The Moral and Religious Training of Children [pp. 26-48]

MORAL1 AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 29
for the Platonic scruple whether virtue can be taught, and so
call their department pedagogy (which even Hegel defined as
pre-eminently the art of making men moral), despite the unpleasant associations which the word calls up, because the term
includes moral discipline in addition to mere didactics. They
assume that "life without knowledge is better than knowledge
which does not affect life," and that "all which frees the mind
is disastrous if it does not at the same time give self-control and
make us better." In a republic, then, in a peculiar sense, I conclude, moral, at the very least, as much as intellectual training
is the obligation which the schools owe to the state and even
to society.
To realize how great and peculiar is the need of moral training in this country we need simply to reflect that nowhere
are children emancipated from the control of parents at so
early an age, that nowhere is individual liberty respected, or
self-control and spontaneity addressed so precociously. The
American child, too, comes into incessant contact with children
of all social grades and nationalities, and is more liable to the
contagion of vice. It should also not be forgotten that frauds
in business and politics make public life, in which scarcely any
great event has of late been accomplished without scandal, a
school of immorality for the young. Private character is subjected to unusual strains in many ways, including all those
peculiar to a period of transition in matters of faith, and the
administration of justice, in which republics so easily and fatally
fail, is already in many portions of our land, to say the least,
exceedingly imperfect. It is not pleasant to dwell upon pictures
like these, nor is it pessimistic; but it is simply unpatriotic to
refuse to recognize tendencies which strike competent foreign
students of our institutions so forcibly and against which the influences of education should be mainly directed.
In most European systems moral is intimately bound up
with religious training; the moral code is derived from Scriptures, much as it is by very many teachers of religion in our
own country. Here, too, moral training has in the past been left
mainly to the church, the strong line of partition between
which and the state is perhaps the most original and cherished
solution of the religious question in history.