Our system of Public-School Education is a result of the faith of the people in the need of universal intelligence for the maintenance of popular government. Does this system include moral training? Since the teaching of religious doctrines is precluded, this, I imagine, is what we are to consider in discussing the Scope of Public-School Education. The equivalents of scope are aim, end, opportunity, range of view; and the equivalents of education are training, discipline, development, instruction. The proper meaning of the word education, it seems, is not a drawing out, but a training up, as vines are trained to lay hold of and rise by means of what is stronger than themselves. My subject, then, is the aim, end, opportunity, and range of view of public-school education, which to be education at all, in any true sense, must be a training, discipline, development, and instruction of man’s whole being, physical, intellectual, and moral. This, I suppose, is what Herbert Spencer means when he defines education to be a preparation for complete living. Montaigne says the end of education is wisdom and virtue; Comenius declares it to be knowledge, virtue, and religion; Milton, likeness to God through virtue and faith; Locke, health of body, virtue, and good manners; Herbart, virtue, which is the realization in each one of the idea of inner freedom; while Kant and Fichte declare it to consist chiefly in the formation of character. All these thinkers agree that the supreme end of education is spiritual or ethical. The controlling aim, then, should be, not to impart information, but to upbuild the being which makes us human, to form habits of right thinking and doing. The ideal is virtually that of Israel, that righteousness is life, though the Greek ideal of beauty and freedom may not be excluded. It is the doctrine that manners make the man, that conduct is three-fourths of life, leaving but one-fourth for intellectual activity and aesthetic enjoyment; and into this fourth of life but few ever enter in any real way, while all are called and may learn to do good and avoid evil.

“In the end,” says Ruskin, “the God of heaven and earth loves active, modest, and kind people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones.” We can all learn to become active, modest, and kind; to turn from idleness, pride, greed, and cruelty. But we cannot all make ourselves capable of living in the high regions of pure thought and ideal beauty; and for the few even who are able to do this, it is still true that conduct is three-fourths of life.

“The end of man,” says Buechner, “is conversion into carbonic acid, water, and ammonia.” This also is an ideal, and he thinks we should be pleased to know that in dying we give back to the universe what had been lent. He moralizes too; but if all we can know of our destiny is that we shall be converted into carbonic acid, water, and ammonia, the sermon may be omitted. On such a faith it is not possible to found a satisfactory system of education. Men will always refuse to think thus meanly of themselves, and in answer to those who would persuade them that they are but brutes, they will, with perfect confidence, claim kinship with God; for from an utterly frivolous view of life both our reason and our instinct turn.

The Scope of Public-School Education is to co-operate with the physical, social, and religious environment to form good and wise men and women. Unless we bear in mind that the school is but one of several educational agencies, we shall not form a right estimate of its office. It depends almost wholly for its success upon the kind of material furnished it by the home, the state, and the church; and, to confine our view to our own country, I have little hesitation in affirming that our home life, our social and political life, and our religious life have contributed far more to make us what we are than any and all of our schools. The school, unless it works in harmony with these great forces, can do little more than sharpen the wits. Many of the teachers of our Indian schools are doubtless competent and earnest; but their pupils, when they return to their tribes, quickly lose what they have gained, because they are thrown into an environment which annuls the ideals that prevailed in the school. The controlling aim of our teachers should be, therefore, to bring their pedagogical action into harmony with what is best in the domestic, social, and religious life of the child; for this is the foundation on which they must build, and to weaken it is to expose the whole structure to ruin. Hence the teacher’s attitude toward the child should be that of sympathy with him in his love for his parents, his country, and his religion. His reason is still feeble, and his life is largely one of feeling; and the fountain-heads of his purest and noblest feelings are precisely his parents, his country, and his religion, and to tamper with them is to poison the wells whence he draws the water of life. To assume and hold this attitude with sincerity and tact is difficult; it requires both character and culture; it implies a genuine love of mankind and of human excellence; reverence for whatever uplifts, purifies, and strengthens the heart; knowledge of the world, of literature, and of history, united with an earnest desire to do whatever may be possible to lead each pupil toward life in its completeness, which is health and healthful activity of body and mind and heart and soul.

