect work.

The methods throughout should be objective, with copious ill.u.s.trations by way of object-lessons, apparatus, charts, pictures, diagrams, and lectures, far less book work and recitation, only a limited amount of room study, the function of examination reduced to a minimum, and everything as suggestive and germinal as possible. Hints that are not followed up; information not elaborated into a thin pedagogic sillabub or froth; seed that is sown on the waters with no thought of reaping; faith in a G.o.d who does not pay at the end of each week, month, or year, but who always pays abundantly some time; training which does not develop hypertrophied memory-pouches that carry, or creative powers that discover and produce-these are lines on which such an inst.i.tution should develop. Specialization has its place, but it always hurts a woman's soul more than a man's, should always come later, and if there is special capacity it should be trained elsewhere. Unconscious education is a power of which we have yet to learn the full ranges.

In most groups in this series of ideal departments there should be at least one healthful, wise, large-souled, honorable, married and attractive man, and, if possible, several of them. His very presence in an inst.i.tution for young women gives poise, polarizes the soul, and gives wholesome but long-circuited tension at root no doubt s.e.xual, but all unconsciously so. This mentor should not be more father than brother, though he should combine the best of each, but should add another element. He need not be a doctor, a clergyman, or even a great scholar, but should be accessible for confidential conferences even though intimate. He should know the soul of the adolescent girl and how to prescribe; he should be wise and fruitful in advice, but especially should be to all a source of contagion and inspiration for poise and courage even though religious or medical problems be involved. But even if he lack all these latter qualities, though he so poised that impulsive girls can turn their hearts inside out in his presence and perhaps even weep on his shoulder, the presence of such a being, though a complete realization of this ideal could be only remotely approximated, would be the center of an atmosphere most wholesomely tonic.

In these all too meager outlines I have sketched a humanistic and liberal education and have refrained from all details and special curriculization. Many of the above features I believe would be as helpful for boys as for girls, but woman has here an opportunity to resume her exalted and supreme position, to be the first in this higher field, to lead man and pay her debt to his educational inst.i.tutions, by resuming her crown. The ideal inst.i.tutions, however, for the two will always be radically and probably always increasingly divergent.

As a psychologist, penetrated with the growing sense of the predominance of the heart over the mere intellect, I believe myself not alone in desiring to make a tender declaration of being more and more pa.s.sionately in love with woman as I conceive she came from the hand of G.o.d. I keenly envy my Catholic friends their Maryolatry. Who ever asked if the Holy Mother, whom the wise men adored, knew the astronomy of the Chaldees or had studied Egyptian or Babylonian, or even whether she knew how to read or write her own tongue, and who has ever thought of caring? We can not conceive that she bemoaned any limitations of her s.e.x, but she has been an object of adoration all these centuries because she glorified womanhood by being more generic, nearer the race, and richer in love, pity, unselfish devotion and intuition than man. The glorified madonna ideal shows us how much more whole and holy it is to be a woman than to be artist, orator, professor, or expert, and suggests to our own s.e.x that to be a man is larger than to be gentleman, philosopher, general, president, or millionaire.

But with all this love and hunger in my heart, I can not help sharing in the growing fear that modern woman, at least in more ways and places than one, is in danger of declining from her orbit; that she is coming to lack just confidence and pride in her s.e.x as such, and is just now in danger of lapsing to mannish ways, methods, and ideals, until her original divinity may become obscured. But, if our worship at her shrine is with a love and adoration a little qualified and unsteady, we have a fixed and abiding faith without which we should have no resource against pessimism for the future of our race, that she will ere long evolve a sphere of life and even education which fits her needs as well as, if not better than those of man fit his.

