CHAPTER 2

THE DISCIPLINE OF CHARACTER

Moral action, it is never to be forgotten, is immersed in circumstances.
                                          —MacCunn in The Making of Character.

Discipline is always of character

Although custom permits us to divide discipline for the purposes of discussion into two parts, it is in truth one and the same for training both mental and moral; without it, we cannot exercise guidance or evoke effort of any sort. Discipline, therefore, in the formation of character, extends its sphere of activity even into the setting forth of a lesson and into all the details of instruction. In teaching well or ill we encourage the formation of good habits or we check them; we make the formation of bad habits more difficult or we make them inevitable. And by habits we must mean habits both moral and intellectual, for the two are inextricably associated. But we find it convenient for practical purposes to isolate the process of evoking or communicating knowledge, because knowledge consists largely in the apprehension of facts, and such apprehension is a part only, though an indispensable part, of the building up of a sound mind. Knowledge is a unity, it is, as an object, the same for all, though different minds may stand in a more or less perfect relation to it. Morality or character is a tendency or will to choose a right course of conduct, and unless we had a system of casuistry we could not set forth exactly the outside or objective conditions of all right action.

The education of a man is never completed

The key-note of the situation is the necessity of recognising that for man education is never completed. Whatever man is destined to be, we know perfectly well that he has never reach the highest point attainable. All his achievements are but an earnest of what he can be. To profane history the perfect man is not known; the divine standard has never been reached by mere man in any form of religion which has set up an ideal. Until, therefore, this unattainable ideal is reached, we must press forward; it is a law of our being. Other creatures may be developed and trained to apparent perfection. We may breed and exercise our domestic animals until we would wish them to be no better; and we have no evidence that they have any consciousness of completeness or incompleteness. But man cannot escape his ideal; he must always be growing. We know what purpose is attained by the “virtue” of a horse, as Plato might say, but the chief thing that we know about human “virtue” is that it changes in detailed application with every new combination of circumstances.

The educator must open up a wide prospect, but not give his pupil too much to achieve in successive stages

If this is the case, then the educator must at once widen and narrow his task. He must communicate to his pupil an impulse which opens up endless possibilities of progress, to be handed on from himself to another generation, perhaps; he must give him the power of “going on.” And he must be careful not to overwhelm his pupil and discourage him by giving him at successive stages too great a burden for each stage to carry. To secure the first end, he must make his pupil, as a result of discipline, as nearly as possible independent of circumstances and of external guidance, by calling into life the internal motives that will always drive him forward. He must leave none of the functions of intelligence and character dormant. But to secure the second end, he must graduate the tasks which he sets so that the sense of power may grow continuously, the pupil freely working out his own salvation, conquering each time a little world, though beyond it lies immensity.

The pupil’s place in his own education

Two views have been held as to the potentiality of teaching. Some people have said that the teacher must let the pupil altogether alone—that “Nature” herself will be sufficient to develop him and shield him from harm. Others have said that the one thing needed to secure the perfection of men is teaching. It will not be surprising if we find that the truth lies between these extremes, though truth is at least touched somewhere by each. The teacher or educator may, indeed, interfere too much or unwisely, and he may interfere too little.

The teacher’s place is in fact determined by his pupil’s. The pupil must be called upon to take a share, the chief share, in the task. Nothing else will do.

The clean sheet of paper

There are two opposite errors that seem to have prevented this fact from being properly seen and interpreted. First of all there has been the belief that, in dealing with a pupil, you have from the first nothing to do but to write on a clean sheet of paper whatever you wish to be there. The philosophers who held this view regarded all knowledge as proceeding solely from bodily sensations, and all processes of reasoning as being modifications and combinations of sensations; in which case we have nothing to do but to reason with our pupil from the first, because sensations are reasons and reasoning is nothing but appeal to sensations.

