The Moral Instruction of Children

arise in the family: the conjugal, the p

s should be discussed the ethics of the professions, the e

of the citizen opens up the whol

ious fellowship give rise to certain fine and lofty ethical conce

cs of practical ethics, from which we are t

s, or of conjugal ethics, in a course intended for children. But especially the order in which the different topics are to follow each other needs to be determined. The order followed in the above sketch is a purely logical one, and the l

ous, and who, whatever their good intentions might be, were hardly qualified to look at the subject from the educator's point of view. The work of breaking ground in the matter of moral instruction has still to be done. As to the selective principle which I have in view I feel a certain confiden

follows: The personal duties of a child are chiefly the observance of a few simple rules of health and the curbing of its temper. It owes social duties to parents, brothers and sisters, and kinsfolk, to its playmates, and to servants. The child is not yet a citizen, and the ethics of politics, therefore, lie far beyond its horizon; it does not yet require to be taught professional ethics, and does not need

y be referred. Thus, the paramount duty of the young child is to reverence and obey its parents. The relation of dependence in which it stands naturally prescribes this duty, and all its other duties can be deduced from and fortified by this one. The correctness of its personal habits and of its behavior to

into harmonious correlation. And this will be all the more feasible, because the faithful performance of the duties of any one period is the best preparation for the true understanding and fulfillment of

six and fourteen years of age is to acquire knowledge. Hence we begin the lessons with the subject of intellectual duty. In the next place, the duties learned in the previous periods are to be brough

ersonal duties are such as relate to the physical life and the f

f acquiring knowledge; the duties which relate to the physical life; the d

ly helpful to them, will in school take the right attitude toward its companions. The fraternal dut

therefore, will be the duties w

in the state, and so this course of elementary moral less

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we are proposing. I should say, however, that the discussion of these duties belongs to the Sunday-schools,

ance as the duty of self-scrutiny, may be considered either at the end of