Page:The Teacher's Practical Philosophy.djvu/7

 The views set forth in this volume are essentially the same as those given to many thousands of teachers and others interested in education, in Japan, Korea, and Hawaii, during the Academic year of 1906-07. Among the Japanese, especially, the interest in the moral aspects and values of the system of public education was at that time intense and pervasive. It embraced not only the teachers as a class and the officers of the Government in the Department of Education, but also the leaders in the army and navy, in business circles, and in civil and social affairs. As instances of this interest I might cite the remark of a vet- eran of the Russo-Japanese war who declared that his principal anxiety in training the nearly thirty thousand recruits under his charge was to give them the right spiritual education; and also the fact that I was repeatedly urged into giving additional courses of lectures on the ethics of business in the Government Commercial Colleges, where ethics is made a required subject of study through one or two years of the course. In this country there has been slowly gathering the conviction that our system of education, from the public schools of primary grade to the