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Festivals And Plays In Schools And Elsewhere
Festivals And Plays In Schools And Elsewhere Author:Percival Chubb 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: II SPECIFIC PEDAGOGICAL VALUES IN THE SCHOOL FESTIVAL IT has been evident, from experience with those to whom the plea for the festival as a serious elemen... more »t in school life is new, that the first step to be taken is to convince them of the position taken in the preceding chapter, that there are highly important pedagogical values in the festival. Among these the first in importance are the moral and cultural values, but more especially the moral. The educational world has recently become alive to the fact that the schools must now undertake the moral education of the young in a much more thorough and systematic fashion than has hitherto been done. For reasons which need not now be traversed the old agencies of moral education, more particularly the old-fashioned home, the church, and the Sunday-school, have signally lost their power; and once more, in this as in other matters, the school must come to the rescue. We say '' must come " because it is generally agreed that moral training is essential to the maintenance of a democratic society. Now, the festival becomes a means of moral education through its promotion of what may be called the three pieties, or three forms of reverence, to which it may make appeal. The first of these we may name natural piety,meaning thereby a feeling for the ordered and rhythmical life of nature, that sense of universal or cosmic law ruling our lives which is hinted at in the largest way by the sequence of the seasons, the life and death and rebirth of the Power behind our human life. This should carry with it a sense of our human dependence upon the majestic laws which rule Nature, reinforced by the admiring and wondering sense of the beauty and bounty of the earth as an expression of this life and law. It is in this natural piety that the gr...« less