Meanwhile, if the eternally womanly seems somewhat less divine, we can turn with unabated faith to the eternally childish, the best of which in each are so closely related. The oracles of infancy and childhood will never fail. Distracted as we are in the maze of new sciences, skills, ideals, knowledges that we can not fully coordinate by our logic or curriculize by our pedagogy; confused between the claims of old and new methods; needing desperately, for survival as a nation and a race, some clue to thrid the mazes of the manifold modern cultures, we have now at least one source to which we can turn-we have found the only magnet in all the universe that points steadfastly to the undiscovered pole of human destiny. We know what can and will ultimately coordinate in the generic, which is larger than the logical order, all that is worth knowing, teaching, or doing by the best methods, that will save us from misfits and the waste ineffable of premature and belated knowledge, and that is in the interests and line of normal development in the child in our midst that must henceforth ever lead us which epitomizes in its development all the stages, human and prehuman; that is the proper object of all that strange new love of everything that is naive, spontaneous, and unsophisticated in human nature. The heart and soul of growing childhood is the criterion by which we judge the larger heart and soul of mature womanhood; and these are ultimately the only guide into the heart of the new education which is to be, when the school becomes what Melanchthon said it must be-a true workshop of the Holy Ghost-and what the new psychology, when it rises to the heights of prophecy, foresees as the true paradise of restored intuitive human nature.

[Footnote 1: David Starr Jordan: The Higher Education of Women.

Popular Science Monthly, December, 1902, vol. 62, pp. 97-107. See also my article on this subject in Munsey's Magazine, February, 1906, and President Jordan's reply in the March number, 1906.]

[Footnote 2: Coeducation. A series of essays by various authors, edited by Alice Woods, with an introduction by M.E. Sadler. Longmans, Green and Co., London 1903, p. 148 et seq.]

[Footnote 3: The Evolution of Ideals. W.G. Chambers, Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 101-143. Also, B.E. Warner: The Young Woman in Modern Life. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1903, p. 218.]

[Footnote 4: The Psychology of Woman. Translated by G.A. Etchison.

Richards, London, 1899.]

[Footnote 5: Physical Development of Women and Children. By Miss M.E.

Allen. American a.s.sociation for Physical Education., April, 1890.]

[Footnote 6: A Review of the Higher Education of Women. Forum, September, 1891, vol. 12, pp 25-40. See also G. von Bunge: Die zunehmende Unfahigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu stillen. Munchen Reinhardt, 1903, 3d ed. Also President Harper's Decennial Report, pp. xciv-cxi.]

[Footnote 7: Physical Hindrances to Teaching Girls, by Charlotte W.

Porter. Forum, September, 1891, vol. 12, pp. 41-49.]

[Footnote 8: Abbotsholme, 1889-1899: or Ten Years' Work in an Educational Laboratory, by Cecil Reddie, G. Allen London, 1900.]

[Footnote 9: See L'Ecole des Roches, a school of the Twentieth Century, by T.R. Croswell. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 479-491.]

[Footnote 10: See Chapter VI.]

CHAPTER XII

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING

Dangers of muscular degeneration and overstimulus of brain-Difficulties in teaching morals-Methods in Europe-Obedience to commands-Good habits should be mechanized-Value of scolding-How to flog aright-Its dangers-Moral precepts and proverbs-Habituation-Training will through intellect-Examinations-Concentration-Originality-Froebel and the naive-First ideas of G.o.d-Conscience-Importance of Old and New Testaments-s.e.x dangers-Love and religion-Conversion.

From its nature as well as from its central importance it might be easily shown that the will is no less dependent on the culture it receives than is the mind. It is fast becoming as absurd to suppose that men can survive in the great practical strain to which American life subjects all who would succeed, if the will is left to take its doubtful chances of training and discipline, as to suppose that the mind develops in neglect. Our changed conditions make this chance of will-culture more doubtful than formerly. A generation or two ago[1] most school-boys had either farm work, ch.o.r.es, errands, jobs self-imposed, or required by less tender parents; they made things, either toys or tools, out of school. Most school-girls did house-work, more or less of which is, like farm-work, perhaps the most varied and most salutary as well as most venerable of all schools for the youthful body and mind. They undertook extensive works of embroidery, bed-quilting, knitting, sewing, mending, if not cleaning, and even spinning and weaving their own or others' clothing, and cared for the younger children. The wealthier devised or imposed tasks for will-culture, as the German Kaiser has his children taught a trade as part of their education. Ten days at the hoe-handle, axe, or pitchfork, said an eminent educator lately in substance, with no new impression from without, and one constant and only duty, is a schooling in perseverance and sustained effort such as few boys now get in any shape; while city instead of country life brings so many new, heterogeneous and distracting impressions of motion rather than rest, and so many privileges with so few corresponding duties, that with artificial life and bad air the will is weakened, and eupeptic minds and stomachs, on which its vigor so depends, are rare. Machines supersede muscles, and perhaps our athleticism gives skill too great preponderance over strength, or favors intense rather than constant, long-sustained, unintermittent energy. Perhaps too many of our courses of study are better fitted to turn out many-sided but superficial paragraphists, than men who can lay deep plans, and subordinate many complex means to one remote end. Meanwhile, if there is any one thing of which our industries and practical arts are in more crying need than another, it is the old-fashioned virtue of thoroughness, of a kind and degree which does not address merely the eye, is not limited by the letter of a contract, but which has some regard for its products for their own sake, and some sense for the future. Whether in science, philosophy, morals, or business, the fields for long-ranged c.u.mulative efforts are wider, more numerous, and far more needy than in the days when it was the fashion for men contentedly to concentrate themselves to one vocation, life-work, or mission, or when cathedrals or other yet vaster public works were transmitted, unfinished but ever advancing, from one generation of men to another.

