CHAPTER IX
THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS
Change from childish to adult friends—Influence of favorite teachers—What
children wish or plan to do or be—Property and the money sense—Social
judgments—The only child—First social organizations—Student life—
Associations for youth, controlled by adults.
In a few aspects we are already able to trace the normal psychic outgrowing of
the home of childhood as its interests irradiate into an ever enlarging
environment. Almost the only duty of small children is habitual and prompt
obedience. Our very presence enforces one general law—that of keeping our
good-will and avoiding our displeasure. They respect all we smile at or even
notice, and grow to it like the plant toward the light. Their early lies are often
saying what they think will please. At bottom, the most restless child admires
and loves those who save him from too great fluctuations by coercion, provided
the means be rightly chosen and the ascendency extend over heart and mind. But
the time comes when parents are often shocked at the lack of respect suddenly
shown by the child. They have ceased to be the highest ideals. The period of
habituating morality and making it habitual is ceasing; and the passion to realize
freedom, to act on personal experience, and to keep a private conscience is in
order. To act occasionally with independence from the highest possible ideal
motives develops the impulse and the joy of pure obligation, and thus brings
some new and original force into the world and makes habitual guidance by the
highest and best, or by inner as opposed to outer constraint, the practical rule of
life. To bring the richest streams of thought to bear in interpreting the ethical
instincts, so that the youth shall cease to live in a moral interregnum, is the real
goal of self-knowledge. This is true education of the will and prepares the way