Here we see there is little room for independence of the part of the pupil; the thing most important is what is contributed by the teacher. And the pupil being regarded prematurely as capable of assimilating ideas which we know to be beyond his intellectual digestion, we have a huge excess of memory work, if any result at all, in the hope that “knowledge” thus acquired will be assimilated by some mysterious process of reason. On the other hand, again, successive appeals to the senses directly, giving little time for quiet mental discrimination, tend to destroy the power of attention, for attention is the power of ignoring or suppressing many things in favour of a few or one. The persistent cultivation of what is called “observation” to the exclusion of reflection may end not only in bird-wittedness but in a positive weakening of will-power. In the formation of character this leads to cant, which is the tendency to imitate by rote; and we can have canting action as well as canting speech, neither being of necessity consciously insincere.

Innate ideas

The second serious hindrance to a proper conception of the pupil as co-operator in his own education has been the belief in the origin of all knowledge in innate ideas. This may be held in two different forms. It may be thought that each new human being is born with his full complement of innate characteristics and ideas, or it may be thought that all the characteristics and ideas of each man are merely the resultant general effect on him of those who have lived before him, his ancestors and predecessors in the world.

Either of these views, if held without considerable reservations, may lead us to doubt all individual responsibility; and indeed contemporary legislation seems sometimes to have been conceived in this spirit. But the psychologist and the educator alike must ignore them, and for practical purposes assume that though they may modify our practice and make us careful, they are not to dictate the character of our efforts in school and the field of discipline generally. The influence of heredity is, no doubt, considerable; but everything tends to confirm the belief, implicit in all educational effort, that environment is much more powerful.

The irrepressible life in children must be used as the chief motive-power in education

We must strike a balance. We must not leave children to grow up as savages, by cultivating their senses alone. We must not even leave them to the education of their senses together with the mere coercive influence of social institutions, for this would at best produce a spiritless uniformity, and at worse might leave criminals on our hands. We must call other powers into play, and educate. But what powers? The powers that really lie readiest to our hand. It is our chief business to use for the child’s own good the life and irrepressible activity of life that are in him, to give him the knowledge that he can develop himself, and the will to do it even when other persons have ceased to interest themselves in his “education. We have, in fact, to set up the right habits and the tendency to form right habits, that is, to do good habitually. The effect of a good habit is that we can depend on it for suggesting the right act at the right time. It is therefore a form of orderliness; that is, impulses in well-disciplined people are so well ordered or arranged that it is easier to do right than wrong.

The first need is orderliness

The first necessity then for the creation of good habits is orderliness, either in an individual or in a class. When this orderliness is produced purposely we call it discipline, which is the manipulation of external agencies in such a way as to make the formation of good habits easy and of bad habits difficult. Speaking roughly, we sometimes talk about the “discipline” of circumstances, the “discipline” of events; but this is to ascribe to outer nature a self-consciousness and intention which it is not proved to possess. The pressure of circumstances may set up good habits, but the adjustment in such cases, the effort to profit by them, originates in the person affected; he is moved by circumstances to reflect, and thence to discipline himself.

Good and bad habits grow by what they feed on

Good habits may grow by use, and bad habits are best eradicated by lack of exercise. The teacher must therefore provide opportunity for the one sort, encouraging them, stimulating them; he must give no openings for the other sort, and, if they appear, nip them and starve them. Habit is, as Professor James says, the great conservative force of human nature and human society. Instincts by themselves give little guarantee of personal or social safety; for instincts are blind, they are that in us which makes us act to produce an effect without meaning to do so, on impulse. They are blind reactions set up by the needs of our physical framework. They take no account of consequences. Habit, on the other hand, though it ultimately tends to become automatic, is set up in the first instance by intention, by the exercise of will. If we set up good habits, we prosper; we “fund and capitalise our acquisitions and live at ease on the interest of the fund,” in the words of the writer last quoted. We will to do a good thing in the first instance, and will again and again until the pain and difficulty of the first effort pass away, and we “live on the interest of the fund” so amassed.

Discipline is the external cultivation of habit

Discipline then, from the teacher’s point of view, is neither more nor less than the steady endeavour to cultivate in his pupils the habit of willing well by providing the right atmosphere and the right food. Virtue and vice themselves are habits, though they imply also a power of seizing new circumstances not implied in mechanical habit. Let us see, now, what the teacher can do to check the beginnings of evil and encourage the beginnings of good; to maintain the good habit and to starve the evil; to give a pupil the habit of controlling the acts that make habit.