It is because the brain is developed, while the muscles are allowed to grow flabby and atrophied, that the deplored chasm between knowing and doing is so often fatal to the practical effectiveness of mental and moral culture. The great increase of city and sedentary life has been far too sudden for the human body-which was developed by hunting, war, agriculture, and manifold industries now given over to steam and machinery-to adapt itself healthfully or naturally to its new environment. Let any of us take down an anatomical chart of the human muscles, and reflect what movements we habitually make each day, and realize how disproportionately our activities are distributed compared with the size or importance of the muscles, and how greatly modern specialization of work has deformed our bodies. The muscles that move the scribbling pen are insignificant fraction of those in the whole body, and those that wag the tongue and adjust the larynx are also comparatively few and small. Their importance is, of course, not underrated, but it is disastrous to concentrate education upon them too exclusively or too early in life. The trouble is that few realize what physical vigor is in man or woman, or how dangerously near weakness often is to wickedness, how impossible healthful energy of will is without strong muscles which are its organ, or how endurance and self-control, no less than great achievement, depend on muscle-habits. Both in Germany and Greece, a golden age of letters was preceded, by about a generation, by a golden age of national gymnastic enthusiasm which const.i.tutes, especially in the former country, one of the most unique and suggestive chapters in the history of pedagogy. Symmetry and grace, hardihood and courage, the power to do everything that the human body can do with and without all conceivable apparatus, instruments, and even tools, are culture ideals that in Greece, Rome, and Germany respectively have influenced, as they might again influence, young men, as intellectual ideals never can do save in a select few. We do not want "will-virtuosos," who perform feats hard to learn, but then easy to do and good for show; nor spurtiness of any sort which develops an erethic habit of work, temper, and circulation, and is favored by some of our popular sports but too soon reacts into fatigue. Even will-training does not reach its end till it leads the young up to taking a intelligent, serious and life-long interest in their own physical culture and development. This is higher than interest in success in school or college sport; and, though naturally later than these, is one of the earliest forms of will-culture in which it is safe and wise to attempt to interest the young for its own sake alone. In our exciting life and trying climate, in which the experiment of civilization has never been tried before, these thoughts are merely exercises.

But this is, of course, preliminary. Great as is the need, the practical difficulties in the way are very great. First, there are not only no good text-books in ethics, but no good manual to guide teachers. Some give so many virtues or good habits to be taught per term, ignoring the unity of virtue as well as the order in which the child's capacities for real virtue unfold. Advanced text-books discuss the grounds of obligation, the nature of choice or freedom, or the hedonistic calculus, as if pleasures and pains could be balanced as measurable quant.i.ties, etc., so that philosophic morality is clearly not for children or teachers. Secondly, evolution encourages too often the doubt whether virtue can be taught, when it should have the opposite effect. Perversity and viciousness of will are too often treated as const.i.tutional disease; and insubordination or obstinacy, especially in school, are secretly admired as strength, instead of being vigorously treated as crampy disorders of will, and the child is coddled into flaccidity. Becomes the lowest develops first, there is danger that it will interfere with the development of the higher, and thus, if left to his own, the child may come to have no will. The third and greatest difficulty is, that with the best effort to do so, so few teachers can separate morality from religious creed. So vital is the religions sentiment here that it is hard to divorce the end of education from the end of life, proximate from ultimate grounds of obligation, or finite from infinite duties. Those whose training has been more religious than ethical can hardly teach morality per se satisfactorily to the noli me tangere [Touch me not] spirit of denominational freedom so wisely jealous of conflicting standards and sanctions for the young.