As the heart makes the home, the teacher makes the school. What we need above all things, wherever the young are gathered for education, is not a showy building, or costly apparatus, or improved methods or text-books, but a living, loving, illumined human being who has deep faith in the power of education and a real desire to bring it to bear upon those who are intrusted to him. This applies to the primary school with as much force as to the high school and university. Those who think, and they are, I imagine, the vast majority, that any one who can read and write, who knows something of arithmetic, geography, and history, is competent to educate young children, have not even the most elementary notions of what education is.

What the teacher is, not what he utters and inculcates, is the important thing. The life he lives, and whatever reveals that life to his pupils; his unconscious behavior, even; above all, what in his inmost soul he hopes, believes, and loves, have far deeper and more potent influence than mere lessons can ever have. It is precisely here that we Americans, whose talent is predominantly practical and inventive, are apt to go astray. We have won such marvellous victories with our practical sense and inventive genius that we have grown accustomed to look to them for aid, whatever the nature of the difficulty or problem may be. Machinery can be made to do much, and to do well what it does. With its help we move rapidly; we bring the ends of the earth into instantaneous communication; we print the daily history of the world and throw it before every door; we plough and we sow and we reap; we build cities, and we fill our houses with whatever conduces to comfort or luxury. All this and much more machinery enables us to do. But it cannot create life, nor can it, in any effective way, promote vital processes. Now, education is essentially a vital process. It is a furthering of life; and as the living proceed from the living, they can rise into the wider world of ideas and conduct only by the help of the living; and as in the physical realm every animal begets after its own likeness, so also in the spiritual the teacher can give but what he has. If the well-spring of truth and love has run dry within himself, he teaches in vain. His words will no more bring forth life than desert winds will clothe arid sands with verdure. Much talking and writing about education have chiefly helped to obscure a matter which is really plain. The purpose of the public school is or should be not to form a mechanic or a specialist of any kind, but to form a true man or woman. Hence the number of things we teach the child is of small moment. Those schools, in fact, in which the greatest number of things are taught give, as a rule, the least education. The character of the Roman people, which enabled them to dominate the earth and to give laws to the world, was formed before they had schools, and when their schools were most flourishing they themselves were in rapid moral and social dissolution. We make education and religion too much a social affair, and too little a personal affair. Their essence lies in their power to transform the individual, and it is only in transforming him that they recreate the wider life of the community. The Founder of Christianity addressed himself to the individual, and gave little heed to the state or other environment. He looked to a purified inner source of life to create for itself a worthier environment, and simply ignored devices for working sudden and startling changes. They who have entered into the hidden meaning of this secret and this method turn in utter incredulity from the schemes of declaimers and agitators.

The men who fill the world, each with his plan for reforming and saving it, may have their uses, since the poet tells us there are uses in adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in its head; but to one deafened by their discordant and clamorous voices, the good purpose they serve seems to be as mythical as the jewel in the toad’s head.

Have not those who mistake their crotchets for Nature’s laws invaded our schools? Have they not succeeded in forming a public opinion and in setting devices at work which render education, in the true sense of the word, if not impossible, difficult? Literature is a criticism of life, made by those who are in love with life, and have the deepest faith in its possibilities; and all criticism which is inspired by sympathy and faith and controlled by knowledge is helpful. Complacent thoughts are rarely true, and hardly ever useful. It is a prompting of nature to turn from what we have to what we lack, for thus only is there hope of amendment and progress. We are, to quote Emerson,

“Built of furtherance and pursuing,
Not of spent deeds, but of doing.”