Habits are closely dependent on physical conditions

He must first of all bear in mind that habits have physical foundations or at least connexions. A thing is done more easily a second time because it has been done once. Physiologists assure us that the nervous system has undergone a corresponding modification. We must not therefore wonder or be discouraged if the effort to break a bad trick in an individual, or even more, in a class, seems to be continually baffled. Mere physical drill, as teachers know, may be here be found of great service, for it accustoms a class not only to perform the motions immediately prescribed, but also to take up with alacrity the sudden word of command at other times. A teacher can indeed do much to make the physical foundations strong. To set up a respect for cleanliness and brightness, we should surround our pupils with clean and beautiful things; what hope would there be of stimulating a lively mental picture of clean and lovely things in a dirty schoolroom, ill-kept, disorderly? It would be, strictly speaking, physically impossible. This is one of the ways—a physical way—by which the teacher creates an atmosphere favourable to discipline. He manipulates the circumstances under his control in such a way as to make it easier to act well than to act ill. We must therefore do our best to deliver our younger and more impressionable pupils from capricious or irrational temptation, by surrounding them with good order and a clean atmosphere.

The proof of the pupil’s power to himself

When the habit of self-control has been set up in small things, then, and not till then, the temptation, providing it is not too strong, may be permitted in order that the will may be strengthened to resist by exercise. We must not, of course, throw inordinate temptation in the way of our class. We cure small habits of deceit and the habit of thinking little of such things before we leave our class alone when it is answering examination papers. This is made necessary by the physical, some would even say the “mechanical,” foundations of habit. The teacher must next be vigilant to permit no backsliding. If we are endeavouring to set up a good habit, it is clear that we must keep the road as clear as possible from the obstructions of a sudden check. If we have given orders that a certain thing is to be done at a certain time in a certain way, then, supposing that we have a general end in view, we find it all the more difficult to compass it if we allow a lapse. The teacher must see that both his pupils and himself make a good start. Many of the difficulties in the way of setting up good habits in an individual pupil or a class arise from an implicit disbelief in the possibility of change from the bad habits. It may not, for instance, be possible for a person who has no habits of regular industry to know that such habits are cultivable and ultimately pleasant. It is clearly then the teacher’s business to watch for or to make an opportunity to show the pupil his own power over himself. A sense of the exercise of power is itself pleasant and carries within itself a guarantee of repetition. The consciousness of the power to make, to produce an independent result, is the most powerful of all educating influences. The cultivation of the habit of obedience owes much to this principle. No day passes in school without providing for some, probably for most, pupils an opportunity to do something which in its superficial aspect is difficult or disagreeable. Every fresh intellectual effort is, in its measure, painful. The schoolmaster does for his pupil what Professor James advises every grown man and woman should do for themselves, he “keeps the faculty of effort alive by a little (gratuitous) exercise every day”. Habit may otherwise destroy initiative by making the pupil the slave of convention. Hence the often-seen depravity of children coming from overstrict homes. No real power of will has been developed; every moral effort has been make for them by some one else. We learn therefore that we must not deaden initiative by excessive coercion. A very strict school-system, displaying an excess of routine orderliness and repression, may secure a fictitious orderliness and appearance of good conduct not justified by subsequent development. Military order in school should therefore be exceptional, not habitual; a tonic, not a food.

