Devoted to the Science, Art, Philosophy and Literature

VOL. XLV.

of Education

NOVEMBER, 1924

No. 3

A Constructive Program for Moral and Civic

Habit-Formation

STEPHEN G. RICH, ESSEX FELLS, N. J.

HE years since the World War have seen an increasing realization on the part of the public

T and educators alike of the need for moral and

civic education. The events of the time, ranging

from the revival of feuds in the Cumberlands to the apathy of voters and the scandals of Teapot Dome, from the crime of the miseducated Loeb to the persecution of the liberal-minded in labor matters, from the rise of the cigarette-smoking flapper to the introduction of religious sectarianism into our politics, these and a host of other events have given some of the more serious of the educational workers serious cause to think, serious cause to devise some means of meeting at least a few of these problems.

The writer of this is fully in agreement with the more reasonable of the lamentators, despite his belief that we are little worse off than we were one or two decades ago. We have become conscious of the evils that existed all along, but that were less conspicuous before we attained national consciousness in the World War. That is, the jeremiads are in the main justified, but they are not really lamentations for new conditions, but realizations of older conditions which we did not recognize (publicly at least) in former times. Feud

ists fought in Mingo in 1900 as in 1921; Teapot Dome is no worse than what Steffens found in 1903 in a great city "corrupt and contented"; we had an avowedly sectarian political movement in the Bay State in the 90's; and so it goes through the list.

Each and every partisan, sectarian, and faddist has his own pet panacea for one or all of the evils. Nearly all of them call for the use of the schools as the means for getting at the young people and inoculating them-rather dosing them to the limit of capacity and beyond it-with their own panacea. As an education worker, as a teacher, the writer wants to place on record as vigorous an objection as possible to all this. It is the business of the teaching profession to find out what the real and urgent needs are for each locality and to change their educational procedure so as to educate, instruct, train, and mold the pupils into the socially necessary actions and attitudes. It is for the teachers to decide whether the greater evil in the town of "Vinegar Rock" is lawlessness or late hours; whether "Little Whittle" needs its children made more strong against civic corruption or against immorality, or against both; whether there is need in "Old Dorp" for bringing up the pupils to despise religious prejudices, etc., etc.

One fundamental item in the situation needs to be considered in each and every case. That item is the decay of the old agencies of social and civic and moral training. In the complex America of this century, an ever-increasing proportion of the children are not subjected to the family training that was possible when we were a people living on farms and in small villages. The teachers need to recognize that they cannot count on home training at all. In the many cases in which it still exists, it will be a welcome and valuable addition to their efforts; but it may not be counted on in any community. What are often called "good home conditions" are as often as not entirely useless as means of moral and civic education. In the writer's experience, the home which is economically in the class of owning a car more expensive than

a Ford or a Chevrolet is usually so indulgent a home towards the children, that neither before the school age or during the school years is there any moral or civic training secured there. The "neglected" child of the poorer home appears now to be at a decided advantage over the child of the better home in these respects.

Despite the increase of Sunday schools, the churches have not keep up with the growth of the need for moral training. The children increase in numbers more quickly than the Sunday schools. Moreover, a few hours on one day a week are no longer, in the absence of the co-operation in the home, sufficient to turn the tide in the child's mind. Despite the many improvements in content and teaching in the Sunday schools, the substance of their teaching is still too abstract, too much concerned with knowing doctrine and knowing the canons of right-doing to be effective in producing the doing of the acts which are approved as right. There is no evidence to show that the church school, with daily moral instruction and religious instruction, is any more effective.

The problem thus becomes one that must be met by the public schools as part of their daily duty. The problem is not merely that of having the children know what they should do. The problem consists in the need to form in the children the habits, attitudes, likes and dislikes, prejudices and points of view that will impel them to be civically and morally desirable persons, without needing continual coercion towards that end in their adult lives. The lion's share of the work in making this sort of persons is the legitimate duty of the public schools; in fact, it is the purpose for which state constitutions state the public school systems are instituted.

Certain doubts and misconceptions must be cleared away in the preliminary steps of developing a constructive program of civic and moral education. The first of these is a contrast that is supposed to exist between these two phases of life. We are only too apt to think of civic education as merely education aimed at understanding or at participation in the

political life of the community. Moral education is, in accordance with this scheme of thinking, conceived of as education designed to make the individual know or act upon the accepted canons of right possibly with the additional aspect of the enforcement of the religious sanctions for individual rightdoing. In this day of highly socialized life, in which the honesty of the man in Brooklyn may affect the health of a child in Capetown, in which no individual can live unto himself if he would live a civilized life, such conceptions must be dismissed as hopelessly inadequate. Civic activity is more than participation in politics: it includes any and all types of activity in which the individual affects others around him rather than himself primarily. We may therefore speak of "civic morality" with propriety. Moral activity, conversely, must be thought of as including far more than the restraint of the individual to the accepted canons of honesty, sobriety, and the like. In these days of prohibition, the drinker is not merely a violator of usage or of individual morality, but, through his being the end-link in the anti-social and anticivic chain of which the bootlegger is the most prominent unit, he is immorally in civic action. Cases might be multiplied, but none would make the situation more clear.

One legitimate doubt, insufficiently met in the current literature of moral and civic education, relates to the choice of code of moral and civic action to be inculcated. There is, unfortunately, comparatively little in common save the actual wording, between the many systems of morals which exist in practice in modern America. Let us, for example, take the commandment, "Thou shalt not steal." Lip-service to this precept is found in every moral system; yet the precept means different things to different men. To the Puritan element that still exists in some localities, it means a very definite prohibition of any actual appropriation of another's goods; yet this same element rarely considers it as applicable to sharp practice whereby low-priced goods are foisted off for high prices. The labor-unionist, again, thinks of it as implying a fair day's

wages for a fair day's work. The wealthy taxpayer considers that it applies to the Government mainly, considering high taxes as stealing. Another case is the matter of the organization of labor-unions and the establishment of the closed shop. At one extreme we have Judge Gary, with his antagonism to both of these; he is only the spokesman of an influential group. At the other extreme we have the workingmen in such places as San Francisco, who consider that it is part of the necessary and right ethical training of their children to have them favorable towards both unions and the closed shop.

This difficulty must be faced and met. The tentative solution used in this article is to choose for each community those items that are of most importance for life to the people of that community, and, as far as possible, to leave for later work such items as represent divergent views of divergent sections of the community. Mathematically, the solution proposes to take as material for instruction the Highest Common Factor of the various moral and civic codes in actual practice in the community. This, of course, is insufficient, and must be reinforced by a judgment, based upon a survey of the situation by the school people, as to the most definite weaknesses or lacks of the community in moral and civic qualities. An illustration of this may be had from a New Jersey town, reasonably civic and moral, but in which the children, not brought up to obey the representatives of the state and city, were in danger from constant jay-walking on busy avenues. In such a town the problem of safety is not that of controlling the automobiles, but that of forming civic habits in the children.

The last difficulty is found in the question of religious sanctions and morality. Some educators, and many others, claim that there is no morality possible, and no moral teaching possible, without the introduction of religious sanctions. This implies religious teaching in the schools. The claim is not here made that moralty and religion are entirely separated.