How then can we ever hope to secure proper training for the will?

More than a generation ago Germany developed the following method: Children of Lutheran, Catholic and Jewish parentage, which include most German children, were allowed one afternoon a week for several years, and two afternoons a week for a few months preceding confirmation, to spend half of a school day with instructors of these respective professions, who were nominated by the church, but examined by the state as to their competence. These teachers are as professional, therefore, as those in the regular cla.s.s work. Each religion is allowed to determine its own course of religious instruction, subject only to the approval of the cultus minister or the local authorities. In this way a rupture between the religious sentiments and teaching of successive generations is avoided and it is sought to bring religious training to bear upon morals. These cla.s.ses learn Scripture, hymns, church service,-the Catholics in Latin and the Jewish in Hebrew,-the history of their church and people, and sometimes a little systematic theology. In some of these schools, there are prizes and diplomas, and the spirit of compet.i.tion is appealed to. A criticism sometimes made against them, especially against the Lutheran religious pedagogy, is that it is too intellectual. It is, of course, far more systematic and effective from this point of view than the American Sunday School, so that whatever may be said of its edifying effects, the German child knows these topics far better than the American. This system, with modifications, has been adopted in some places in France, England and in America, more often in private than in public schools, however.

The other system originated in France some years after the Franco-Prussian War when the clerical influence in French education gave way to the lay and secular spirit. In these cla.s.ses, for which also stated times are set apart and which are continued through all the required grades under the name of moral and civic instruction, the religious element is entirely absent, except that there are a few hymns, Bible pa.s.sages and stories which all agree upon as valuable. Most of the course is made up of carefully selected maxims and especially stories of virtue, records of heroic achievements in French history and even in literature and the drama. Everything, however, has a distinct moral lesson, although that lesson is not made offensively prominent. We have here nearly a score of these textbooks, large and small. It would seen as though the resources of the French records and literature had been ransacked, and indeed many deeds of heroism are culled from the daily press. The matter is often arranged under headings such as cleanliness, acts of kindness, courage, truthfulness versus lying, respect for age, good manners, etc. Each virtue is thus taught in a way appropriate to each stage of childhood, and quite often bands of mercy, rescue leagues and other societies are the outgrowth of this instruction. It is, of course, exposed to much criticism from the clergy on the cogent ground that morality needs the support of religion, at the very least, in childhood. This system has had much influence in England where several similar courses have been evolved, and in this country we have at least one very praiseworthy effort in this direction, addressed mainly, however, to older children.

Besides this, two ways suggest themselves. First, we may try to a.s.sume, or tediously enucleate a consensus of religious truth as a basis of will training, e.g., G.o.d and immortality, and, ignoring the minority who doubt these, vote them into the public school. Pedagogy need have nothing whatever to say respecting the absolute truth or falsity of these ideas, but there is little doubt that they have an influence on the will, at a certain stage of average development, greater and more essential than any other; so great that even were their vitality to decay like the faith in the Greek or German mythology, we should still have to teach G.o.d and a future life as the most imperative of all hypotheses in a field where, as in morals, nothing is so practical as a good theory; and we should have to fall to teaching the Bible as a moral cla.s.sic, and cultivate a critical sympathy for its view of life. But this way ignores revelation and supernatural claims, while some have other objections to emanc.i.p.ating or "rescuing" the Bible from theology just yet. Indeed, the problem how to teach anything that the mind could not have found out for itself, but that had to be revealed, has not been solved by modern pedagogy, which, since Pestalozzi, has been more and more devoted to natural and developing methods. The latter teaches that there must not be too much seed sown, too much or too high precept, or too much iteration, and that, in Jean Paul's phrase, the hammer must not rest on bell, but only tap and rebound, to bring out a clear tone. Again, a consensus of this content would either have to be carefully defined and would be too generic and abstract for school uses, or else differences of interpretation, which so pervade and are modified by character, culture, temperament, and feeling, would make the consensus itself nugatory. Religious training must be specific at first, and, omitting qualifications, the more explicit the denominational faith the earlier may religious motives affect the will.