Provision of opportunity for free choice

Obedience alone may be slavish and kill initiative; we must provide opportunity for free choice. Obedience is best cultivated by leaving at most times a large measure of discretion to pupils, by not subjecting them perpetually to the word of command. Teachers do not always think enough of the necessity of providing variety of opportunity for the exercise of good habits and for the detection of defects. Most people understand that defects of one or another sort will display themselves in especial force at some particular stage of development. Under ordinary circumstances, for instance, we may expect our pupils to display defects of feeling most unreservedly in early youth, when the feelings are usually most acute and the will is less effective for purposes of concealment, the two facts together explaining the obvious selfishness of youth. The forms which selfishness takes in persons of older standing are more or less subtle modifications—the vulgar noisiness of the underbred person, disagreeable tricks of behaviour, the careless use of the property of the community that includes oneself or of external corporations, and so on. The teacher, then, must watch the early signs vigilantly, while at the same time providing room for the exercise of self-restraint. Small children in their sphere must not strike or pinch one another, and should “behave mannerly at table”; adolescents in their sphere must have the care of common interests and corporate property imposed on them as a part of their discipline, a tradition in which our English public schools are particularly fortunate. It may well be believed that our own countrymen show, on the whole, a genuine talent for self-government because it has become a general practice in our schools to hand over some of the common concerns of the whole body to the responsible and intelligent care of pupils themselves. The government which in the Kindergarten should entrust the care of the common sponge to one little child, the government which in the middle school throws orderly duties on monitors, the rule which in public schools devolves certain details of discipline on prefects—each of these proceeds by the same route. We do not recognise the need for the ostentatious control of clubs and games in dealing with big boys and girls, though teachers are bound to assure themselves that things are working smoothly and that the growing society has the full advantage, as far a possible, of the experience of antiquity. For instance, we may not directly interfere with the conduct of a school club, but we are bound to provide all means for its business-like conduct. Little ones we encourage to play without malice; and we should give big boys and girls who have formal meetings access to a “Chairman’s Handbook,” so teaching them the rules of the game, and placing their little provincial concerns in proper relation to the bigger affairs in which as members of an adult community they will have to take a responsible share. It is part of the teacher’s chief business to get his pupils to recognise that laws exist not for the increase of restraint but for the increase of freedom. We forbid both ourselves and others to do or leave undone certain things solely in order that there may be more general freedom in the result to be divided up amongst all individuals. This is the kind of service which tends to perfect freedom.

Correctness and precision

But not only must we consider the stage of development which our pupils have reached; we must also consider the varying circumstances in which they may be placed. It will not do for us to enjoin the duty of orderliness and neatness of person and to permit disorderliness of thought. Correctness and precision of thought should be maintained as carefully as propriety of person; just as, in the sphere of instruction, we can make our teaching of composition or rhetoric effectual only if we exact intelligent and intelligible speech at all times. The order of development may be thus expressed by the individual: I try; I do; I become. The first step is the effort to do or to make something. The total result is a permanent modification of character, which is good or bad according to the purpose which effort had in view. Effort implies difficulty, difficulty is disagreeable. Therefore, discipline teaches the pupil to overcome something against the grain for the sake of what lies beyond it, the achievement of something. The reward is not only that the effort meets with immediate success, but also that the next step, and all subsequent steps in succession, are easier. Physiologically speaking, nerve-structure is modified and a more constant “state” is set up. The pupil “becomes” something different from what he was before; the change has that general character which we call: “qualitative”; it is a change or growth of character.

The school environment is artificial

We must recognise, teachers as we are, that at best we are only “journeymen,” day-jobbers, assistants, and that the true and sufficient teacher ought to be the parent. The school is an artificial institution, and to the schoolmaster and schoolmistress their special work is assigned because the excessive differentiation of occupation on the one hand and the increase of conventional claims on the other take parents from what would appear to be their first duty, the education and supervision of their children.

Home the best nursery of virtue

If the chief means available for the production of a good character is the setting up of good habits, it is easy to see that the more permanent environment must present the more constant opportunity for exercise. In the next place, father and mother should have a more minute knowledge of the tendencies of the children that are theirs, the children whose personality, bodily and spiritual, springs from their own, than any teacher should be expected to acquire in the necessary reserve of corporate school-life. Again, the amiable or social instincts arise most spontaneously in the home by the sympathetic interaction of kindness rendered from the first dependence of the child on its mother. And finally, the little home society has its aboriginal legislators, by whose benevolent will the common happiness is visibly determined, whose pleasure forms the first common standard of reference in cases of doubt. This is the first form of conscience—the sense of pleasing or displeasing a parent. “The narrow limitation of the family circle and the restriction of sympathy to its few members are the most natural preliminary conditions for the development of sympathetic interest and good-will,” says Professor Rein. The good home, then, and the good mother in particular, are under ordinary circumstances indispensable for the production of the good character. We may not, of course, say that good man and good women have not come from surroundings which have been, to all appearance, entirely evil, just as beautiful flowers may grow upon refuse heaps; but there has been something special and extraordinary, something unaccountable, in their constitution or history, which has vanquished the diabolic influence. The business of the teacher is not primarily with such as these; he deals with the ordinary case, not genius, moral or intellectual.

