Essay No. 34
Responsibility for
the Moral Education of Youth
BY
The Hon. George H. Martin, Litt.D,
Treasurer of the Massachusetts Board of Education,
Boston, United States.
THE education of youth is a very complex process, and it is brought about by the combined effort of many forces. If all these forces acted in the same direction, and that in a right direction, the result would be their sum, and their cumulative effect would produce the highest type of moral character. If, however, as is usually the case, some of the forces act in opposition to others, the resultant is the difference, and the outcome is determined by the relative strength of the two. If the stronger forces act in the direction of right living, the character will be upright and the general tenor of the life correct. If the forces which tend to degrade are stronger, the resultant will be low moral standards and an unworthy life.
The forces which act upon all young lives are the borne, the school, and the social environment. The
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school purposes, nor one couched in more felicitous language, than the one contained in the famous law of Massachusetts, enacted in 1789":*
"The president, professors and tutors of the University at Cambridge and of the several colleges, all preceptors and teachers of academies and all other instructors of youth shall exert their best endeavours t0 impress on the minds of children and youth committed to their care and instruction the principles of piety and justice and a sacred regard for truth, love of their country, humanity and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry and frugality, chastity, moderation and temperance, and those other virtues which are the ornament of human society and the basis upon which a republican constitution is founded ; and they shall endeavour to lead their pupils, as their ages and capacities will admit, into a clear understanding of the tendency of the above-mentioned virtues to preserve and perfect a republican constitution and secure the blessings of liberty as well as to promote their future happiness, and also to point out to them the evil tendency of the opposite vices."
This law is marvellously comprehensive in its application—all instructors of youth—and its twelve virtues include all human relations.
But it should be noticed that it limits the obliga-tion of teachers. They are to use their best en-deavours to impress on the minds the principles—that
Section i8, Chapter 42, Revised Laws.
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is, they are to instruct. The persistent practice of these virtues which constitutes training and results in habits must be secured largely outside of school. The school and the college enable the children and youth to frame standards, to create ideals of charac¬ter. As to most of these virtues, this is as far as they go.
The school may secure respect and obedience to the authority of the teacher, but it cannot compel children to reverence and obey their parents. It may secure justice and fair play among the pupils in their dealings with each other during the school hours, but it cannot enforce it in the home and on the street, where the child spends seven-eighths of his time. The school is an admirable field for the exercise of humanity and neighbourly love, and within its limits of time and persons may do much to strengthen them as permanent motives of conduct ; but when the most is done, wide fields are necessarily left untouched. The school work tends directly toward sobriety and industry, but the schools cannot keep the children from social excesses nor impose on them domestic tasks. Frugal habits must be formed at home, if anywhere, and temperance is a virtue of the home rather than of the school.
From this two-fold effort of the schools, through discipline and through instruction, it is probable that the standards of morals of pupils in the public schools are higher than are the standards of the business or social circles which they enter.
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But what confronts a child on looking away from the school and its teaching ? He finds in the home laxity of discipline and little insistence on even the outward marks of respect. He does not find in the world that practice of justice and fair-dealing that he has been led to expect. He cannot help seeing that fraud and chicanery and dishonesty are preva¬lent, and their practice by people in good society is winked at or condoned. In business and politics, and often in social affairs, he learns that a sacred regard for the truth is not considered consistent with a workable policy. He finds that "Man's inhumanity to man " still "makes countless thousands mourn." When he has formed in school a standard of temper¬ate and frugal living, he is confronted in his own home by domestic waste and expenditure for un¬necessary luxury and on every street corner by a drinking-saloon licensed by public authority. He has been taught industry, and he sees the idle rich faring sumptuously every day and the idle poor supported at public expense. And, as for chastity, he finds that society insists on it only for women. He sees every form of vice made heroic in the yellow journal and on the yellow stage.
