thage, as the manners of Hannibal and Scipio; nor so much where Marcellus died, as because he was unworthy of his devoir he died there.' Milton's Tractate is so noble throughout, that it is hard to make selections. His very definition of education magnifies the moral aim: 'I call, therefore, a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.' His humanism never degenerates into mere linguistics, or literary æsthetics. In the classics, he says, the main skill and groundwork will be to temper the pupils with such lectures and explanations upon every opportunity as may lead and draw them into willing obedience, inflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue, stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God and famous to all ages.'

With Doctor Arnold of Rugby one ideal is always supreme, that of moral thoughtfulness and devotion to duty; all else is auxiliary and subordinate. The key to Horace Mann's self-abnegation in the cause of the schools was the belief that education is the only force that could elevate character; his labors, his public addresses, and his writings, are all inspired and penetrated with the moral aim.

When we come to current educational discussion we find a surprising change of emphasis. The reader who will make comparison between the earlier writers and the leading formal treatises on education of our own time, will agree that far less stress is laid upon the moral element. Fortunately, we have excellent and rather impersonal evidence of this fact in the form of a number of well-known reports which embody the collective thought and conclusions of leading educational thinkers of the day.

The Report of the Committee of Ten is probably the best known and most authoritative educational document in America. It originated in the National Education Association, and occupied the attention of a series of committees and conferences from 1891 to 1893, when the Report was published. The original committee included among its ten members, all eminent, three whom it cannot be invidious to mention, President Eliot, chairman; Dr. W. T. Harris, and President Angell. Nine sub-committees, or conferences, with ten members each, were appointed to deal with the branches of the secondary curriculum; thus the Report is the work directly of one hundred eminent teachers and experts, chosen to represent the parts and aspects of the secondary school. The Educational Review said editorially: 'No committee appointed in this country to deal with an educational subject has ever attracted so much attention as this one'; and later calls the work of the committee, 'the most systematic and important educational investigation ever undertaken in this country.' It may safely be said that there is not a high school in the United States to-day that is not affected by the Report of this great committee; its total influence is beyond estimate.

Yet one might read the Report from cover to cover and hardly be reminded that there is such a thing as moral education. True, there are, out of the two hundred and forty-nine pages, a few sentences which touch this theme, some directly, more indirectly; but these could be assembled easily on three or four pages, and the other two hundred and forty-five be left without a trace; moreover, what is more significant, the removal would not affect the original unity one whit, but would rather seem to be an elimination of extraneous matter.

...

Lest any one, under the influence of just those prevalent conceptions which this paper aims to set forth, should say that the absence of the moral element is normal and legitimate in view of the general aim and nature of the Report, let us quote from the Report itself to show that it does not ignore the final values in education. For example, we read, 'The secondary schools . . . do not exist for the purpose of preparing boys and girls for college. Their main function is to prepare for the duties of life.' One of the most interesting (and extraordinary) parts of the general report is that which deals directly with values of studies. Indeed, the proposed doctrine of values calls forth a vigorous minority report from one of the leading members of the committee; and this minority report contains the most direct and pointed of all the few fragments that bear on moral character: The training of observation, memory, expression, and (inductive) reasoning is a very important part of education, but is not all of education. The imagination, deductive reasoning, the rich possibilities of emotional life, the education of the will through ethical ideas and correct habit, all are to be considered in a scheme of learning. Ideals are to be added to the scientific method.' It is clear then, and will be increasingly clear as one reads the pages of the Report, that the value and influence of the studies discussed formed an integral and essential part of the Report, and that no part of that value could be considered as excluded, except, perhaps, by its insignificance and minuteness.

But some one may ask, Did not the majority of the conferences deal with subjects which have no influence upon character, as Latin, Greek, Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, German and French, Geography and Biology?

The italics are the author's.

Well, in truth we are not much troubled over this question, so far as our argument is concerned, although somewhat grieved that it should have to be raised at all. We shall be glad if most of our readers say here that the writer has set up a straw man, and that no one would think of denying ethical value, at least to some of these studies. At all events, we are willing to waive the charge of the complete absence of the moral element from these parts of the reports for the present, asking only one question: What of a secondary curriculum in which the subject-matter of seven out of nine conferences has to be excused from an examination as to moral value?