The parents depute their duties to teachers

But society is so constituted, and father and mother have so many things to do, legitimate or unnecessary, outside the home, that they must needs hand over their duties, as for many generations they have already done, to the teacher, who undertakes to specialise himself for this work. He does not always try to train himself, we know only too well; he often thinks that as nature has (unfortunately) prescribed no test of fitness before people undertake the duties of parentage, so also art need not prescribe any rules for the admission of unfit people to exercise the privileges of teaching. Alas! the possession of many children is no proof of fitness to possess them, nor does the wielding of the rod give a real right to handle it. If it did, the position of the teacher who makes his first experiments unwatched and uncorrected is that of the good woman who was rebuked for feeding her year-old babe on salt herring. “I ought to know,” she said, “how to bring up children. I’ve buried ten.”

The school a half-way house between home and the world

But the school is a half-way house between the home, on the one hand, incompletely provided with the time and apparatus necessary, and on the other hand, the world, where the penalty of unfitness or unpreparedness is exacted so pitilessly. Or shall we say that the school is rightly a kind of “purgatory,” in its true and legitimate sense for the pupil, even if too often it is a “purgatory” in its secondary or derived sense for the ill-prepared or dispirited teacher?

The school provides precisely that large field for the exercise of virtue and for training, physical, moral, and mental, which the smaller family circle may lack, though the wisely ordered family circle may be as good as the best school—nay, better—except perhaps for the cultivation of the first aptitudes for conducting public affairs publicly.

The school can confirm home training and fill up gaps. Virtues and vices

Consider the personal or private habits which the school helps to train. Unselfishness is fostered at home by persistent checking of unpleasant tricks, bad habits in care of the person and at table, the abandonment of things to be done by others which should be done by oneself. It is taught on a large scale at school by enforcing respect for the common convenience, comfort, and property. Habits of personal cleanliness and propriety become at school more inevitable because the loss of public respect is more impressive than the reproof of those with whom we are more familiar. An evil temper and disobedience meet at the school a more automatic punishment that they can at home, for the immediate obedience exacted from a large body is easily recognised as lying at the root of the law and order which are necessary for its existence. At home we often choose the easier path of passing over disobedience, just because it is easer, but at school it is not easier, and so we more consistently repress it. Shyness, often really a want of trustfulness, which is cured at home by encouragement to fear nothing and to suspect nobody of a desire to hurt or belittle one, must be finally routed at a wisely administered school by the tact of the master or mistress who teaches the ill-bred shy boy or nervous girl to do something well enough to deserve legitimate praise and public respect. Cruelty shows itself at home in the natural weakness of children’s constructive imagination and sympathies acted on by the love of power which seems common, in greater or less degree, to every healthy-minded person. At home we check it by directly cultivating the sympathies and teaching the child to imagine itself in the place of others, giving it opportunities for the practice of helpfulness. At school we have to cope with it most commonly in the form of bullying of younger by older boys and in the spitefulness which is understood to occupy a corresponding position among girls. For this there is nothing but a gentle vigilance and Arnold’s plan of making the older the responsible guides and friends of the younger, thus providing a benevolent sphere for the exercise of power and influence. Even fagging may be made beneficent by a cheerful recognition of a natural institution conditionally on the older boys recognising their responsibility for the comfort and progress of the younger. And it is worthwhile to point our here that one of the conditions of the successful exercise of discipline by boys or girls themselves is that they should be of varying ages. A monitorial or præfectorial system is rarely successful in a school if rulers and ruled are of nearly the same standing.

The sense of justice as a motive with young people

A somewhat serious mistake to be carefully avoided is the endeavour to appeal to a very young child’s sense of justice to the neglect of his sympathies. The elemental social feelings are there to our hand, but justice is a very complex and highly intellectual conception not to be looked for in a little child. It is far safer to rely upon the cultivation of the sympathetic imagination. The great practical moral injunction is not to distribute justice to every one,—in which case few of us would escape whipping,—but to do to others as we should like them to do to us. This is the way to cure the little habits of selfishness and greed, which make youth unlovely and develop into grosser forms,—cruelty, discourtesy, uncharity, in the course of adolescence. When however the boy or girl has been taught to reflect, and has learnt to overcome the natural disinclination to give to everyone his due, our task is an easier one, for we may then make open appeal to a growing sense of fairness. Justice is, in a sense, a compendium of virtue, at all events in one stage of human development; but it is, just because of that, a comparatively late stage, and the teacher must act accordingly.