Is it any wonder that some youth, many youth, confused by the contradiction between school and life, between what they have been taught is right and what they see is done, their character yet in the gristle, yield to the temptation set before them and
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follow the multitude to do evil ? Is it not rather a matter of surprise and thankfulness that so many maintain correct standards and strengthen themselves in habits of right living ?
It seems to me clear that, if any substantial improvement of society is hoped for, this play of con¬flicting forces in the teaching and training of child¬ren and youth must cease. All social forces must become mutually co-operative and sustaining. They must act in the same direction and cumulatively, and not, as now, athwart and opposite each other.
The Church needs to reorganise and modernise its methods of instruction. Its Bible schools need to embody the best methods of modern pedagogy in their appeal to children. Formulas of doctrine need to give way to concrete principles of living. The Bible needs to be presented not as a dead book, telling about dead people and dead races ; but its men and women should be made luminous with human qualities, shown to be types of men and women of to-day, and their experiences made helpful in shaping conduct now.
Out of the heart are the issues of life. The home is the heart of human society, and out of it are the issues of character. This is the basic law of human nature, universal and everlasting. No change of social customs can abrogate it. It is not subject to the caprice of fashion. To violate it or ignore it means disaster. No other human being can stand
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in loco parentis. The phrase is only a legal fiction.
If in the home are not exemplified piety and justice and a sacred regard for truth, industry, frugality, chastity and temperance, it is an uphill task for teachers or preachers to make these virtues so alluring as to influence conduct.
If the mottoes "The teacher makes the school " and "Like priest, like people" are true, much more true is the saying of Euripides, "The errors of parents the gods turn to the undoing of their children."
If the parents neglect their children, it matters little whether they are absorbed in cares of State, or business, or pleasure, or sin, the children suffer the penalty. And it matters little whether the home be one of poverty or riches, so far as its moral influence goes.
The most needed social reform is to make good homes universal. Parenthood should be a throne and obedience should be the "bond of rule." There should be dignity without austerity, firmness and, if necessary, severity without cruelty, affection and sympathy without silliness, morality without hypoc¬risy, and religion without cant.
Such homes would give efficacy to the teaching of the school and the Church.
The community has much to answer for when children go astray. It has put temptation in their
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way. It has tolerated practices in business and in politics which tend to break down character. It has allowed vice to flaunt itself in a hundred ways attractive to the young. In its dealing with children it has often been severe when it should have been lenient and lenient when it should have been severe.
It has so handled the making, the interpretation, and the execution of law as to produce moral con¬fusion and obliquity. While punishing the poor and friendless criminal to the limit, it has allowed the rich and the influential to go free. It has rarely anywhere reached the guilty ones "higher up." Its penalties have been retributive rather than reforma¬tory. It has so dealt with juvenile delinquency as to implant the seeds of suspicion and hostility toward society itself.
The streets of every large city in the world are filled with young persons who have been confirmed in evil habits by the sins of society—sins of omission and of commission. The lack of suitable play¬grounds, of proper places for evening recreation, and of adequate instruction in industry has left the young of both sexes a prey to their own natural but per¬verted instincts.
So the work of moral disintegration which the unfaithful home has begun the equally unfaithful society has completed.
We have no occasion for surprise, therefore, that children and youth show as many lapses from virtue
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as they do. The wonder is that there are so few.
The remedy for it all is not a simple one. To make the instruction in the schools more systematic or to introduce into them religious exercises where now there are none might be useful, but it would not be adequate.
Higher standards of conduct in social life, fewer legalised temptations in the path of youth, more intelligent dealing with juvenile delinquency, more adequate provision for recreation and vocational education, more appropriate methods of moral and religious nurture by the Church, and, above all, a keener sense of parental responsibility, more judicious restraint, and more sympathetic aid in trying to be good—all of these are needed.
The subject of the moral education of youth is suffering to-day for the lack of comprehensive grasp. Efforts at reform are too narrow and one-sided. When the discussion assumes this broader phase, and not till then, the real magnitude of the work will be seen and the necessity for co-operative effort of all social forces will appear.
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