Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/459

 ETHICAL INSTRUCTION IN SCHOOL AND CHURCH 439

its entire life there is a dialectic, an interdiscussion, between the ego- and the alter-self. And one of the ways by which the child comes to its thought of self is by discovering what other people are, and applying his discoveries to himself. The child has at hand a developed intelligence — his parents, teachers, preachers, and friends ; and they, if they educate him ethically, make easier this discovery of the common ideals and customs, and the conditions into which he has been born. The school should help him to understand the ethical alter-self in order that his ego-self may develop into harmony with this socius, and become intelligent and self-controlled to cooperate with those around him.

The pedagogy oi this ethical discipline will conform to that of all educative disciplines, so far as general pedagogy is con- cerned. It will differ from the regular school pedagogy in that the chief concern is the production of an emotional effect. There must be produced in the child more than an intellectual under- standing of ethical theory. The child must resolve to fulfill ethical ideals. To illustrate, scholarship demands that the scholar's ideal shall be understood by the children, but the more serious task is to win their hearts to its fulfillment. Our discipline must reveal the true scholar's emotional apprehension of this ideal, awaken the children to an appreciation of the fact that devotion to this ideal seems admirable in the eyes of all educated people. The ethical lectures must interpret to the children the adult feeling about their quarrels and fights, their school failures and successes, the boy at work and at play, the sneak, the thief, the bully, the cry-baby, and the general good- for-nothing; and reveal adequately the adult admiration, even passionate delight, in the large-hearted, earnest, all-alive boy and girl.

We must deal, not with abstract, but with coticrete questions, because the child mind has not begun to deal with abstractions. A child is sailing his boat in a park pond, and some tease comes by. A stone pitched into the water a foot from the boat swells the water, and over goes the boat. The child cries out: "You stop; it is not fair for you to sink my boat." It does not say :