The school may be a seed-plot of public vices, and for some forms of virtue provides no exercise

The school is, as we see, particularly well adapted to be the nursery of what may be called the public virtues; and it is equally the seed-plot of public vices. For the sowing of some of the private virtues it is very stony ground indeed. As our school system is constituted, if a boy does not learn to be chivalrous and to respect weakness at home, he is not likely to learn the lesson elsewhere. Sisters and mothers are not common in the monastic community of a public school. If a boy or girl has not learnt at home to be generous in the imputation of motive, the absence at school of the intimate companionship and daily conversation of wiser and older folk will leave the tare to grow till it becomes habitual uncharity. Again, the courage that enables us to bear pain at home and to speak the truth is sorely tried when it is called upon to help us to face obloquy and public dislike in a righteous cause against large numbers amongst whom our whole life is lived. Of course the lesson has to be learnt, but in a school where the “tone” is not good, it cannot be learnt. Hence the very solid ground of Dr. Arnold’s peremptory exclusion from Rugby of all moral suspects. For more harm is done in a school by a few influential bad boys or girls than good by a few, however much respected, who comport themselves well; and every one knows how difficult it is to pursue and destroy an evil spirit that has once secured its hold. We cannot of course all hope to possess the powers held by Head Masters in the position of Dr. Arnold, nor is it certain that most of us would use such powers wisely; and on the other hand, as schools come to be managed by state functionaries or elected bodies, the Head Masters and Head Mistresses find themselves (for good or ill, this is not the place to say) much less autocratic. But the power of school-life and school-death once generally regarded as the inalienable privilege of the Head of a school certainly makes it easer to remove the elements of disturbance and demoralisation in good time.

The size of schools

This necessity for vigilance in dealing with the plague spots is a very strong argument against the undue enlargement of schools in all grades. In the highest grade of schools the Head may count on having on his staff a large proportion of seasoned and responsible colleagues, whose vigilance and sense of duty to the whole school may be as perfect as his own, and whose knowledge of pupils, if the school is of the residential type, will be ample and intimate. But in enormous schools of other grades, where masters and mistresses see their pupils only for a very small part of the working day, and where they have unmanageably large classes, the difficulties of satisfactory guidance and supervision are an unreasonable tax on the resources of every one.

Truthfulness

Truthfulness is not a virtue that we can easily isolate. It is almost as much the product of the sound intelligence as of the healthy temperament. Neither heart nor head can do their best unless fair treatment is meted out most scrupulously; treat your pupils with justice, and their good sense will be the best guarantee of a reciprocity of fairness. It has often been noticed that behind the lie there is always some meanness or selfishness, a desire to outwit for gain or to evade a penalty rightly imminent. It is these that must be tackled in lying of the genuine sort, and the younger the offender the more cautious must the treatment be. A child must be won to truth and courage; it cannot be frightened or bullied into it. Appeal first to the sense of self-respect, of dignity. What is the child’s ideal? Show that untruthfulness falls below it. We must not predicate “wickedness” of a little chid and tell him he is wicked. To do this is itself false and wicked. A timid little child may be drawn into the habit of truthfulness by being made to understand that to be trustworthy is a mark of grown-up goodness. “Grown-up-ness” is his ideal.

A pupil will soon begin to feel the force of intellectual truthfulness. The careful teacher who faces the difficulties of learning in the company of his class, who performs an experiment, construes an unseen passage, works out a problem, with an obvious desire not to let himself or the class be deceived into thinking that a point has been mastered when it has only been ignored, is cultivating that taste and preference for seeing things as they are and for so describing them which are the essence of the virtue.

