Moral teaching

“ If we review this progress in moral teaching we recognise that it corresponds to the natural and for the most part unconscious working of that instinctive test which, as was pointed out before, we apply to all moral questions, the test of universality. The pivots of all the prophetical teaching are the incessant inculcation of justice and mercy; justice which requires us to recognise the rights of others side by side with our own; mercy which demands our sympathy with the feelings of other creatures that can feel. ”

“ In the five introductory lectures we discussed the problem of unsectarian moral teaching, the efficient motives of good conduct, the opportunities of moral influence in schools, the classification of duties, and the moral status of the child on entering school. ”

“ In concluding this portion of the discussion, we may say that our conceptions of moral education have been too narrow, too formal, and too pathological. We have associated the term ethical with certain special acts which are labeled virtues and are set off from the mass of other acts, and are still more divorced from the habitual images and motives of the children performing them. Moral instruction is thus associated with teaching about these particular virtues, or with instilling certain sentiments in regard to them. The moral has been conceived in too goody-goody a way. ”

“ The search for instances makes the point of the fable clearer, while the expression of the thought in precise language, on which the teacher should always insist, tends to drive it home. It will be our aim in the present course of lectures to apply the methods of object teaching, now generally adopted in other branches, to the earliest moral instruction of children—an undertaking, of course, not without difficulties. ”

“ A fundamental understanding of moral principles in education
Nothing can be more useful than for the public and the teaching profession to understand their respective functions. The teacher needs to understand public opinion and the social order, as much as the public needs to comprehend the nature of expert educational service. ”

“ Let us not then attempt a better method than God has sanctioned; and in our intercourse with the young, let us not only deter them from the commission of evil by the fear of disfavour or the rod, but let us also incite them to virtue, by the hope of approbation and of a future reward.
3. In our enquiry into the practical working of the moral sense, we found, not only that there were motives of action employed for encouraging the pupil to virtue, and for deterring him from vice; but we found also, that these motives referred chiefly to God, to a future judgment, and to eternity. ”

“ On such a basis, moral education is inevitably reduced to some kind of catechetical instruction, or lessons about morals. Lessons 'about morals' signify as matter of course lessons in what other people think about virtues and duties. ”

“ And it was her happy lot to become the teacher to mankind of the truth of an alone and righteous God, and to be the creator of a moral ideal which is to-day the highest ethical standard of all the races of the Western world, and the most vital moral force at work in universal history. ”

“ A vast amount of good, I am persuaded, can be done in this way by stimulating the moral nature, by enabling the scholar to detect the finer shades of right and wrong, helping him to trace temptation to its source, and erecting in his mind barriers against evil-doing, founded on a realizing sense of its consequences. ”

“ This general maxim being laid down, it remains for the student to study history, to analyse experience, and by a close and careful investigation into human nature and human relations to elaborate a moral code which would bring about general happiness and well-being. ”

“ They concerned the powers and possibilities of man in the crowning endowments of his nature, and in the highest ascent of their evident intention and adaptation. They touched the great problems of personal and social welfare in the most vital relations and decisive interests. So the old sages became moralists and their great themes were the themes of virtue and duty. Not very deeply, however, did they, for centuries, succeed in penetrating the rational principles of the moral life and the authority of the moral judgments. ”

“ If we teach righteousness, let us also practice righteousness in every sense of the word; if we teach morality let us be moral; let us see to it that we preserve ourselves within the bounds of all the good which we teach to others. ”

“ But when we approach the subject with an express view to moral culture, we must cross the field of emotional association in general by a new track.
The newly-appointed professors of the theory of education are perhaps not yet fully aware that, when they venture upon the troubled arena of moral education, they will not be able to evade the long-standing question. What is the moral faculty? ”

“ The foregoing pages will, I trust, have exhibited with sufficient clearness the nature of the two great divisions of moral philosophy—the school which proceeds from the primitive truth that all men desire happiness, and endeavours out of this fact to evolve all ethical doctrines, and the school which traces our moral systems to an intuitive perception that certain parts of our nature are higher or better than others. ”

“ When the pupil has been brought to the point where he regards his moral education as a matter of serious import, instruction in conjunction with a growing [196] knowledge of the world may bring it about that a glow of moral sentiment permeates his whole thought, and that the idea of a moral order unites on the one hand with his religious concepts, and with his self-observation on the other. ”

“ In these ways he is organising his desires with reference to some relatively permanent and comprehensive aim. The great purpose of moral education is to encourage the organisation of desires under some worthy end. Right desires are as important for the child as true knowledge. It has been said, and with much truth, that the great aim of all education is to teach men and women to desire the right things. ”

“ And the perplexing phenomenon of wide diversity of moral judgments in daily life, to which we have had occasion several times already to refer, resulting from the different degrees of correctness with which the relations of life are understood and interpreted, enforces the same truth. The moral power is educable. It sees its objects in the light, not in darkness, nor fully in dawn. It acts best when flooded with the fullest knowledge. ”

“ I am in the habit of speaking of God to children as the Giver of love and goodness, and of the power of thought and action, rather than as the Creator of the outward world, and have found that the tyrannizing unity of the soul's instinct did the rest.
In what is called religious education, teachers often do great harm, with the best intentions, to finely strung moral organizations. Encouragement to good should altogether predominate over warning and fault-finding. ”

