Page:Ethics and Education.djvu/10

vi. be treated nowadays. We know more about human heredity to-day than we did 100 years ago. Human nature is not an unstained page. We come into the world with more than blank minds and helpless bodies. We come bringing with us machines, natures, which must be radically changed if we ever become more than mere fractions of men and women. Nearly all the woes of the world arise either from ignorance of the ways we should go or from hereditary waywardnesses which we bring into the world with us. It is as truly the function of the school to correct these inherent defects in our acting machinery and to put sign–boards in the mind telling which ways to go and which ways to avoid as it is to tutor the understanding or guide the growing body. In developing this thesis it has been necessary to enter to some extent the general fields of both ethics and education.

It is the intention to follow this work with another work of a more practical kind. I have prepared a course of study and instruction in ethics for the four years of the high school — twenty lessons for each year, eighty lessons in all—covering pretty well the field of both theoretical and practical ethics. This course I am now working out in the Crane