Bad teaching, and especially bad logic, may plant untruthfulness in the soul

Careless teachers do most of their proper mischief because they have not acquired the scrupulous habit of intellectual truthfulness. The lack of it is not felt by themselves; they would be indignant if we tried to bring it home to them. But from the want of logic and from a touching belief in the performance of “experiments” as “science”, the science lessons in particular are often full of reckless deceptions. When, for instance, a child is invited to infer from a single illustration, miscalled “experiment,” that “heat causes things to expand,” he is made to commit that particular offence against logic and truth which is the fountain of most of the errors of reasoning that plague mankind—the inference of a general law from one particular. Lessons in other matters may, in their degree, all conduce to the same end, if the teacher’s logic is always of like quality. Imperfect classifications, bad definitions, fallacies of every kind, the fruit of a lack of logical training, all tend to nebulousness of teaching. It is not too much to say, then, that the first duty incumbent on the teacher who would teach truly and teach truthfulness is to learn and to practise the elementary rules of logic. Psychology may wait until the teacher knows how to discriminate a good argument from a bad one. As soon as he knows the meaning of logical inference, self-respect will not permit him to hoodwink himself or allow others to be hoodwinked.

It is excellent discipline, not for pupils alone, if a teacher will put himself out to find some work in which he is not proficient, and will do it with the class for company. Most of us could probably find some such gap in the omniscience which encases us. When the class sees how the teacher addresses himself boldly and honestly to each difficulty, every member of it learns a lesson which he can never forget; he feels that he has the same kind of wits as his master, perhaps less nimble and well trained, but capable of being used to equally good effect if used honestly.

Loafing

One of the most fruitful causes of school vices, large and small, is loafing. A man who has nothing better to do in life than to look on is always a poor creature, generally useless, often dangerous. Boys or girls, young men or young women, who naturally abound in energy and the desire for movement, must either work healthily, or else find a vent for their super-abundant powers in some kind of useless or vicious excess. Loafing leaves the loafer at the mercy of the first pressure or temptation that comes to quicken the latent energy. Boys and girls should therefore have something to do; they must not merely stare and gape at others. Hence the justification of the compulsory games of the great schools. There is an undoubted excess of athleticism at many, even most of the boys’ boarding schools of these days. But the chief harm done is not to the athletes. It is true that the athletes receive more than their due share of honour and therefore waste a good deal of time; but they really do something well, and though they run the serious risk of imperfect development (like an ill-roasted egg, all o’ one side) they do learn to work and to strive for a healthy end. But those boys and man who stand in crowds at the football or cricket match, and think themselves sportsmen because they applaud, get no good from the process whatsoever. This, of course, touches only those who have no interests that carry them abroad for other purposes, filling their minds and freshening their bodies. The quieter folk who wander afield in the service of natural history or geology or botany or the like are not loafers. They are getting fresh air and exercise in the way that pleases them best; they are not merely looking on; they are doing.

Morality not to be taught without concrete exercise

Can morality be taught, as such, in the school? And if so, can it be taught at any definite age or stage? Or should good conduct be taught as occasion serves at all times with regard to the pupil’s power of comprehension and power to will? I think we shall probably take the latter view. Teaching should and can always be moral, but to teach morality by mere precept is impossible. If we address ourselves habitually to the task of isolating a virtue or a desirable opinion on conduct and presenting it thus to young people without being sure that they have the means to carry it into instant action or to feel its bearing on life, we are shutting our eyes to fact of which the teacher cannot afford to be ignorant. For first of all, the progress and growth of character, as of mind, is slow and in stages; and, secondly, the immature mind has not the experience necessary for realising the abstractions so presented to it. At most, our eloquence and earnestness may argue the young mind into apparently and in good faith accepting our opinion; but the effect attenuates itself into mere sentimentality unless the life of our pupil offers an immediate or certainly very early opportunity for exemplifying the precept of perceiving it in action. To teach a virtue without the concrete material in your hand, so to speak, you must needs appeal to the powers of reflection and judgment which are, as yet, so weak. You cannot hope to get a sincere and effectual acquiescence; your process is a kind of intellectual bullying and there is no such thing as purely intellectual virtue. The oldest of us must have stuff to work on. Hazlitt puts this well. “The habit of fixing the attention,” says he, “on the imaginary and abstracted, deprives the mind equally of energy and fortitude” ^[1]

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