But we still have two inalienable fields left: English and History. Here we are on very solid ground, for we do not need Milton to tell us that these subjects are the very soul of the ethical power of the school; and moreover, in both cases, the conferences state in no uncertain terms their own conception of the aims. In the case of English we cannot do better than quote: "The main direct objects of the teaching of English in schools seem to be two: (1) to enable the pupil to understand the expressed thoughts of others, and to give expression to thoughts of his own; and (2) to cultivate a taste for reading, to give the pupil some acquaintance with good literature, and to furnish him with the means of extending that acquaintance. Incidentally, no doubt, a variety of other ends may be subserved by English study, but such subsidiary interests should never be allowed to encroach on the two main purposes just indicated.' No one who reads the conference report through will suspect the writers of any sins against their final injunction in the foregoing quotation; the anonymous incidental ends, including practically all the ideals most dear to the old Greeks

and the humanists, especially those of our own race, are simply and absolutely ignored. Who could possibly divine that the branch of study with which this part of the Report deals includes such works as Shakespeare's Macbeth, George Eliot's Silas Marner, Burke's Speech on Conciliation with the American Colonies, and Carlyle's profound and pathetic Essay on Burns?

The report on History must be credited with the largest proportion of ethical matter. Out of twenty-five pages, we find distinct or implied reference to character in about one whole page. It may seem invidious to detract from this praise; yet we cannot but be struck with the fact that the moral element does not enter into the main aim, but that, instead, we find a supplementary paragraph entitled, Other Advantages,' and in this are grouped the education of a citizen, training in literary expression, and, last of all, moral training. Finally, the objects are summed up in a passage in which moral training is excluded from any direct and explicit mention, thus losing even the humble place it had gained among the subsidiary aims.

In the field of elementary education the neglect of the moral side is far less serious than in the secondary school; nevertheless, we cannot help feeling that even in the elementary school neither theory nor practice fully recognizes the claims of the moral side of training. The best document at hand to illustrate this is the so-called Report of the Committee of Fifteen, issued in 1895, which, it must be admitted, is both far less representative and less influential than the Report of the Committee of Ten. The second part of the Report of the Committee of Fifteen deals with the values and correlation of studies in the elementary curriculum, and is the work of five eminent authorities. The body of the Report was written

by the chairman, the late Dr. W. T. Harris, then United States Commissioner of Education; while each of the other four appended a minority report setting forth dissent and additions. We freely admit that Dr. Harris's Report by no means ignores ethical culture, particularly in dealing with literature and history, but we think he gives it still too small a place. In view of the rather common belief that definite moral instruction has no proper place in the school, it should be noted that the Report does not take this position, but says distinctly that it ought to be given; what then is its place?

to which is devoted a very short half page, largely consumed in explaining how unimportant the subject is! The paragraph begins with a definition that condemns the subject in advance, by speaking of moral culture as a theory of the conventionalities of polite and pure-minded society,' and closes with a sophism of the sort that is too often used to excuse our neglect of the moral aim: The higher moral qualities of truth-telling are taught in every class exercise that lays stress on accuracy of statement.' Moreover, although the Committee makes extended recommendations as to each subject, and sketches a programme for the whole eight years of the school course, poor 'morals and manners are quite forgotten. It is another case of giving a dog a bad name and hanging him.

Not quite so clear and concrete, yet more significant, is the fact that the Committee does its main work, that of

correlation, without any aid from the ideas of moral education. This is too complicated a matter to discuss here, further than to recall those words of the first great philosopher and prophet of the elementary school, Comenius. His method of solving the problem of correlation was very different from any of the logical, psychological, or pedagogical methods proposed by the Committee, but, when interpreted broadly, very like the principle of correlation in Plato and Aristotle, Milton and Ascham, Arnold and Horace Mann. All studies and methods and discipline were, he maintained, to teach the child 'to know and rule himself, and to direct his steps toward God.' Such is the only true correlation of studies, and only under such a conception can character receive its due.

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The more specialized and less widelyknown reports will, in general, manifest the same emphasis; the discussion of History in the Report of the Committee of Eight may be cited as a striking example, inasmuch as it deals with the one subject in the whole curriculum that is richest in ethical matter and most fruitful in possible moral education. Compare, if you will, the attitude of Montaigne, of Milton, and of Dr. Arnold, regarding the teaching and use of History, with that embodied or implied in this modern report.

