Morning journal and courier., 1888-06-16

The Lecture by Superintendent Balliet
 or SprlAgAeld-ssFeelin and Their Culture"
 At 4:45 Mr. Thomas M. Ballet, superin- tendsnt of schools in Springfield, Mess., de- ivered at High school hall lecture on "Feelings and Their Culture" The hall was about ha1f filed and many teachers were in the audience. Superintendent Dutton i'm troduoed Mir. Ballet, who said: We are apt to make two mistakes in dealing with the child's emotional nature.
 In the first place we often uneonsciously assume in the management of children that their emotional nature is fully developed, that they have all the emotions and feelings generally that the adult hf1. You have of ten seen children seven and eight years old stand by the graves of father or mother without being moved to tears. Wnxsis thiss It is not due to the fact that they do not realize that father or mother is dead, but to the fact that their love forsthem is not as yet developed. Grief is not possible where there Is no love. Just as the intellectual faculties develop in g certain order, which must be ob served in education, so the emotional nature develops in a certain sorder which can- of the child. Certain emotions are not poe- sible to the child until he hss been matured by years of contact with the hard relations of life. To ssk boy of twelve to declaim one of Webstsr's speeches is to ask him to ex- prees thoughts and smotiors which he cannot have. His thoughts no more fit into Web ster sentences than his little head would fit into Webster's hat. We put msny things into our reading books for children that ex-
 press thoughts and feelings es yet wholly
 foreign to their mind. To ask boy of nine
 i- ta-s 1 -.-l.- .l~-- Ae .eA1 with expression lesson descl .bing 8 mothers grief at the death of her child is to demand of hin what 's pychologically impossible. A book for children must not simply be w4;tten in child's vocabulary, but must contain materift that is- not foraieu to his mental e7d emotional life and that .s..at into his modes of thought. On this point many of our school books ain grievously against the laws of the child sorl.
 Another mistake we are apt to make in
 dealing with the child's emotional nature is to assume that talking to him about an emo
 ton develops the emotion. In this way we
 moralize to him about his emotions, proving
 to him that he ought to be grateful, reverent,
 kind, etc.
 The emotional nature comes under the
 general law that exercise develops power.
 To cultivate a feeling we must call it into
 activity. Feeling, like thoughts and muscle, organ.
 There is in this way sort of memory of our feeling as there is of our thoughts. Habit, too, is 8 sort of memory of the will. Emotions are called into activity by idses (using the word in the popular senso) Ev- We cannot laugh or be ans4y without some cause. The only being in the world that can eiggls without a cause $ High school girl about sixteen years old. The feeling of fear is called inte activity by the idea of danger, the feeling of sympathy by the idea of suffering, etc. The idea that is. to
 call feeling into exercise must, ynnk1 1a ak.o ok E., Al. { thoughts of suffering in the abstract that moves eur sympathy, but the thoughts of a concrete case of suffering; it is not aeanness in the abstract that arouses an indiRnation bu the thoughts of Q particular mean act. Ab- stract thoughts must be clothed in flesh and blood by the imagination before it can reach character. Hence the imagination is . sort of medium between abstract thought and the moral life, and negle ;ting to develop it or crushing it in school all tond to create that gulf between intellectual culture and
 moral life which we have so often occasion to dsplore in our educational conventions.
 We have not yet fully learned that ell in- tellsctual work, if it is genuine, has direct moral vslue. There is closer connection between geography and chality, between arithmetic and righteousness than we arc prone to admit.
 One feeling is often displaced by another; certain emotions cannot ce-exist in the mind but are mutually expulsive of one another
 This thought E the theme of Chalmers famous sermon on ssThe expulsion power of Q new affection" In this way the emotion of anger is expelled by the emotions of the 1udicrous. If you can make an angry man lTSga TSsaa you haEs ;s.,on expelled hi his anger in dramatic art. We ce1 laugh ourselves free frsm crowding cares. This law, too. ex- plains why we can disaiss all feelings of bitterness when we stand by the grave of our enemy. The sympathy and feeling of awe which death inspires expels all un- worthy emotions. It also explains why nation ynay become reconeiled over the grave of great here.
 The childs conscience, as his whole moral nature, develops gradually. We can no more trust his conscience to protect him against moral harm than we could trust his injury. We must appeal to the child's moral sense so as to call it into activity and develop it, but it is a mistake to rest the dis cipline of tke school, in the case of little children, on such appeals to the sense of right.
 If this be true, then it is mistake to ex- pose young children to temptations which these immature moral natures are not strong snough to resist. The "self-rsperting sys- iemn in the public schools violates this prin- ,iple. It tempts children to tell falsshoods md escape punishment. It is one of the pest means ever invented for systematically raining children into lying. To place boy 'f twelve or fourteen behind the counter in a l tore to sell goods, position in which he l aandles great deal of money in g dsy and ,an appropriate small sums without detec- | ion, is violation of this principle. | No man has right to put so l evere a strain on child's charac- ! CT at that morally tender age. In this | nany father gradually trains his own child | f1 kfaff cr1 ia rTftn 7r, 1nazed to find that his owa good boy at the | ge of thirty-fve can rob banks and super atund Sunday schools at the same time until | e must start for Canada. No man becomes ! cd in day. It requires many years of I mining to bring boy up to the point of |