ESSAYS 469 



all the resources of literature and art, everything- which can act on the mind or 

 senses of man, have been called in to give an ideational basis and to strengthen 

 the emotional impulse to "goodness." It is hardly surprising, then, that to this 

 priesthood has been entrusted, in the majority of cases, the training of the young. 

 Their first and often their only care was to make a good citizen ; the further office 

 of education, that of making a useful citizen, could generally, until the advent of 

 science, be left to the manual training received by apprenticeship in the arts 

 of war and in the crafts of peace. 



Training or Character 



Stated in biological terms, we may say that the main object sought in this part of 

 education is to establish automatic reactions in the plastic brain of the young indi- 

 vidual, reactions which, though in many cases at first conscious, become more and 

 more relegated to the class of instinctive reactions or behaviour. It is a higher phase 

 of the process by which the infant learns to walk, or by which the soldier springs 

 sharply to attention at the word of command and maintains his dressing and equal 

 step on the march. In the infant we* may use the methods of reward and punish- 

 ment for the production of these reactions, employing the world-old discipline of 

 pain to inhibit such reactions as are undesirable. From early life, at any rate 

 in the higher communities, this method becomes insignificant in comparison with 

 the influence of mimicry and the desire of self-esteem and the esteem of one's 

 comrades. With the growth of intelligence the reactions so learned acquire an 

 ideational tone and an intellectual justification from the consciously or uncon- 

 sciously biased teaching of history, literature, or religion. The special part played 

 by religion in this connection is shown by the great social changes and trans- 

 formations in rules of conduct which follqw any general change in religious 

 conviction or belief. Thus a rule which is at first enforced by the common will of 

 the community or by the pressure of external circumstances comes finally in the 

 old community to be expressed in the desires and impulses of the individual 

 himself, so that morality or proper social behaviour (goodness) becomes in the 

 educated individual instinctive. A number of terms are employed to denote the 

 different aspects of the quality of the individual thereby produced : we speak of 

 morality, training of character, inculcation of self-control and righteousness, the 

 evocation of altruism and patriotism ; in common language, we try to teach 

 the individual to " play the game," and we endeavour so to build up his mentality 

 that he cannot act otherwise without doing violence to his instincts. This part of 

 the individual's training depends to a very slight degree on the intellectual content 

 of the education. At an English school it is the tone of the school and the 

 constant contact with the rules of its little society as experienced in all the relations 

 of life, and especially in combined games, which play the greatest part in the 

 fixation of rules of conduct. To teach a boy to play the game is the main object 

 and the principal achievement of the training of the Boy Scouts, as it is of the 

 English Classical Public School. With the same school curriculum the most 

 diverse characters can be formed and the most divergent rules of conduct 

 inculcated. The German gymnasiast, who furnishes the greater part of the higher 

 servants of state in Germany, and whose ideals of conduct we have learnt to abhor, 

 has received a classical education probably superior to that of nine-tenths of the 

 boys who leave our public schools. Our officers in the present war have received 

 the most diverse of educations — in most cases singularly imperfect in range and 

 thoroughness. But they practically all have shown their assimilation of the rules of 

 conduct accepted as becoming to members of the British commonwealth of states. 