The prevailing neglect of the moral element is shown no less strikingly by a comparison of modern text-books with those of the past. I have in my possession one of the most widely-used Readers of the early part of the nineteenth century in America, Murray's English Reader. We might well transcribe the table of contents entire, for almost every title shows the contrast between this Reader of the days of our grandfathers and the Reader of today. Out of the eighty-four prose seSe nosse et regere, et ad Deum dirigere.

lections in the first part of the volume, fifty-four are distinctly and avowedly moral; eighteen others are religious; of the remaining twelve all, with scarcely an exception, have a moral or religious motive. The poetical selections have the same strongly ethical character.

Now, let the reader take in hand a typical modern Reader, or inspect the list of classics prescribed for high schools. The contrast with the old Murray will be striking. The distinctly and avowedly ethical and religious is conspicuous by its absence. The great majority of the selections are nonmoral: narratives to entertain or amuse, historical matter to inform and instruct, essays to whet the wit and cultivate the literary taste (would that they actually did!), and a good admixture of the humorous, or even ludicrous.

Of course, Murray's Reader of 1835 is not a good text-book for our schools to-day. The complete absence of the humorous from its pages would alone suffice to condemn it, and its whole tone is painfully pietistic and goody-goody. But it is imbued from beginning to end with a profound and ever active desire to train the moral natures of the pupils; that purpose is always in the focus of attention and never takes a second place. Truly, we have changed all that,' but with the error of the old letter, may we not have cast away some of the excellence of the old spirit? In our dread of the goody-goody, may we not have shut the door on that all-surpassing end of education, the Good?

Let us consider one more manifestation of the lapse of attention to moral education, found in another part of the educational field, the college and the university.

Whither has the old-time college chapel vanished? Within the memory of many of us who are not yet old, it was the custom in American colleges, not excepting state institutions, for

students and faculty to meet regularly and frequently for a religious and moral exercise. The ears of the youth were at least accustomed to the words of Holy Writ and the voice of prayer, and the serious counsel and admonition of their elders. We have heard not a few who passed through college in those days declare that no part of the college training was more beneficent in its influence than the chapel.

How have the times changed, in all save a constantly diminishing and apologetic minority of colleges! The voluntary chapel exercise still maintained in some colleges impresses one mainly by the pitiful smallness of its attendance, and by the certainty that those who most need its ministrations are elsewhere. In most institutions, especially the larger, the students seldom come together at all; probably never in anything like their full numbers. When they do assemble in large numbers it is usually for anything but a religious or ethical occasion; most often, as every one knows, for an athletic rally. Now, no sensible man is opposed to athletics: we have not too much athletics, but too little, and that but indifferently distributed; and no prudent man desires to get into a controversy with the supporters of college athletics; but no friend of education can look with unconcern upon a condition in which the assembly that was used by our fathers for the nurture of character in the maturing youth is abandoned to the excitation of athletic furor and the perfection of practice in rooting.' The old chapel service was doubtless often lacking in a sense of the fitness of things, and perhaps sometimes injured the cause it desired to aid; but the work aimed at in the college chapel has not passed away, and will never pass away; the vital question is this: Having discarded the instrument our fathers trusted to for moral culture, have we

created anything to take its place, or are we ignoring the task which should be the crown of our educational purpose?

Another marked symptom of our lack of interest in the moral side of education is our indifference respecting the religious and moral instruction that is practically universal among other peoples. For the purpose of the argument, let our ignorance and unconcern respecting the religious instruction in European schools be excused on the ground of our strenuous secularism in education; but France, a sister republic, equally committed to a non-sectarian public school, has for nearly thirty years been carrying on a vast experiment in moral and civic instruction. Can anything justify our almost complete apathy toward this great national experiment and its possible lessons for us?

III

We must next ask after the causes which have led to this comparative neglect of the moral aim in education.

Without pretending to anything like a complete comprehension of the question, we venture to point out some forces that have contributed to the present situation. The first of these has already been hinted at: the place formerly belonging to moral training is now occupied by intellectual work. Moral education has not been deliberately rejected, nor recklessly thrown away; it has been crowded out. The intellectual content of the curriculum has grown to such vast proportions that it has usurped almost the whole attention and energy of the school. Consider the increase and expansion which have taken place in recent times, and are still in full tide of advance in every field of human knowledge. Who can grasp the contrast between our own day and the time of the Attic philosophers, with respect to the mere quantity of know