Hence the wise and the strong dwell not upon their virtues and accomplishments, but strive to learn wherein they fail, for it is in correcting this they desire to labor. They wish to know the truth about themselves, are willing to try to see themselves as others see them, that self-knowledge may make self-improvement possible. They turn from flattery, for they understand that flattery is insult. Now, if this is the attitude of wise and strong men, how much more should it not be that of a wise and strong people? Whenever persons or things are viewed as related in some special way to ourselves, our opinions of them will hardly be free from bias. When, for instance, I think or speak of my country, my religion, my friends, my enemies, I find it difficult to put away the prejudice which my self-esteem and vanity create, and which, like a haze, ever surrounds me to color or obscure the pure light of reason. It cannot do us harm to have our defects and shortcomings pointed out to us; but to be told by demagogues and declaimers that we are the greatest, the most enlightened, the most virtuous people which exists or has existed, can surely do us no good. If it is true, we should not dwell upon it, for this will but distract us from striving for the things in which we are deficient; and if it is false, it can only mislead us and nourish a foolish conceit. It is the orator’s misfortune to be compelled to think of his audience rather than of truth. It is his business to please, persuade, and convince; and men are pleased with flattering lies, persuaded and convinced by appeals to passion and interest. Happier is the writer, who need not think of a reader, but finds his reward in the truth he expresses.

It is not possible for an enlightened mind not to take profound interest in our great system of public education. To do this he need not think it the best system. He may deem it defective in important requisites. He may hold, as I hold, that the system is of minor importance, the kind of teacher being all important. But if he loves his country, if he loves human excellence, if he has faith in man’s capacity for growth, he cannot but turn his thoughts, with abiding attention and sympathy, to the generous and determined efforts of a powerful and vigorous people to educate themselves. Were our public-school system nothing more than the nation’s profession of faith in the transforming power of education, it would be an omen of good and a ground for hope; and one cannot do more useful work than to help to form a public opinion which will accept with thankfulness the free play of all sincere minds about this great question, and which will cause the genuine lovers of our country to turn in contempt from the clamors politicians and bigots are apt to raise when an honest man utters honest thought on this all-important subject.

I am willing to assume and to accept as a fact that our theological differences make it impossible to introduce the teaching of any religious creed into the public school. I take the system as it is, that is, as a system of secular education, and I address myself more directly to the question proposed: What is or should be its scope?

