Excerpt from Success: A Course in Moral Instruction for the High School
This manual is intended to supply material for a year"s course in moral instruction in the high school. It is planned with reference to the interests, needs, and intellectual status of the members of the junior and senior classes, particularly the latter. Its appeal is directed, furthermore, to the more thoughtful members of these classes. The course will undoubtedly be given as an elective; presumably also (though I hope not) without credit. In any event, it will be something outside of the ordinary routine. Under these circumstances, it was possible to consider in its preparation solely the question of the condition of its greatest usefulness rather than that of widest popularity. There will accordingly be found here nothing but materials which may supply a basis for serious work. At the same time, as I believe, this demand for work will be no bar to popularity among the more earnest students, who alone will profit from any course of this kind, however planned.
The principal aim of the course is to develop a habit of thoughtfulness about the problems of daily conduct. It is true of most of us, young and old alike, that in our preoccupation with the means we forget all about reflecting on the value of ends. It was so in the Greece of Socrates; it is so all over the world today. The American in particular, like Huxley"s horse-back rider, doesn"t know where he is going, but he is going at a terrible pace. Moreover, our vision is so narrow that the indirect effects of our actions for the most part escape our attention. The first object of this course, then, is to train young people to scrutinize ends as well as means, and to learn to trace the indirect effects of their actions upon the welfare, including the character, of all those affected, both self and others. The outcome should be some rudiments, at least, of wisdom, in the sense of a knowledge of how to live, the wisdom which, as far as anything now done by our schools is concerned, lingers, while mere knowledge comes in abundance. Such wisdom may unquestionably influence life, and influence it profoundly.
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