CHAPTER XVIII

CHILDREN AND THE SCHOOL

Wise parents will know the character of the influences affecting their children at all times. At no time can their responsibility be delegated to others. There is a tendency to think that when children go to school the family has a release from responsibility. But the school is simply the community--the group of families--syndicating its efforts for the formal training of the young. Every family ought to know what the community is doing with its children. The school belongs to all; it is not the property of a board, nor a private machine belonging to the teaching force; it belongs to us and we owe a social duty as well as a family obligation to understand its work and its influence on the children.

Parents ought to visit the school. Wise princ.i.p.als and teachers will welcome them, setting times when visits can best be made. The visitors come, not as critics, but as citizens and parents. The princ.i.p.al benefits will be an acquaintance with the teachers of our children and a better understanding of the conditions under which the children work for the greater part of the day. By far the larger number of teachers most earnestly desire character results from their work. It will help them to know that we are interested in what they are doing.

-- 1. HOME AND SCHOOL CO-OPERATION

Parents and teachers, both desiring spiritual results, can find means of co-operation. Parent-teacher clubs and a.s.sociations have done much to bring the home and the school together. Meeting regularly in the evening, so that fathers, too, can attend, gives opportunity to work out a common understanding to raise the spiritual aims of the school, and to discover means by which the families may aid in securing better conditions for school work.

One of the most important considerations relates to the moral effect of the school life and environment. We are committed in this country to the principle that the public school cannot teach religion, but this by no means relieves it of responsibility for moral character. The family needs this ally. Children expect instruction in the school and they feel keenly the power of its ideals and the standards established by its methods and requirements. The family and the school greatly need to co-ordinate their efforts here to the end that there may be under way in both an orderly program for the moral training of children.

-- 2. THE SCHOOL TEACHING PARENTS

The school may help the home if arrangements are made for parents to meet regularly and receive instruction in those forms of moral training which can best be given at home. This is one method of solving the vexed question of s.e.x instruction. Many hesitate as to the wisdom of such instruction in schools; but no one doubts that it ought to be and could be given in families but for the fact that parents are both ignorant of what to tell and indifferent to the matter. It may be that some day the state will not only say that the child must go to school, but also that every parent intrusted with children must either prove ability to train and instruct in these and other matters or go to school to obtain the necessary training. The state would not go beyond its province if it required ignorant parents--and that means most of us in matters of moral training--to go to school and learn our business. And without waiting for such compulsion the school may now offer opportunity for all parents to obtain the desired information. Teachers are especially trained to an understanding of child-nature and to methods of pedagogy; they are prepared to teach many things we ought to know; why should not the family obtain the advantage of such expert knowledge?

The school would also be within its province if it undertook to stimulate the indifferent parents, both rich and poor, to an appreciation of the educational task and opportunity of the home. Each inst.i.tution greatly needs the other. The school reaches all the children of all the people; might it not be made a larger means of helping all the parents of all the children to quickened moral responsibility and to greater educational efficiency?

-- 3. CONTROLLING SCHOOL CONDITIONS

The family ought to know the conditions at the school outside the recitation or working hours. Few parents have any conception of the power of the playground over moral character. Perhaps a smaller number realize how dangerous are some of the elements at work there. Play of itself is immensely valuable, but play means playfellows, and some of these are simply purveyors of indecency and moral contagion in conversation and act. We are required to send our children to school; we have a right to demand freedom from moral contagion. Do you know what goes on in secret places on the grounds? Do you know that the vilest ideas and phrases are current in pictures, cards, on sc.r.a.ps of paper, and in handwriting on walls, not only in the high schools, but often among children of from six to twelve years of age? This is too large a subject to be developed properly here. It is one familiar to all wide-awake school men and women and ought to be equally so to the parents of children. Where the school combats this evil the home should intelligently aid; where the school is indifferent the family dare not rest until either the indifference is quite dispelled or the indifferent dismissed.

Do not expect to get the facts concerning these suggested conditions by inquiry among your children. They are reticent, naturally, on such matters when talking with adults; besides, the sense of school honor holds them to silence. If they tell you voluntarily, you are happy in their free confidence. Do not betray it; simply let it lead you to make further inquiry at the school from the authorities and stimulate you to insist that, for the sake of the spiritual good of the young, the school must furnish conditions of moral health.

I. References for Study

Ella Lyman Cabot, _Voluntary Help to the Schools_, chaps. vii, viii. Houghton Mifflin Co., $0.60.

W.A. Baldwin, "The Home and the Public Schools," _Religious Education_, February, 1912. $0.65.

II. Further Reading

M. Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in Schools_. 2 vols.

Longmans.

John Dewey, _The School and Society_. The University of Chicago Press, $1.00.

Smith, _All the Children of All the People_. Macmillan, $1.50.

