The Child and the Concept of Morality

New Zealand Tablet, 6 April 1922, Page 13

The Child and the Concept of Morality

The training and education of the child, it has been said, begin with the birth of his grandfather (writes a contributor to America). The idea underlying this paradox is a correct one. If the child is to be rounded off to the finest proportions from the moral, intellectual and physical point of view, you must begin his training from his earliest years. The first impressions are the lasting ones. The first seeds sown in a virgin soil quickly grow to the maturity of the flower or plant, because, as yet, in that soil, they find no forces to oppose them.

We confine ourselves for the moment to the development of moral ideas in the heart of the child, A modern school of pedagogy, considering as conclusive the vague hypotheses which experimental psychologists are endeavoring to establish, maintain that in the earliest period of the child’s education, that of the elementary or primary school, moral ideas exercise no influence on what Sabatier calls, the “making of the soul.” They endeavor to prove their thesis with so-called scientific reasons and arguments. The earliest “centres of association,” they tell us, begin to take form only when the child is six or seven years old. In the normal individual, they again assert, these centres attain but a slight degree of development when he is already from twelve to fifteen years old. They reach their full growth only when he is about thirty-two years old. Then only do the higher ideas of morality, truth, justice, liberty, reach their perfect flowering. The child in the elementary school, they tell us, is physiologically incapable of acquiring these moral notions and concepts. What is their conclusion ? % One against which Catholics, and every true educator must protest and against which they must be constantly on guard, both in theory and in practice. Since the child, says the new school, is physiologically and biologically incapable of acquiring these moral ideas, it is a useless and thankless task for the teacher to try to awaken in the soul of the child ideas and concepts to which it is simply inaccessible, and which find no lodgment there. The teacher, they sarcastically tell us, who endeavors to form the “moral sense” of the child is rolling up hill a Sisypus stone, only to see it crashing down again, and to be forced to renew efforts never to be crowned with succesi. EXPERIENCE CONDEMNS ASSOCIATION THEORY. Experience teaches us how unsound such a theory is. Hundreds of teachers will answer, facts in hand, that the theory just exposed, is not true and is contradicted by the lives of the children and pupils, as they see them developing before their eyes in the classroom. For, to take but one aspect of the question, if the idea of morality cannot find entrance into the soul of the child, such a soul would be incapable of reacting to any sentiment of love, of gratitude, of shame, of remorse, of honor and loyalty, of enthusiasm for the beautiful, of patriotism. Yet, we venture to say, that scarcely a teacher in the United States is to be found who does not realise, does not feel and see with his eyes even, that the very youngest children to whom he has ever read a fairy tale, or a story of daring and heroism, with a beautiful and virtuous maiden and a equally “good” villain in the plot, inevitably sympathises with the persecuted and virtuous maid and loathes the tyrant. Their admiration is for Joseph, not for his treacherous brothers. They may not of course be fully conscious of the nature of their admiration or their hatred. But they are in the right direction. Their “orientation” is the true one. No teacher can measure, weigh and catalogue the exact amount of moral influence exerted on the child. But he knows that the influence is exercised. The child conscious of a lie, if the soul be not dulled by long and mischievous habit and he bo not a practised professional in the arts of deceit, will show it when caught in the act. He knows that he has done something wrong. Is he then so inaccessible to moral ideas? Every teacher on the other hand has seen his children perform acts of generosity, kindness, of unselfish devotion and self-control. Surely these are not merely physiological and biological phenomena. They are the manifestation of a higher law. They are moral acts in the strictest sense of the word. HISTORY PROVES ITS FALSITY. The soul of the child has been one of the greatest and most, tragic battlegrounds of history. Schools of philosophers, tyrants,, theorisers, the individual and the State

alike have striven for its possession. It is no wonder that the Catholic Church wishes to form the soul of the child. She realises that its formation here, in a great measure settles for good or evil the fate of that soul for eternity. Charged with the spiritual interests of her children, she knows that they are well equipped for their spiritual responsibilities, if at the start, they are moulded to correct moral and spiritual ideas. She knows that they are accessible to the highest ideals of virtue. She trained the soul of Agnes to prize above all things the unfading crown of virginity. She fortified the heart of the boy Pancratius to face the horrors of the Roman arena. When but mere lads, under her fostering care, young Stanislaus and Berchmans and Aloysius had reached the height of the moral sublime. Boys in age, they were saints in ideals and in conduct. Children are not mere automata. No one has ever yet fully fathomed the pure depths of a child’s soul. That is a mysterious realm. But we know that if pure souls can be degraded by sin, they can be rendered more beautiful than the loveliest of sunny bowers by the presence of truth, purity, and unselfish love. Men fight for the possession of the soul of the child, because they know the morality implanted there will be the morality of the future. Why try to instil reoral ideas into the soul of the child, as each system of education endeavors to do, if all this moral teaching is to awake no echo in that voiceless shrine? Men have strangely erred for centuries for the victory- and the dominance of moral ideas, if the child is by nature so poorly equipped to respond to their appeal. GREAT EDUCATORS AGAINST IT, It would be no difficult task to oppose to this false and dangerous theory the authority of almost every one of the great educators of history. It is around the ideas of right and wrong, fundamental in the life of society, and without a correct concept of which, life is impossible and social chaos would be the inevitable result, that their systems, for the most part, revolved. Quintilian tells us that the younger, the purer the heart is, the stronger, the more lasting, the more decisive, the impressions are. Erasmus teaches that the education of the child begins with his nurse. And he is not speaking of his physical development and the guidance of his first tottering steps. For he adds, that she must use the most alluring and tempting methods to train him to virtue and knowledge. Montaigne, in spite of his scepticism and seeming indifference to higher ideals, writes that our vices become, so to say, part of ourselves in very childhood. There the bent is given. Fenclon assures us that our strongest inclinations are formed in childhood. Pestalozzi holds that the “moral life of the child” awakens in the home in earliest years, even long before he has gone to school. Compayre, whose educational theories must often be rejected, but who in this instance gives expression to a sound pedagogical principle, writes that in the moral formation of the child,” the family holds a paramount position of influence. In direct opposition to the false theories that complete moral development is not reached until the age of thirty, Joseph do Maistre, who knew men v and the world from many angles, says that man in the strictest meaning of the word, the moral man, the one who reacts to the great ideas of right and wrong, of truth, virtue, justice, liberty, honor, is already formed morally when he reaches the age of ten “and if he has not been formed on the knees of his mother, that will ever be for him a great pity and a great misfortune.”

What must be the conclusion? The soul of the child must be early formed to the noblest ideas of morality and of religion. It will quickly react to them, if they are presented in clear, simple, tangible form, in picture, in parable and story. The soul of the child is a rich and fruitful soil. Germs of evil speedily develop there and cast out their paralysing rootlets and tentacles stifling every fair and lovely growth. But it is no less responsive to truth and beauty. If the Divine Teacher asked that the little ones be not hindered from .His Sacred Presence and -.ho benefit of His teaching, it was because He knew they would respond to His lessons, his words, and example. The Cath >- lie teacher will deem it his honor and privilege to follow in the footsteps of such a Master.

For Children’s Hacking Cough, .Woods’ Great Peppermint Cure. -• - r