The fact that religious instruction is excluded makes it all the more necessary that humanizing and ethical aims should be kept constantly in view. Whoever teaches in a public school should be profoundly convinced that man is more than an animal which may be taught cunning and quickness. A weed in blossom may have a certain beauty, but it will bear no fruit; and so the boy or youth one often meets, with his irreverent smartness, his precocious pseudo-knowledge of a hundred things, may excite a kind of interest, but he gives little promise of a noble future. The flower of his life is the blossom of the weed, which in its decay will poison the air, or, at the best, serve but to fertilize the soil. If we are to work to good purpose we must take our stand, with the great thinkers and educators, on the broad field of man’s nature, and act in the light of the only true ideal of education, that its end is wisdom, virtue, knowledge, power, reverence, faith, health, behavior, hope, and love; in a word, whatever powers and capacities make for intelligence, for conduct, for character, for completeness of life. Not for a moment should we permit ourselves to be deluded by the thought that because the teaching of religious creeds is excluded, therefore we may make no appeal to the fountain-heads which sleep within every breast, the welling of whose waters alone has power to make us human. If we are forbidden to turn the current into this or that channel, we are not forbidden to recognize the universal truth that man lives by faith, hope, and love, by imagination and desire, and that it is precisely for this reason that he is educable. We move irresistibly in the lines of our real faith and desire, and the educator’s great purpose is to help us to believe in what is high and to desire what is good. Since for the irreverent and vulgar spirit nothing is high or good, reverence, and the refinement which is the fruit of true intelligence, urge ceaselessly their claims on the teacher’s attention. Goethe, I suppose, was little enough of a Christian to satisfy the demands of an agnostic cripple even, and yet he held that the best thing in man is the thrill of awe; and that the chief business of education is to cultivate reverence for whatever is above, beneath, around, and within us. This he believed to be the only philosophical and healthful attitude of mind and heart towards the universe, seen and unseen. May not the meanest flower that blows bring thoughts that lie too deep for tears? Is not reverence a part of all the sweetest and purest feelings which bind us to father and mother, to friends and home and country? Is it not the very bloom and fragrance, not only of the highest religious faith, but also of the best culture? Let the thrill of awe cease to vibrate, and you will have a world in which money is more than man, office better than honesty, and books like “Innocents Abroad” or “Peck’s Bad Boy” more indicative of the kind of man we form than are the noblest works of genius. What is the great aim of the primary school, if it is not the nutrition of feeling? The child is weak in mind, weak in will, but he is most impressionable. Feeble in thought, he is strong in capacity to feel the emotions which are the sap of the tree of moral life. He responds quickly to the appeals of love, tenderness, and sympathy. He is alive to whatever is noble, heroic, and venerable. He desires the approbation of others, especially of those whom he believes to be true and high and pure, he has unquestioning faith, not only in God but in great men, who, for him, indeed, are earthly gods. Is not his father a divine man, whose mere word drives away all fear and fills him with confidence? The touch of his mother’s hand stills his pain; if he is frightened, her voice is enough to soothe him to sleep. To imagine that we are educating this being of infinite sensibility and impressionability when we do little else than teach him to read, write, and cipher, is to cherish a delusion. It is not his destiny to become a reading, writing, and ciphering machine, but to become a man who believes, hopes, and loves; who holds to sovereign truth, and is swayed by sympathy; who looks up with reverence and awe to the heavens, and hearkens with cheerful obedience to the call of duty; who has habits of right thinking and well doing which have become a law unto him, a second nature. And if it be said that we all recognize this to be so, but that it is not the business of the school to help to form such a man; that it does its work when it sharpens the wits, I will answer with the words of William von Humboldt: “Whatever we wish to see introduced into the life of a nation must first be introduced into its schools.”

Now, what we wish to see introduced into the life of the nation is not the power of shrewd men, wholly absorbed in the striving for wealth, reckless of the means by which it is gotten, and who, whether they succeed or whether they fail, look upon money as the equivalent of the best things man knows or has; who therefore think that the highest purpose of government, as of other social forces and institutions, is to make it easy for all to get abundance of gold and to live in sloven plenty; but what we wish to see introduced into the life of the nation is the power of intelligence and virtue, of wisdom and conduct. We believe, and in fact know, that humanity, justice, truthfulness, honesty, honor, fidelity, courage, integrity, reverence, purity, and self-respect are higher and mightier than anything mere sharpened wits can accomplish. But if these virtues, which constitute nearly the whole sum of man’s strength and worth, are to be introduced into the life of the nation, they must be introduced into the schools, into the process of education. We must recognize, not in theory alone but in practice, that the chief end of education is ethical, since conduct is three-fourths of human life. The aim must be to make men true in thought and word, pure in desire, faithful in act, upright in deed; men who understand that the highest good does not lie in the possession of anything whatsoever, but that it lies in power and quality of being; for whom what we are and not what we have is the guiding principle; who know that the best work is not that for which we receive most pay, but that which is most favorable to life, physical, moral, intellectual, and religious; since man does not exist for work or the Sabbath, but work and rest exist for him, that he may thrive and become more human and more divine. We must cease to tell boys and girls that education will enable them to get hold of the good things of which they believe the world to be full; we must make them realize rather that the best thing in the world is a noble man or woman, and to be that is the only certain way to a worthy and contented life. All talk about patriotism which implies that it is possible to be a patriot or a good citizen without being a true and good man, is sophistical and hollow. How shall he who cares not for his better self care for his country?