This is the way of our hopes, to the closer consideration of which we intend to return in the future, though it must be expected that the happiest consensus will be long quarantined from most schools. Meanwhile a second way, however unpromising, is still open. n.o.ble types of character may rest on only the native instincts of the soul or even on broadly interpreted utilitarian considerations. But if morality without religion were only a bloodless corpse or a plank in a shipwreck, there is now need enough for teachers to study its form, drift, and uses by itself alone. This, at least, is our purpose in considering the will, and this only.

The will, purpose, and even mood of small children when alone, are fickle, fluctuating, contradictory. Our very presence imposes one general law on them, viz., that of keeping our good will and avoiding our displeasure. As the plant grows towards the light, so they unfold in the direction of our wishes, felt as by divination. They respect all you smile at, even buffoonery; look up in their play to call your notice, to study the lines of your sympathy, as if their chief vocation was to learn your desires. Their early lies are often saying what they think will please us, knowing no higher touchstones of truth. If we are careful to be wisely and without excess happy and affectionate when they are good, and saddened and slightly cooled in manifestations of love if they do wrong, the power of a.s.sociation in the normal, eupeptic child will early choose right as surely as pleasure increases vitality. If our love is deep, obedience is an instinct if not a religion. The child learns that while it can not excite our fear, resentment or admiration, etc., it can act on our love, and this should be the first sense of its own efficiency. Thus, too, it first learns that the way of pa.s.sion and impulse is not the only rule of life, and that something is gained by resisting them. It imitates our acts long before it can understand our words. As if it felt its insignificance, and dreaded to be arrested in some lower phase of its development, its instinct for obedience becomes almost a pa.s.sion. As the vine must twine or grovel, so the child comes unconsciously to worship idols, and imitates bad patterns and examples in the absence of worthy ones. He obeys as with a deep sense of being our chattel, and, at bottom, admires those who coerce him, if the means be wisely chosen. The authority must, of course, be ascendancy over heart and mind. The more absolute such authority the more the will is saved from caprice and feels the power of steadiness. Such authority excites the unique, unfathomable sense of reverence, which measures the capacity for will-culture, and is the strongest and soundest of all moral motives. It is also the most comprehensive, for it is first felt only towards persons, and personality is a bond, enabling any number of complex elements to act or be treated as whole, as everything does and is in the child's soul, instead of in isolation and detail. In the feeling of respect culminating in worship almost all educational motives are involved, but especially those which alone can bring the will to maturity; and happy the child who is bound by the mysterious and constraining sympathy of dependence, by which, if unblighted by cynicism, a worthy mentor directs and lifts the will. This unconscious reflection of our character and wishes is the diviner side of childhood, by which it is quick and responsive to everything in its moral environment. The child may not be able to tell whether its teacher often smiles, dresses in this way or that, speaks loud or low, has many rules or not, though every element of her personality affects him profoundly. His acts of will have not been choices, but a ma.s.s of psychic causes far greater than consciousness can estimate have laid a basis of character, than which heredity alone is deeper, before the child knows he has a will. These influences are not transient but life-long, for if the conscious and intentional may anywhere be said to be only a superficial wave over the depths of the unconscious, it is in the sphere of will-culture.

But command and obedience must also be specific to supplant nature. Here begins the difficulty. A young child can know no general commands. "Sit in your chair," means sit a moment, a sort of trick, with no prohibition to stand the next instant. Any just-forbidden act may be done in the next room. All is here and now, and patient reiteration, till habit is formed, and no havoc-making rules which it cannot understand or remember, is our cue. Obedience can, however, be instinct even here, and is its chief virtue, and there is no more fear of weakening the will by it than in the case of soldiers. As the child grows older, however, and as the acts commanded are repugnant, or unusual, there should be increasing care, lest authority be compromised, sympathy ruptured, or lest mutual timidity and indecision, if not mutual insincerity and dissimulation, as well as parodied disobedience, etc., to test us, result. We should, of course, watch for favorable moods, a.s.sume no unwonted or preternatural dignity or owlish air of wisdom, and command in a low voice which does not too rudely break in upon the child's train of impressions. The acts we command or forbid should be very few at first, but inexorable. We should be careful not to forbid where we cannot follow a untrusty child, or what we can not prevent. Our own will should be a rock and not a wave. Our requirements should be uniform, with no whim, mood, or periodicity of any sort about them. If we alternate from caresses to severity, are fields and capricious instead of commanding by a fixed and settled plan, if we only now and then take the child in hand, so he does not know precisely what to expect, we really require the child to change its nature with every change in us, and well for the child who can defy such a changeable authority, which not only unsettles but breaks up character anew when it is just at the beginning of the formative period. Neglect is better than this, and fear of inconsistency of authority makes the best parents often jealous of arbitrariness in teachers. Only thus can we develop general habits of will and bring the child to know general maxims of conduct inductively, and only thus by judicious boldness and hardihood in command can we bring the child to feel the conscious strength that comes only from doing unpleasant things. Even if instant obedience be only external at first, it will work inward, for moods are controlled by work, and it is only will which enlarges the bounds of personality.

