Moral Education By Edward Howard Griggs EIGHTH EDITION "Welche unendliche Operationen Natur und PREFACE IT is now widely recognized in America that the chief aim of education is to develop noble manhood and womanhood. The absorption, natural to our pioneer period, in sharpening the tools of the mind and equipping the individual for personal success, is being rapidly replaced by the effort to mold the moral personality that will use the mind's instruments for the great ends of human life, in harmony with the good of the whole. Nor is this movement confined to our own country. The struggle to recover from the disaster of 1870 in France, the influence of the educational reformers in Germany, the enthusiastic awakening of the nation in Italy, the growth of social and humanitarian sentiment in England, have led to interesting experiments in moral education in the countries named. We have still much to learn from these experiments, especially in France and Germany, but it is in our own country that the greatest awakening to the moral aim of education has occurred. Yet while the end is thus generally, if vaguely, recognized, there is still the greatest confusion as to what it implies and as to the means by which it can be attained. Character is often conceived in a purely negative way, as the avoidance of evil, while the problem of moral culture is at times even interpreted to mean assigning a school period in which to teach 'morals and manners' as one would teach arithmetic. Moreover, much of the literature of the subject is singularly dreary and barren. I have long puzzled over the |