The teacher - 1908 Author:George Herbert Palmer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ETHICAL INSTRUCTMN IN THE SCHOOLS Within a few years a strong demand has arisen for ethical teaching in the schools. Teachers themselves have become inte... more »rested, and wherever they are gathered the question, " What shall this teaching be?" is eagerly discussed. The educational journals are full of it. Within a year there have been published seven books on the subject. Several of them — it would be hardly an exaggeration to say all — are books of marked excellence. Seldom does so large a percentage of books in a single year, in a single country, and on a single subject reach so high a level of merit.. I shall not criticise them, however, nor even engage in the popular discussion of which they form a part. That discussion concerns itself chiefly with the methods by -which ethics may be taught. I wish to go behind this controversy and to raise the previous question whether ethics should be taught to boys and girls at all. Evidently there are strong reasons why it should be. Always and everywhere it is important that men should be good. To be a good man! — it is more than half the fulfilment of life. Better to missfame, wealth, learning, than to miss righteousness. And in America, too, we must demand not the mere trifle that men shall be good for their own sakes, but good in order that the life of the state may be preserved. A widespread righteousness is in a republic a matter of necessity. Where all rule all, each man who falls into evil courses infects his neighbor, corrupting the law and corrupting still more its enforcement. The question of manufacturing moral men becomes, accordingly, in a democracy, urgent to a degree unknown in a country where but a few selected persons guide the state. There is also special urgency at the present time. The ancient and accredited me...« less