Yet we must not forget that even morality is relative, and is one thing for adults and often quite another for children. The child knows nothing of absolute truth, justice, or virtues. The various stimuli of discipline are to enforce the higher though weaker insights which the child has already unfolded, rather than to engraft entirely unintuited good. The command must find some ally, feeble though it be, in the child's own soul. We should strive to fill each moment with as little sacrifice or subordination, as mere means or conditions to the future, as possible, for fear of affectation and insincerity. But yet the hardier and sounder the nature, the more we may address training to barely nascent intuitions, with a less ingredient of immediate satisfaction, and the deeper the higher element Of interest will be grounded in the end. The child must find as he advances towards maturity, that every new insight, or realization of his own reveals the fact that you have been there before with commands, cultivating sentiments and habits, and not that he was led to mistake your convenience or hobby for duty, or failed to temper the will by temporizing with it. The young are apt to be most sincere at an age when they are also most mistaken, but if sincerity be kept at its deepest and best, will be least harmful and easiest overcome. If authority supplement rather than supersede good motives, the child will so love authority as to overcome your reluctance to apply it directly, and as a final result will choose the state and act you have pre-formed in its slowly-widening margin of freedom, and will be all the less liable to undue subservience to priest or boss, or fashion or tradition later, as obedience gives place to normal, manly independence.

In these and many other ways everything in conduct should be mechanized as early and completely as possible. The child's notion of what is right is what is habitual, and the simple, to which all else is reduced in thought, is identified with the familiar. It is this primitive stratum of habits which princ.i.p.ally determines our deepest belief which all must have over and above knowledge-to which men revert in mature years from youthful vagaries. If good acts are a diet and not a medicine, are repeated over and over again, as every new beat of the loom pounds in one new thread, and sense of justice and right is wrought into the very nerve-cells and fibers; if this ground texture of the soul, this "memory and habit-plexus," this sphere of thoughts we oftenest think and acts we oftenest do, is early, rightly and indiscerptibly wrought, not only does it become a web of destiny for us, so all-determining is it, but we have something perdurable to fall back on if moral shock or crisis or change or calamity shall have rudely broken up the whole structure of later a.s.sociations. Not only the more we mechanize thus, the more force of soul is freed for higher work, but we are insured against emergencies in which the choice and deed is likely to follow the nearest motive, or that which acts quickest, rather than to pause and be influenced by higher and perhaps intrinsically stronger motives. Reflection always brings in a new set of later-acquired motives and considerations, and if these are better than habit-mechanism, then pause is good; if not, he who deliberates is lost. Our purposive volitions are very few compared with the long series of desires, acts and reactions, often contradictory, many of which were never conscious, and many once willed but now lapsed to reflexes, the traces of which crowding the unknown margins of the soul, const.i.tute the organ of the conscious will.

