Excerpt from Second International Moral Education Congress: The Hague, August 22-27, 1912; Papers Contributed by American Writers and Review of Recent American Literature on Moral Education

Those who believe that the school should undertake systematic work for the moralization of its pupils, seem, in the main, to be divided into two camps, those who rely for the attainment of their end upon moral instruction, and those who put their trust in moral training. The former use the lecture, in one or another of its various forms, or the text-book, and appeal chiefly to their pupils' powers of apprehension and memory. Most of its representatives confine their attention to the problem, what modes of conduct are right or wrong. But this limitation is not inherent in the system. The laws of life, and the technique of dealing with temptation, may form a part of such a programme as well as anything else. The essence of the method is that the-end is knowledge, and the means, the imparting of information by the teacher. The advocates of the second method, on the other hand, seek to provide conditions, whether in the class room or out of school hours, that will make for the formation of habits of right action.

The first of these methods is a constant object of ridicule for the representatives of the second. It has been likened by them to the attempt to teach swimming by instruction given to the pupil when on land. Now it is one of the purposes of this paper to show that instruction in morals should be reduced to a minimum. But in so far as the criticism referred to is directed against the value to children and young people of information about the moral life, it misses the mark. Knowledge may not, by itself, be an efficient cause of moral action, but it is a conditio sine qua non. And there is only too much of it - and that, in part, of the highest importance, - that is a sealed book not merely to the child, but often to his parents. How many people know, what Comte, among others, has tried to teach us, that it is the duty of every person living by any useful work to regard himself, not as an individual working for his own private benefit, but as a public functionary, working for the benefit of society?

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