G.A. Coe, "Virtue and the Virtues," _Religious Education_, February, 1912.

III. Topics for Discussion

1. What ought parents to know about public-school life?

2. In visiting a school what may the parent do to acquire information in the proper way?

3. How may the home co-operate with the school?

4. What degree of instruction in morals ought the school to give?

5. In what way does the school best help in moral training?

6. What do you know about the conditions on the playgrounds of your own school?

CHAPTER XIX

DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES

Moral crises arise in every family. Deeply as we may desire to maintain an even tenor of character-development, in harmony and quietness, occasions will bring either our own imperfections or those of our children--or of our neighbors' children--to a focus and throw them in high relief on the screen. Progress comes not alone in perpetual placidity. When temper slips from control, when angry pa.s.sions rule, when the spirit under discipline rebels, when a course of petty wrongdoing comes to a head, when secret sins are discovered, and when we suddenly find ourselves confronted with a tragic problem in the higher life, it is still important to remember that the crisis is just as truly a part of the educational process as is the orderly, gradual method of development.

A moral crisis is an experience in which our acts are such, or have such results, that they are thrown out in a white light that reveals their inner meaning, so that they are sharply discerned for their spiritual and character values. Then in that light courses of conduct have to be valued anew, reconsidered, and determined.

Two courses are open in times of moral crisis in the family. One is to bend our efforts to settle the situation, to proceed on the policy of getting through with the crisis as quickly as possible, to seek to remove the pain rather than to cure the ill. The other is to regard the crisis as a revealer of truth, to use it as a valuable opportunity, one in which moral qualities of acts are so easily evident, so keenly felt, as to make it a time of spiritual quickening, a chance for the best sort of training.

-- 1. THE PROMISE OF IMPERFECTION

The perfect child is the one unborn; shortly after his birth he begins to take after his father. The perfect character does not exist in a child. It is as unreasonable to expect it as it would be to look for the perfect tree in the sapling. _Character comes by development_; it is not born full-blown. Childhood implies promise, development. Therefore parents must not be surprised at evidences that their children are pretty much like their neighbors' children. Outside of the old-time Sunday-school-library book the child who never lied, lost his temper, sulked, or made a disturbance never existed and never will, except in a psychopathic ward in some hospital. Could anything be sadder than the picture of the anemic, pulseless automaton who is always "good"?

When parents speak of the "natural depravity" of their children, they are commonly using terms they do not understand. What they mean is the natural immaturity of their children, a condition of imperfection in which they may rejoice, as it shows the possibility of development. The child is in the world to grow to the fulness of all his powers. The powers of the higher life are to develop as truly as those which we call physical and mental. The family is the great human culture-bed for the development of those powers, their training-field and school.

Does someone say, concerning a little child, "But we thought he had the grace of G.o.d in his heart, that he had been born again and would no more do wrong"? True, he may be born again, but there is a world of difference between being born and being grown up. From one to the other, in the realm of character, is a long and tedious process, with many a stumble, many a fall, many a hard knock, and many a lesson to be learned. Every moral crisis is part of the struggle, the experience and training that may make toward the matured life. You have no more right to expect your child to be a mature Christian than you had to expect him to be born six feet tall.

A moral crisis is a lesson. The important consideration for the parent, then, is to see the wrongdoing of the child as an experience in his moral upward climb; not as a fall alone, but as part of the acquisition of the art of standing upright and walking forward. Dealing with such an occasion one may well say to himself or herself, "This is my chance to guide, to make this experience a light that shines forward on the way for the child's weak feet and to strengthen him to walk in it." For is it not true with us that practically all we really know has come by the organizing of our different experiences? Think whether it is so or not.

And is it not to be the same with the child?

We can study here only a few typical moral crises, perhaps those that give greatest perplexity to parents. They cannot be successfully met as isolated instances, but must be seen as a part of the whole educational process. Those to whom the development of character is a reality will watch tendencies and train them before they focalize in crises.

-- 2. THE COLLISION OF WILLS

Parenthood presents tremendous moral strains; it is rife with temptations. It offers a little world for autocracy to vaunt itself. The martinets command, often totally blind to the changing nature of the subjects as they pa.s.s from the submissive to the rebellious. One day the parents wake up to realize that they are not the only ones possessed of will.

When to your Yes the child says No, while you may not applaud, you ought to rejoice; you have discovered a will, you have found developing in your child the central and essential quality of character. Forgiveness will be hard to find and recovery still more difficult if you make the mistake of attempting to crush that will. The child needs it and you will need its co-operation. The power to see the possibility of choice of action, to know one's self as a choosing, willing ent.i.ty, able to elect and follow one among many courses of action, is a distinctive, G.o.dlike quality. The opposition of wills is like the birth of a new personality, a new force thrown out into the world to meet and struggle and adjust itself with all other persons.