It is only so far as this primitive will is wrong by nature or training, that drastic reconstructions of any sort are needed. Only those who mistake weakness for innocence, or simplicity for candor, or forget that childish faults are no less serious because universal, deny the, at least, occasional depravity of all children, or fail to see that fear and pain are among the indispensables of education, while a parent, teacher, or even a G.o.d, all love, weakens and relaxes the will. Children do not cry for the alphabet; the multiplication table is more like medicine than confectionery, and it is only affected thoroughness that omits all that is hard. "The fruits of learning may be sweet, but its roots are always bitter," and it is this alone that makes it possible to strengthen the will while instructing the mind. The well-schooled will comes, like Herder, to scorn the luxury of knowing without the labor of learning. We must antic.i.p.ate the future penalties of sloth as well as of badness. The will especially is a trust we are to administer for the child, not as he may now wish, but as he will wish when more mature. We must now compel what he will later wish to compel himself to do. To find his habits already formed to the same law that his mature will and the world later enjoin, cements the strongest of all bonds between mentor and child. Nothing, however, must be so individual as punishment. For some, a threat at rare intervals is enough; while for others, however ominous threats may be, they become at once "like scarecrows, on which the foulest birds soonest learn to perch." To scold well and wisely is an art by itself. For some children, pardon is the worst punishment; for others, ignoring or neglect; for others, isolation from friends, suspension from duties; for others, seclusion-which last, however, is for certain ages beset with extreme danger-and for still others, shame from being made conspicuous. Mr. Spencer's "natural penalties" can be applied to but few kinds of wrong, and those not the worst. Basedow tied boys who fell into temptation to a strong pillar to brace them up; if stupid and careless, put on a fool's cap and bells; if they were proud, they were suspended near the ceiling in a basket, as Aristophanes represented Socrates. Two boys who quarreled, were made to look into each other's eyes before the whole school till their angry expressions gave way before the general sense of the ridiculous. This is more ingenious than wise. The object of discipline is to avoid punishment, but even flogging should never be forbidden. It maybe reserved, like a sword in its scabbard, but should not get so rusted in that it can not be drawn on occasion. The law might even limit the size and length of the rod, and place of application, as in Germany, but it should be of no less liberal dimensions here than there. punishment should, of course, be minatory and reformatory, and not vindictive, and we should not forget that certainty is more effective than severity, nor that it is apt to make motives sensuous, and delay the psychic restraint which should early preponderate over the physical. But will-culture for boys is rarely as thorough as it should be without more or less flogging. I would not, of course, urge the extremes of the past. The Spartan beating as a gymnastic drill to toughen, the severity which prevailed in Germany for a long time after its Thirty Years' Wars,[2] the former fashion in many English schools of walking up not infrequently to take a flogging as a plucky thing to do, and with no notion of disgrace attaching to it, shows at least an admirable strength of will. Severe constraint gives poise, inwardness, self-control, inhibition, and not-willingness, if not willingness, while the now too common habit of coquetting for the child's favor, and tickling its ego with praises and prizes, and pedagogic pettifogging for its good-will, and sentimental fear of a judicious slap to rouse a spoiled child with no will to break, to make it keep step with the rest in conduct, instead of delaying a whole school-room to apply a subtle psychology of motives on it, is bad. This reminds one of the Jain who sweeps the ground before him lest he unconsciously tread on a worm. Possibly it may be well, as Schleiermacher suggests, not to repress some one nascent bad act in some natures, but let it and the punishment ensue for the sake of Dr. Spankster's tonic. Dermal pain is not the worst thing in the world, and by a judicious knowledge of how it feels at both ends of the rod, by flogging and being flogged, far deeper pains may be forefended. Insulting defiance, deliberative disobedience, ostentatious carelessness and bravado, are diseases of the will, and, in very rare cases of Promethean obstinacy, the severe process of breaking the will is needful, just as in surgery it is occasionally needful to rebreak a limb wrongly set, or deformed, to set it over better. It is a cruel process, but a crampy will in childhood means moral traumatism of some sort in the adult. Few parents have the nerve to do this, or the insight to see just when it is needed. It is, as some one has said, like knocking a man down to save him from stepping off a precipice. Even the worst punishments are but very faint types of what nature has in store in later life for some forms of perversity of will, and are better than sarcasm, ridicule, or tasks, as penalties. The strength of obstinacy is admirable, and every one ought to have his own will; but a false direction, though almost always the result of faulty previous training when the soul more fluid and mobile, is all the more fatal. While so few intelligent parents are able to refrain from the self-indulgence of too much rewarding or giving, even though it injures the child, it is perhaps too much to expect the hardihood which can be justly cold to the caresses of a child who seeks, by displaying all its stock of goodness and arts of endearment, to buy back good-will after punishment has been deserved. If we wait too long, and punish in cold blood, a young child may hate us; while, if we punish on the instant, and with pa.s.sion, a little of which is always salutary, on the principle, ohne Affekt kein Effekt, [Without pa.s.sion, no effect] an older child may fail of the natural reactions of conscience, which should always be secured. The maxim, summum jus summa injuria, [The rigor of the law may be the greatest wrong] we are often told, is peculiarly true in school, and so it is; but to forego all punishment is no less injustice to the average child, for it is to abandon one of the most effective means of will-culture. We never punish but a part, as it were, of the child's nature; he has lied, but is not therefore a liar, and we deal only with the specific act, and must love all the rest of him.

