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

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRANINNG OF CHILDREN. 41
cleanliness, order, honor, taste, self-respect, treatment of animals,
reading, vacation, pursuits, etc., can be brought quite within
the range of boy-and-girl interests by a sympathetic and tactful
teacher, and be made immediately and obviously practical.
All this is nothing more nor less than conscience-building. The
old superstition that children have innate faculties of such a
finished sort that they flash up and grasp the principle of things
by a rapid sort of first "intellection," an error that made all
departments of education so trivial, assumptive and dogmatic for
centuries before Comenius, Basedow and Pestalozzi, has been
banished everywhere save from moral and religious training,
where it still persists in full force. The senses develop first,
and all the higher intuitions called by the collective name of
conscience gradually and later in life. They first take the form
of sentiments without much insight, and are hence liable to be
unconscious affectation, and are caught insensibly from the environment with the aid of inherited predisposition, and only
made more definite by such talks as the above. But parents
are prone to forget that healthful and correct sentiments concerning matters of conduct are at first very feeble, and that the
sense of obligation needs the long and careful guardianship of
external authority. Just as a young medical student with a
rudimentary notion of physiology and hygiene is sometimes
disposed to undertake a more or less complete reform of his
diet, regimen, etc., to make it "scientific" in a way that an
older and a more learned physician would shrink from, so the
half-insights of boys into matters of moral regimen are far too
apt, in the American temperament, to expend, in precocious
emancipation and crude attempts at practical realization, the
force which is needed to bring their insights to maturity. Authority should be relaxed gradually, explicitly, and provisionally
over one definite department of conduct at a time. To distinguish right and wrong in their own nature is the highest and
most complex of intellectual processes. Most men and all
children are guided only by associations of greater or less subtlety. Perhaps the whole round of human duties might be
best taught by gathering illustrations of selfishness and tracing
it in its countless disguises and ramifications through every
stage of life. Selfishness is opposed to a sense of the infinite