Belmont chronicle. [volume] (St. Clairsville, Ohio) 1855-1973, 1879-02-27
Morals In the Schools.

Teachers who have adopted the Gradgrind
method of education will not care to read the
extract from an address by President Chad
bourne published in the Tribune recently; but
those who are still open to argument will get
q wholesome idea or two from the quotation:
Education" says this wise scholar, 'does
not consist in mastering languages, but is
found in'that moral training which extends
beyond the school room to the play ground
and street, and which teaches that meaner
thing can be done than to fail in a recitation"
Ii it be geod to find a college president inter-
doubly good to have from his lips presenta-
tion of the greatest need of those schools.
For assuredly there is no larger want in them
just now than the want of simple, practical,
moral training. Education, in its true sense
to amplifiy President Chadbourne's sentence
is not the cramming of certain facts and rules
! into the hard, little head of yound ADAM
II is the training that shall make his mind and
moral nature malleable for the work of life;
that shall cultivate honesty as well as msthe-
matical capacity, truthfulness as well as lin
guistics; that shall send the boy out to his
| labor with a clean sozl as well as a clever
head.
The lowering of moral tone that was one
of the legscies of the Cival War is perceived
and deplored constantly, and on all sides.
But that is all. 1t does not seem to occur to
Diogenes and Cassandra and their train of
walters that an excellent place IN which to
begin to remedy this evil is the public school.
| Would it not be easire TO make the young
Adam good than to take the ingrained wick
edness of years out of the tough old Adam?
Let spirit of manly sincerity and honor and
of simply womanly goodness be made to
enter boys and girls of the crowded scrools-
herein lies more hope for the future than we
are justified in feeling now. Better the stiff
est and sternest Puritansm oil a hundred and
| fifty years ago, than the f1abby sense of honor,
the adjustable sense of truth, which our
critics, with too much reason, credit to
modern American. Of course, there would
be no use in expecting in the Gradgrind sort
of teacher the moral inspiration that could
make him guide, with practical little sermon
here and there, his group of boys to higher
| life. But the teacher who goes to his work
with sense of its immense importance, with
realization of his obligation to something
higher than board OF education-such a
teacher holds a tremendous power in heart and
voice. In heart we say-for it is the practi
cal Christianity that moves to good living
and thinking that is wanted, rather than the
cut-and- dried morality of third-rate dog
matist. A child may be given an upward
bent with single sentence coming in happy
moment, but that sentence must be thing of
spirit; never mind the form. We do not
advocate long moral sermons in the schools;
but let there be constant current of quiet
instruction in the things that go to male men
and women true, honest and high-minded.
Fifteen minutes, for instance, could well be
spared from a days German instruction if
they went to make two or three boys feel
keenly that cruelty, of which there is far too
much in schools, was stupid and sneaking
thing. Not long ago in Western school a
boy received such savage and merciless treat
ment flom his mates that he died day or two
after from his injuries. What Sort of educa-
ton is it that does not teach children to feel
themselves degraded by brutality like this2 1t
is folly to leaYe all moral training to home and
PARENTS the hours in which child comes un-
der those influences are more than balanced
by the hours of school and play. Instruction
in good living, if it be not continuous like
daily bread and sunshine, is of small account;
and instruction in good living given constant
| ly, with simplicity, with heartfelt sincerity
and kinduess, is what children especially
need to receive from their teachers. What
shall it profit boy if he leaves school skilled
in figures, but untaught in the manly honor
that would make him anupright man of bust
ness2 Or girl if with her grammar and her
rhetoric she has not learned to speak the
words of TRUTH Of unselfshness, Of Christian
charily?-[ Weekly Tribune.