#83.# In this first stage, when parent and teacher are motive and will to him, the child needs to be guided with the utmost care. _There must be reasonableness in the guidance._ Caprice, anger, impatience, arbitrariness, and severity are the methods of weaklings and cowards. From all such the child should be freed. Consistency, kindness, patience, reasonableness, and moderation are the methods of strong, successful teachers. If you utter a command, see to it that the child obeys. Nothing is quite so deadly in the realm of the will as the fact that the pupil knows that his teacher threatens, commands, talks--but never acts. If you really do not intend to enforce obedience, do not utter the command. If you do not intend to compel obedience, do not assume the rôle of guide and teacher. How many children come into caprice instead of regulated conduct because they have from infancy lived in a realm of caprice, of confusion, and of disorder; a realm that moved by no law and hence set no law of guidance in the soul of the child. #84. The Aim of Teaching is Right Living.#--We err when we assume that intellectual endeavor will inevitably lead to right conduct. Nothing is more obvious than the fact that our conduct is far below the plane of our thought. We _know_ vastly better than we _do_ the things that are right and true. Nor do we quite understand the function of good teaching if we neglect to cultivate the feeling powers of the soul. It is my conviction that we act more nearly in harmony with our feelings than our thoughts. If, then, conduct, right action, or character is the end of all true teaching; if, as Jesus taught, it is not what we know, nor yet what we feel, but what we do, that makes life worth while, it is of the utmost importance that we should so train the feeling life as well as the thought life as to prepossess the soul to right conduct. But the feelings are intensely concrete. Whence arises again the value of concrete teaching as a method in will training. #85. Self-control.#--Aim to bring the pupil speedily into the exercise of his own will, into self-regulated conduct. Nothing will so surely negative good instruction as to deny to the pupil the freedom to exercise his own will as soon as that will has become sufficiently powerful and reasonable to be an adequate agency to direct the pupil's conduct. Many teachers and parents insist upon guiding the pupil long after he is capable of self-direction. Here, of course, is the critical moment in the pupil's life, and only the most careful study of the pupil and constant prayer for Divine assistance will insure the wisest procedure. When a boy has acquired self-control it is always a mistake to treat him as you would a small child. His self-respect is involved in his desire to do things in the way his own will determines. To ignore this fact is to predispose the boy to rebellion against his teacher; and perhaps against all constituted authority--human and divine.