SOCIOLOGY IN ETHICAL EDUCATION'. 37; 



right ideas ; so far as they are wrong, they are the product of 

 wrong ideas. 



If, as we think, the presence among men of erroneous ideas is 

 the cause of social disorders, the cure will be their displacement, 

 through educational processes, with such as will prpduce right 

 character in men and inspire right relations among men. We be- 

 lieve this is entirely possible, and we think that both the agencies 

 and the methods are in sight. Both must be educational. All 

 political and legislative schemes, the single-tax theory, the nation- 

 alization of land and industries, all socialistic projects, all co- 

 operative remedies, will prove of little avail, if they aim at curing 

 social disorders by improving the environment only of the man. 

 The man himself is wrong. He is the thing which needs correc- 

 tion and improvement ; not the world in which he lives, or the 

 form of government under which he lives. The only possible 

 way of correcting him, and through him of permanently curing 

 social disorders, is through the processes of education — educa- 

 tion of the child with the potential man in him. 



The Church, the press, and the schools are the agencies which, 

 supplemented by other forces, have determined the existing funda- 

 mental ideas of society. If these agencies have been able to for- 

 mulate and fix these, they certainly can modify them, or even 

 displace them by others. The functions of these agencies, how- 

 ever, and the methods employed in the execution of these func- 

 tions, must be modified, some even revolutionized. Although the 

 Church and the press, the discussion of whose functions and 

 methods the limits of our paper forbid, are powerful agencies 

 whose influence is beyond all computation, or even conjecture — 

 which must be employed in the improvement of social conditions 

 — yet they are not the agency upon which greatest reliance can 

 be placed. This is found in the schools — the great free public- 

 school system. There is greatest hope in this agency for many 

 reasons: particularly because its organization, and no other, is 

 fully adapted to the requirements of the situation ; because it 

 deals with the child, which is a moldable and not a crystallized 

 thing; and because the schools are the agency which in large 

 degree determines the character of all other agencies. 



Our hope, then, is in the schools ; but their function and their 

 methods must be modified, because they are not giving to the 

 world the best they can give. They are not giving what the 

 world most needs — the best possible character, which results very 

 largely from a careful, rational study of our relations to others, 

 from a right understanding of all those relations which are inter- 

 woven everywhere among men in all phases and departments of 

 life. Nothing is more important for our children and youth to 

 understand than the nature and character of human relations ; 



