the familiar statement that the
ultimate purpose of all education is character-forming would be
hypocritical pretense; for as every one knows, the direct and immediate
attention of teachers and pupils must be, for the greater part of the
time, upon intellectual matters. It is out of the question to keep
direct moral considerations constantly uppermost. But it is not out of
the question to aim at making the methods of learning, of acquiring
intellectual power, and of assimilating subject-matter, such that they
will render behavior more enlightened, more consistent, more vigorous
than it otherwise would be.

The same distinction between "moral ideas" and "ideas about morality"
explains for us a source of continual misunderstanding between teachers
in the schools and critics of education outside of the schools. The
latter look through the school programmes, the school courses of study,
and do not find any place set apart for instruction in ethics or for
"moral teaching." Then they assert that the schools are doing nothing,
or next to nothing, for character-training; they become emphatic, even
vehement, about the moral deficiencies of public education. The
schoolteachers, on the other hand, resent these criticisms as an
injustice, and hold not only that they do "teach morals," but that they
teach them every moment of the day, five days in the week. In this
contention the teachers _in principle_ are in the right; if they are in
the wrong, it is not because special periods are not set aside for what
after all can only be teaching _about_ morals, but because their own
characters, or their school atmosphere and ideals, or their methods of
teaching, or the subject-matter which they teach, are not such _in
detail_ as to bring intellectual results into vital union with character
so that they become working forces in behavior. Without discussing,
therefore, the limits or the value of so-called direct moral instruction
(or, better, instruction _about_ morals), it may be laid down as
fundamental that the influence of direct moral instruction, even at its
very best, is _comparatively_ small in amount and slight in influence,
when the whole field of moral growth through education is taken into
account. This larger field of indirect and vital moral education, the
development of character through all the agencies, instrumentalities,
and materials of school life is, therefore, the subject of our present
discussion.

THE MORAL TRA