Ha
16
THE WESTERN AMERICAN
cation of righteousness and judgment!
But not only has the moral training
been crowded out, as it were by indirec
tion, through the pressure of the intel
lectual burden of the school: it has also
suffered more direct attacks, The chief
of these may be summed up as a reac-
tion against the pietism and the strict-
ness of earlier periods, and an emphasis
upon the right of the child to grow up
in accordance with the springs and im
pulses of his own nature. It is true that
this very movement must be credited
with some of the best elements in mod
ern education: it forms the essence of
the message of Pestalozzi, Froebel, and
many lesser leaders in educational re
form, all dating back, it hardly need be
said, to Rousseau himself. But it is a
commonplace that movements of pro
gress swing, pendulum-like, to extremes,
and the “child-centric” movement in
education is no exception. The fact is
that we are stricken with a plague of
Rousseauism. Rousseau did not know
how to tell “nothing but the truth”; he
dealt habitually in hyperbole of an ex
treme kind. As an example, take the
famous dictum: “Do not command the
pupils; never, on any conceivable sub
ject!” This extraordinary injunction is
but one grain of the kind of seed found
abundantly in the most widely read
book on education the modern world
possesses, written by one who knew how
to make the ears of his readers tingle.
Rousseau was of course merely the elo
quent and powerful voice in which the
Spirit of the Age spoke; thousands of
fathers and mothers and teachers who
have neither read a line in the Emile are
influenced by its ideas in their attitude
toward their children and pupils.
There is a terrible harmony between
Rousseau’s absurd “Never command a
child” and the suggestive gibe that there
is just as much family government to
day as ever, but that it has passed from
the hands of the parents into the hands
of the children. In our recoil from the
harshness and pietism of the days of
our great-grandfathers, and our enthu
siasm for the rights of the child, have
we not drifted into a policy of laissez-
faire in moral training? Young people
nowadays must not be preached to; even
the sermon for children is so completely
sugar-coated with humor and entertain
ment that our ancestors would never
have called it a sermon at all. Morally,
we expect our young people to grow,
like Topsy; strange indeed, when we
consider how much care and attention
we devote to their intellectual develop
ment, and how much deliberate' and
methodical instruction is spent upon the
culture of their powers of thought!
In the home the laissez-faire policy
has been encouraged wonderfully by the
absorption of the time and attention of
parents by other things than the train
ing of the children. This is especially
true of fathers in the business and pro
fessional classes. The intensity of com
petition and the growing complexity of
modern occupations have gradually en
croached upon the time and available
APRIL, 1928
powers of the man until he almost ceases
to figure in the education of his chil
dren. Every high-school principal is fa
miliar with the case of the lad who has
outgrown the control of the mother and
is going to the bad because his father is
too busy even to know what is happen
ing. Few indeed are the fathers who
seem to understand that in order to keep
control of their sons they must actually
spend time with them and maintain
genuine intimacy. Teachers constantly
observe that the boy whose father keeps
in close touch with him has little trouble
in school, and gives bright promise for
the future. The serious cases of discip
line, leading finally to suspension and
expulsion, almost invariably arise where
the father is too busy to do his part.
The emergency in moral education is
rendered the more serious by the situa
tion of religion. Especially is this true
in our own country. So far as we know,
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CLASSIFIED
Professions—Business
ATTORNEYS
i
NELS JACOBSON
806 N. W. Bank Bldg. Main 4416
DAVID E. LOFGREN
1030 Ch. of Com. Bldg. Brd’wy 0462
SAMUEL OLSON
605 McKay Bldg
Brd’wy 7097
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Phone Broadway 7214
GULLIKSON & MILLER
Dressed Meats and Poultry
I
109 Front Street, Portland, Oregon
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WASHINGTON AT THIRD
PORTLAND, OREGON
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E HAVE purchased 122,000 pair U. S. Army Munson
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296 BROADWAY
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