Moral Principles in Education

the question to aim at making the methods of learning, of acquiring intellectual power, and of assimilating subject-matter, such that they will render behavior more enlightened, more consistent, more vigorous than it otherwise would be. The same distinction between "moral ideas" and "ideas about morality" explains for us a source of continual misunderstanding between teachers in the schools and critics of education outside of the schools. The latter look through the school programmes, the school courses of study, and do not find any place set apart for instruction in ethics or for "moral teaching." Then they assert that the schools are doing nothing, or next to nothing, for character-training; they become emphatic, even vehement, about the moral deficiencies of public education. The schoolteachers, on the other hand, resent these criticisms as an injustice, and hold not only that they do "teach morals," but that they teach them every moment of the day, five days in the week. In this contention the teachers _in principle_ are in the right; if they are in the wrong, it is not because special periods are not set aside for what after all can only be teaching _about_ morals, but because their own characters, or their school atmosphere and ideals, or their methods of teaching, or the subject-matter which they teach, are not such _in detail_ as to bring intellectual results into vital union with character so that they become working forces in behavior. Without discussing, therefore, the limits or the value of so-called direct moral instruction (or, better, instruction _about_ morals), it may be laid down as fundamental that the influence of direct moral instruction, even at its very best, is _comparatively_ small in amount and slight in influence, when the whole field of moral growth through education is taken into account.…