We must look, as educators, most closely to those sides of the national life where there is the greatest menace of ruin. It is plain that our besetting sin, as a people, is not intemperance or unchastity, but dishonesty. From the watering and manipulating of stocks to the adulteration of food and drink, from the booming of towns and lands to the selling of votes and the buying of office, from the halls of Congress to the policeman’s beat, from the capitalist who controls trusts and syndicates to the mechanic who does inferior work, the taint of dishonesty is everywhere. We distrust one another, distrust those who manage public affairs, distrust our own fixed will to suffer the worst that may befall rather than cheat or steal or lie. Dishonesty hangs, like mephitic air, about our newspapers, our legislative assemblies, the municipal government of our towns and cities, about our churches even, since our religion itself seems to lack that highest kind of honesty, the downright and thorough sincerity which is its life-breath.

If the teacher in the public school may not insist that an honest man is the noblest work of God, he may teach at least that he who fails in honesty fails in the most essential quality of manhood, enters into warfare with the forces which have made him what he is, and which secure him the possession of what he holds dearer than himself, since he barters for it his self-respect; that the dishonest man is an anarchist and dissocialist, one who does what in him lies to destroy credit, and the sense of the sacredness of property, obedience to law, and belief in the rights of man. If our teachers are to work in the light of an ideal, if they are to have a conscious end in view, as all who strive intelligently must have, if they are to hold a principle which will give unity to their methods, they must seek it in the idea of morality, of conduct, which is three-fourths of life.

I myself am persuaded that the real and philosophical basis of morality is the being of God, a being absolute, infinite, unimaginable, inconceivable, of whom our highest and nearest thought is that he is not only almighty, but all-wise and all-good as well. But it is possible, I think, to cultivate the moral sense without directly and expressly assigning to it this philosophical and religious basis; for goodness is largely its own evidence, as virtue is its own reward. It all depends on the teacher. Life produces life, life develops life; and if the teacher have within himself a living sense of the all-importance of conduct, if he thoroughly realize that what we call knowledge is but a small part of man’s life, his influence will nourish the feelings by which character is evolved. The germ of a moral idea is always an emotion, and that which impels to right action is the emotion rather than the idea. The teachings of the heart remain forever, and they are the most important; for what we love, genuinely believe in, and desire decides what we are and may become. Hence the true educator, even in giving technical instruction, strives not merely to make a workman, but to make also a man, whose being shall be touched to finer issues by spiritual powers, who shall be upheld by faith in the worth and sacredness of life, and in the education by which it is transformed, enriched, purified, and ennobled. He understands that an educated man, who, in the common acceptation of the phrase, is one who knows something, who knows many things, is, in truth, simply one who has acquired habits of right thinking and right doing. The culture which we wish to see prevail throughout our country is not learning and literary skill; it is character and intellectual openness, that higher humanity which is latent within us all; which is power, wisdom, truth, goodness, love, sympathy, grace, and beauty; whose surpassing excellence the poor may know as well as the rich; whose charm the multitude may feel as well as the chosen few.

“He who speaks of the people,” says Guicciardini, “speaks, in sooth, of a foolish animal, a prey to a thousand errors, a thousand confusions, without taste, without affection, without firmness.” The scope of our public-school education is to make common-places of this kind, by which all literature is pervaded, so false as to be absurd; and when this end shall have been attained, Democracy will have won its noblest victory.

How shall we find the secret from which hope of such success will spring? By so forming and directing the power of public opinion, of national approval, and of money, as to make the best men and women willing and ready to enter the teacher’s profession. The kind of man who educates is the test of the kind of education given, and there is properly no other test. When we Americans shall have learned to believe with all our hearts and with all the strength of irresistible conviction that a true educator is a more important, in every way a more useful, sort of man than a great railway king, or pork butcher, or captain of industry, or grain buyer, or stock manipulator, we shall have begun to make ourselves capable of perceiving the real scope of public-school education.