form the habit of continually relating his otherwise isolated ideas to the conditions which determine their value. Does the school, as a system, afford, at present, sufficient opportunity for this sort of experimentation? Excepting in so far as the emphasis of the school work is upon the doing side, upon construction, upon active investigation, it cannot meet the psychological conditions necessary for the judgment which is an integral factor of good character.

(c) I shall be brief with respect to the other point, the need of susceptibility and responsiveness. The informal, social side of education, the æsthetic environment and influences, are all-important here. In so far as all the work is laid out in regular and formulated ways, in so far as there are lacking opportunities for casual and free social intercourse between the pupils, and between the pupils and the teacher, this side of the child's nature is either being starved or else left to find haphazard expression along more or less secret channels. When the school system under plea of the practical (meaning by the practical the narrowly utilitarian) confines the child to the three R's and the formal studies connected with them, and shuts him out from the vital sources of literature and history, and deprives him of his right to contact with what is best in architecture, music, sculpture and picture, it is hopeless to expect any definite results with respect to the training of this integral element in character.

What we need in education more than anything else is a genuine, not merely nominal faith in the existence of moral principles which are capable of effective application. We believe that, so far as the mass of children are concerned, if we keep at them long enough we can teach reading and writing and figuring. We are practically, even if unconsciously, skeptical as to the possibility of anything like the same sort of assurance on the moral side. We believe in moral laws They are something set

and rules, to be sure, but they are in the air. off by themselves. They are so very "moral" that there is no working contact between them and the average affairs of everyday life. What we need is to have these moral principles brought down to the ground, through their statement in social and in psychological terms. We need to see that moral principles are not arbitrary, that they are not merely transcendental; that the term "moral" does not designate a special region or portion of life. We need to translate the moral into the actual conditions and working forces of our community life, and

into the impulses and habits which make up the doing of the individual.

All the rest is mint, anise, and cummin. The one thing needful is that we recognize that moral principles are real in the same sense in which other forces are real; that they are inherent in community life, and in the running machinery of the individual. If we can secure a genuine faith in this fact, we shall have secured the only condition which is finally necessary in order to get from our educational system all the effectiveness there is in it. The teacher who operates in this faith will find every subject, every method of instruction, every incident of school life pregnant with ethical life.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO.

THESES.

JOHN DEWEY.

Moral life in school involves the same principles as moral life outside the school. Ethical theory is two-faced, psychological and social; the psychological has to do with the agent and how he operates as an individual; the social with what he does in his relation to the social whole.

This social relation of a child is frequently taken in too limited a sense, as when training to citizenship in the narrow sense is in mind. The child must be considered as a member of society in the broadest sense. Apart from the thought of participation in social life the school has no end nor aim.

The school must be made a vital social institution to a very much greater extent than obtains at present.

The common separation between intellectual and moral training is one expression of the failure to construct the school as a social institution.

Excepting in so far as the school is an embryonic yet typical community life, moral training must be partly pathological, partly formal.

The extent and way in which a study brings a pupil to consciousness of his social environment, and confers upon him the ability to interpret his own powers from the standpoint of their possibilities in social use, is the ultimate and unified standard, the criterion of the value of studies.

Form represents the technique, the adjustment of means involved in social action, just as content refers to the realized value or end of social action. The social standpoint in geography, history, literature, and mathematics.

Ultimate moral motives and forces are nothing more nor less than social intelligence, the power of observing and comprehending social situations—and social power-trained capacities of control - at work in the service of social interest and

aims.

The moral trinity of the school. The demand is for social intelligence, social power, and social interests. Our resources are: (1) the life of the school as a social institution in itself, (2) methods of learning and of doing work, (3) the school studies or curriculum,

Psychological study is necessary in education to help determine its ethical import and conduct (1) because all conduct springs out of native instincts and impulses; (2) ethical principles need to be stated in psychological terms because the child supplies us with the only means or instruments with which moral ideals are to be realized.

Character means power of social agency, organized capacity for social functioning. It means social insight, social executive power, and social responsiveness. Test the school upon these three requirements.

What we need in education more than anything else is a genuine, not merely nominal, faith in the existence of moral principles capable of effective application. [Outline by the Editor.]

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF MORAL EDUCATION.

By CHARLES DE GARMO, PH.D.,

President of Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa.

In a democratic age and country the natural tendency is to exalt the importance of the individual. One may even declare that this is an habitual mode of thought with democratic peoples. This natural tendency is still further emphasized by our recent methods of child study, whereby the eyes of teachers are turned to individual peculiarities of body and mind. Without doubt this tendency will be wholly beneficial provided we hold steadily before ourselves the true ends for which the individualization is made. To see the social aspects of moral training we need to distinguish somewhat sharply between two types of individuality, which I call the social and the non-social.

TYPES OF NON-SOCIAL INDIVIDUALITY.

A non-social individual is one that is, on the one hand, so absorbed in his subjective self that he is prone to overlook a large part of his duties to others and, on the other, to miss many of the best things of life, because he does not appreciate the opportunities that coöperation opens to him. There are several types of this form of non-social individuality. One is the emotional type, in which feeling is so exalted as to lose its connection with insight and action; the self is submerged in emotion. Another is the æsthetic type, in which beauty of form, harmony of color, concord of sound, self-poise of conduct, count for more than those forms of thought and action that make for efficiency in the accomplishment of actual work. Still another type of the nonsocial individual is seen in the man whose intellectual effort ends with analysis. Such a man is the logician, the man of introspective insight, the man whose mind has plenty of light, but no heat. In the popular imagination the college graduate is often pictured as such a character. This is also a common view of what a philosopher is; namely, a man who can make a thought-analysis of the cosmos, but who cannot manage with efficiency even the minor details of his own physical sur

roundings. Still another type of non-social individuality is seen in the man of strong, resolute action, such as the pioneer must be, who takes his fortune and his life in his hand, and who, plunging into the wilderness, tries to promote the one and to preserve the other by means of his axe and his rifle. He is the man who has no neighbors, whose life is lived out in solitary communion with nature. These types are all non-social because they make little or nothing of coöperation among men for the accomplishment of ends desired by all.

In the moral world he is the non-social individual who emphasizes but little, or in only a few directions, ethical relations to his fellows. Thus, for instance, one man may feel he has done his whole duty to society when he has subscribed a given amount to public or private charities; another when he has paid his assessments for the maintenance of the church; another when his heart is overflowing with good will for his neighbors to the extent of allowing them to do what they have a mind to, provided they do not hinder him in his enterprises; another thinks he has fulfilled his whole social function when he votes on election day, or when for a price he helps consume the things provided at a church sociable, or when he pays his taxes. Others conceive that they have kept the whole moral law when they have observed the negative commandments.

EUROPEAN INFLUENCES PRODUCING NON-SOCIAL TYPES OF CHARACTER.

There are many historical reasons, besides the natural democratic tendencies of the age, that explain why our current educational theories concerning the individual are so largely non-social in character. As we know, during the Middle Ages, social organization was confined to a few broad lines, which though at first the means for promoting and preserving liberty, finally became the means for destroying it. Thus, in the religious and political realm, the church had become supreme, and had presumed to relieve men of the necessity of thinking. The natural rights of a man to his own thoughts and the freedom of expressing them were destroyed, the attempt being made to regulate the spiritual life of mankind by the authority of the church. In the economic life the feudal system, with its robber barons controlling the land, and its accompanying vassalage of the lower classes, became, through the rise of cities and the general growth of industrial life, a source of the greatest tyranny, though at first it was a condition of survival for the lower classes. Absolute monarchy, which in the earlier,