“ When Education is good, no point of morality will be reckoned of more importance than the distribution of Praise and Blame; no act will be considered more immoral than the misapplication of them. They are the great instruments we possess for ensuring moral acts on the part of our Fellow-creatures; and when we squander away, or prostitute those great causes of virtue, and thereby deprive them of a great part of their useful tendency, we do what in us lies to lessen the quantity of Virtue, and thence of Felicity, in the world. ”

“ Character is more than intellect, love is more than knowledge, religion is more than morality; and a great heart brings us closer to God, nearer to all goodness, than a bright mind. Education is essentially moral, and the intellectual qualities themselves, which we seek to develop, derive their chief efficacy from underlying ethical qualities upon which they rest and from which they receive their energy and the power of self-control. Inequality of will is the great cause of inequality of mind; and the will is strengthened by the practice of virtue, as the body by food and exercise. ”

“ If we look into the works on ethics, from Aristotle down to our own day—take up, for instance, the work of Herbert Spencer on the Data of Ethics, or that of Leslie Stephen on the Science of Ethics—I think you will find that in no two works is there any precise agreement as to what are the primary grounds of moral obligation. ”

“ But apart from education, the question of the bedrock on which morals rest, the foundation on which a moral edifice can be built that will stand secure against the storms of life—that is a question of perennial interest, and it must be answered by each of us, if we would have a test of Right and Wrong, would know why Right is Right, why Wrong is Wrong. ”

“ WE, desiring to improve public morals, must begin by reforming the heart of man; and in order to reform the heart of man, it is necessary first of all to place education upon a sound basis.
When man comes into being between Heaven and Earth, there are certain moral obligations in his daily life, which are for the learned and simple alike; to seek after the mysterious and to practice strange arts is not to follow the example of the wise and the worthy. ”

“ His education and rank of life, instead of having been by any means of the lowest order, were such as, in the judgment of the world, and on the authority of experience, are held of necessity to humanize and inform the mind, and to communicate perfectly just conceptions of moral distinctions. ”

“ But, nevertheless, the whole period of high-school work should be a contribution to the end of moral character. Let us get rid, at the outset, of the idea that a moral life is a mechanical obedience to rules and conventionalities, a cut-and-dried affair, a matter that lies in but one province of our nature, a formalism, and learn that the whole being, its purposes and activities, the heroic impulses and the commonplace duties lie within its circle. Everything a man is and does, learns and becomes, constitutes his moral character. ”

“ We note how emphatically the field in which this wisdom is to be exercised is declared to be the moral conduct of life. 'Righteousness and judgment and equity' are 'wise dealing,' and the end of true wisdom is to practise these. ”

“ It does not harm the scholar to have before him the ideal of perfect scholarship; nor the teacher to have before him the ideal of a perfect school; nor the legislator to have before him the ideal of perfect law. Gordon, The Christ of To-day, 134—“The moral goal must be a flying goal; the standard to which we are to grow must be ever rising; the type to which we are to be conformed must have in it inexhaustible fulness.” ”

“ Any action is moral, which can be praised or blamed. The moral faculties are those which determine moral action. These faculties are, the Conscience, Will, and Affections. In this division, I do not attempt metaphysical exactness, but only what I can make my readers understand. When I speak of educating these faculties, I do not mean to separate the process from that of religious education in general; for nothing can be well done, in the formation of character, without religious principle and motives at the foundation. ”

“ As I consider virtue and vice to consist in action, and not in opinion, and as this action has its seat in the will, and not in the conscience, I shall confine my inquiries chiefly to the influence of physical causes upon that moral power of the mind, which is connected with volition, although many of these causes act likewise upon the conscience, as I shall show hereafter. The state of the moral faculty is visible in actions, which affect the well-being of society. ”

“ But to pass from the one to the other, it seemed to us proper, by way of conclusion, to introduce here an order of researches which belongs to both practical and theoretical morals, the study, namely, of the means man has at his disposal in his moral self-perfection, either by curing himself of vice, or in advancing in virtue: this is what we call moral medicine and gymnastics. ”

“ Can one instruct without accustoming young minds to work, to obedience, to correct habits of thought; without putting into their hands good books; without giving them good examples? It is most true that one does not form men with pure and abstract science alone,—it is necessary to add the letters, history, morality, religion. The teacher, besides, should study the character of his pupils, should, through work and moral and physical exercises, put down presumption, correct unmanliness, combat selfishness, anticipate or restrain the passions. ”

“ It is generally admitted, for example, that such mental qualities as attention, memory, judgment, intelligence, reason, such moral qualities as loyalty, courage, truthfulness, kindness, unselfishness, such semi-moral qualities as cleanliness, orderliness, carefulness, alertness, industry, punctuality, are capable of being developed by education. ”

“ At this age the moral part of education will wisely confine itself to laying a foundation of good habits, to the careful exclusion of all evil communication and the deadly contagion of wicked example. ”

“ A chief part of our remaining task will be to make plain how the new intellectual life born in the revival of the fifteenth century, and expressing itself since in every department of human life, thought, and activity, has reacted upon the moral feelings and judgments of men and taught321 them to seek the ultimate sanctions of a true morality in the deep universal intuitions of the human heart and conscience. ”

“ It is our business to discover such secondary principles, and in our instruction to lead the pupil to the recognition of them. The nature of the formulas of duty which we have in mind—formulas which shall express the generalized moral experience of civilized mankind, will appear more plainly if we examine the processes by which we arrive at them. An example will best elucidate: Suppose that I am asked to give a lesson on the duty of truthfulness. At the stage which we have now reached it will not be enough merely to emphasize the general commandment against lying. ”