[Footnote 7: Physical Hindrances to Teaching Girls, by Charlotte W. Porter. Forum, September, 1891, vol. 12, pp. 41-49.] [Footnote 8: Abbotsholme, 1889-1899: or Ten Years' Work in an Educational Laboratory, by Cecil Reddie, G. Allen London, 1900.] [Footnote 9: See L'Ecole des Roches, a school of the Twentieth Century, by T.R. Croswell. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 479-491.] [Footnote 10: See Chapter VI.] * * * * * CHAPTER XII MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING Dangers of muscular degeneration and overstimulus of brain--Difficulties in teaching morals--Methods in Europe--Obedience to commands--Good habits should be mechanized--Value of scolding--How to flog aright--Its dangers--Moral precepts and proverbs--Habituation--Training will through intellect--Examinations--Concentration--Originality--Froebel and the naive--First ideas of God--Conscience--Importance of Old and New Testaments--Sex dangers--Love and religion--Conversion. From its nature as well as from its central importance it might be easily shown that the will is no less dependent on the culture it receives than is the mind. It is fast becoming as absurd to suppose that men can survive in the great practical strain to which American life subjects all who would succeed, if the will is left to take its doubtful chances of training and discipline, as to suppose that the mind develops in neglect. Our changed conditions make this chance of will-culture more doubtful than formerly. A generation or two ago[1] most school-boys had either farm work, chores, errands, jobs self-imposed, or required by less tender parents; they _made_ things, either toys or tools, out of school. Most school-girls did house-work, more or less of which is, like farm-work, perhaps the most varied and most salutary as well as most venerable of all schools for the youthful body and mind. They undertook extensive works of embroidery, bed-quilting, knitting, sewing, mending, if not cleaning, and even spinning and weaving their own or others' clothing, and cared for the younger children. The wealthier devised or imposed tasks for will-culture, as the German Kaiser has his children taught a trade as part of their education. Ten days at the hoe-handle, axe, or pitchfork, said an eminent educator lately in substance, with no new impression from without, and one constant and only duty, is a schooling in perseverance and sustained effort such as few boys now get in any shape; while city instead of country life brings so many new, heterogeneous and distracting impressions of motion rather than rest, and so many privileges with so few corresponding duties, that with artificial life and bad air the will is weakened, and eupeptic minds and stomachs, on which its vigor so depends, are rare. Machines supersede muscles, and perhaps our athleticism gives skill too great preponderance over strength, or favors intense rather than constant, long-sustained, unintermittent energy.