The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on EducationPalmer, Alice Freeman
Philosophy
The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on Education
Palmer, Alice Freeman
Education; Education, Higher; Women -- Education
Now in my previous paper I showed how a theoretic knowledge of good
conduct had better not be given to children. By exposition of holy laws
they are not nourished, but enfeebled. What they need is right habits,
not an understanding of them: to become good persons rather than to
acquire a critical acquaintance with goodness. What moral function then
remains for the schools? To furnish knowledge of morality has been
proved dangerous. For teachers to turn away from imparting knowledge and
devote their scanty time to fashioning character is to abandon work
which they alone are fitted to perform. Yet to let them send forth boys
and girls alert in mind and loose in character is something which no
community will long endure.
Until one has clearly faced these alternative perplexities he is in no
condition to advise about grafting morality into a school curriculum;
for until then he will be pretty sure to be misled by the popular notion
of morality as a thing apart, demanding separate study, a topic like
geography or English literature. But the morality nutritious for
school-children is nothing of this kind. No additional hour need be
provided for its teaching. In teaching anything, we teach it. A false
antithesis was therefore set up just now when we suggested that a
teacher's business was to impart knowledge rather than to fashion
character. He cannot do the one without the other. Let him be altogether
true to his scientific aims and refuse to accommodate them to anything
else; he will be all the better teacher of morality. Carlyle tells of a
carpenter who broke all the ten commandments with every stroke of his
hammer. A scholar breaks or keeps them with every lesson learned. So
conditioned on morality is the process of knowing, so inwrought is it in
the very structure of the school, that a school might well be called an
ethical instrument and its daily sessions hours for the manufacture of
character. Only the species of character manufactured will largely
depend on the teacher's acquaintance with the instrument he is using. To
increase that acquaintance and give greater deftness in the use of so
exquisite an instrument is the object of this paper. Once mastered, the
tools of his own trade will be more prized by the earnest teacher than
any additional handbook of ethics.
It will be easiest to point out the kind of moral instruction a school
is fitted to give, if we distinguish with somewhat exaggerated
sharpness its several lines of activity. A school is primarily a place
of learning; it is unavoidably a social unit, and it is incidentally a
dependent fellowship. No one of these aspects is ever absent from it.
Each affords its own opportunity for moral training. The combination of
them gives a school its power. Yet each is so detachable that it may
well become the subject of independent study.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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