And yet, after all, indiscriminate flogging is so bad, and the average teacher is so inadequate to that hardest and most tactful of all his varied duties, viz., selecting the right outcrop of the right fault of the right child at the right time and place, mood, etc., for best effect, that the bold statement of such principles as above is perhaps not entirely without practical danger, especially in two cases which Madame Necker and Sigismund have pointed out, and in several cases of which the present writer has notes. First, an habitually good child sometimes has a saturnalia of defiance and disobedience; a series of insubordinate acts are suddenly committed which really mark the first sudden epochful and belated birth of the instinct of independence and self-regulation, on which his future manliness will depend. He is quite irresponsible, the acts are never repeated, and very lenient treatment causes him, after the conflict of tumultuous feelings has expanded his soul, to react healthfully into habitual docility again, if some small field for independent action be at once opened him. The other case is that of ennui, of which children suffer such nameless qualms. When I should open half a dozen books, start for a walk, and then turn back, wander about in mind or body, seeking but not finding content in anything, a child in my mood will wish for a toy, an amus.e.m.e.nt, food, a rare indulgence, only to neglect or even reject it petulantly when granted. These flitting "will-spectres" are physical, are a mild form of the many fatal dangers of fatigue; and punishment is the worst of treatment. Rest or diversion is the only cure, and the teacher's mind must be fruitful of purposes to that end. Perhaps a third case for palliative treatment is, those lies which attend the first sense of badness. The desire to conceal it occasionally accompanies the nascent effort to reform and make the lie true. These cases are probably rare, while the temptation to lie is far greater for one who does ill than for one who does well, for fear is the chief motive, and a successful lie which concealed would weaken the desire to cure a fault.

We have thus far spoken of obedience, and come now to the later necessity of self-guidance, which, if obedience has wrought its perfect work, will be natural and inevitable. It is very hard to combine reason and coercion, yet it is needful that children think themselves free long before we cease to determine them. As we slowly cease to prescribe and begin to inspire, a very few well-chosen mottoes, proverbs, maxims, should be taught very simply, so that they will sink deep. Education has been defined as working against the chance influences of life, and it is certain that without some precepts and rules the will will not exert itself. If reasons are given, and energy is much absorbed in understanding, the child will a.s.sent but will not do. If the mind is not strong, many wide ideas are very dangerous. Strong wills are not fond of arguments, and if a young person falls to talking or thinking beyond his experience, subjective or objective, both conduct and thought are soon confused by chaotic and incongruous opinions and beliefs; and false expectations, which are the very seducers of the will, arise. There can be little will-training by words, and the understanding can not realize the ideals of the will. All great things are dangerous, as Plato said, and the truth itself is not only false but actually immoral to unexpanded minds. Will-culture is intensive, not extensive, and the writer knows a case in which even a vacation ramble with a moralizing fabulist has undermined the work of years. Our precepts must be made very familiar, copiously ill.u.s.trated, well wrought together by habit and attentive thought, and above all clear cut, that the pain of violating them may be sharp and poignant. Vague and too general precepts beyond the horizon of the child's real experience do not haunt him if they are outraged. Now the child must obey these, and will, if he has learned to obey well the command of others.

One of the best sureties that he will do so is muscle-culture, for if the latter are weaker than the nerves and brain, the gap between knowing and doing appears and the will stagnates. Guts.m.u.ths, the father of gymnastics in Germany before Jahn, used to warn men not to fancy that the few tiny muscles that moved the pen or tongue had power to elevate men. They might t.i.tillate the soul with words and ideas; but rigorous, symmetrical muscle-culture alone, he and his Turner societies believed, could regenerate the Fatherland, for it was one thing to paint the conflict of life, and quite another to bear arms in it. They said, "The weaker the body the more it commands; the stronger it is the more it obeys."