However difficult, we must try by some method to make youth realize
what is excellent in those who have lived far enough in the past to
inspire reverence and yet keep some connection between those heroes
and sages of the older times and the march of human life upward and
onward. Especially is this the case in all treatment of the family
relation. We need not banish Chaucer's "Griselda" from the collections
of poems worthy to live and to be read, but at least we should insert
some companion pieces which show wifely fidelity in a more modern
form. We may well ask the child's admiration of the craftsman's
passion for achievement in "Palissey the Potter," but there might be
ethical significance in pointing out that nowadays we sometimes
question the right of a man to sacrifice to his art not only himself
but his wife, his children, and all related to him. The fact is that
although we cannot make use of any cumbersome scheme of historic
outlines of social progress nor of any learned history of matrimonial
institutions, we must somehow learn to permeate our teaching of
history and of literature and our exaltation of examples of human
greatness of character with the spirit of those who believe that
humanity is learning, and can know how to manage social affairs better
and better as the years of life-experience go on.[19]
=Moral Training at the Heart of Education.=--The right and helpful
relation of the school to the family, then, is one that must first of
all place moral character, the power to live a good and useful life in
all social relations, at the centre. And it is one also that takes
account particularly of the development of the family order and of
what we must save and of what we may throw away in that order, if we
would have a stable inner circle of human rights and duties as a
pattern for all relationship in the industrial order and in the state.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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