The Moral Instruction of Children

There is, however, a conflict here between old and new ideals. The old-fashioned school regarded obedience to authority the one essential; the new ideal regards insight into the reasonableness of moral commands the chief end. It is said, with truth, that a habit of unreasoning obedience does not fit one for the exigencies of modern life, with its partisan appeals to the individual and its perpetual display of grounds and reasons, specious and otherwise, in the newspapers. The unreasoning obedience to a moral guide in school may become in after life unreasoning obedience to a demagogue or to a leader in crime. It is not obedience to external authority that we need so much as enlightened moral sense, and yet there remains and will remain much good in the old-fashioned habit of implicit obedience. The new education aims at building up self-control and individual insight. It substitutes the internal authority of conscience for the external authority of the master. It claims by this to educate the citizen fitted for the exercise of suffrage in a free government.