he vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life,
carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.
The babe acquires, as we well say, the mother tongue. While speech
habits thus contracted may be corrected or even displaced by conscious
teaching, yet, in times of excitement, intentionally acquired modes of
speech often fall away, and individuals relapse into their really native
tongue. Secondly, manners. Example is notoriously more potent than
precept. Good manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are
good breeding; and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response
to habitual stimuli, not by conveying information. Despite the never
ending play of conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding
atmosphere and spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners.
And manners are but minor morals. Moreover, in major morals, conscious
instruction is likely to be efficacious only in the degree in which
it falls in with the general "walk and conversation" of those who
constitute the child's social environment. Thirdly, good taste and
esthetic appreciation. If the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious
objects, having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste
naturally grows up. The effect of a tawdry, unarranged, and
over-decorated environment works for the deterioration of taste, just as
meager and barren surroundings starve out the desire for beauty. Against
such odds, conscious teaching can hardly do more than convey second-hand
information as to what others think. Such taste never becomes
spontaneous and personally engrained, but remains a labored reminder of
what those think to whom one has been taught to look up. To say that the
deeper standards of judgments of value are framed by the situations
into which a person habitually enters is not so much to mention a fourth
point, as it is to point out a fusion of those already mentioned. We
rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is
worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not
conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we
take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which
determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions. And these
habitudes which lie below the level of reflection are just those which
have been formed in the constant give and take of relationship with
others.

4. The School as