Youth_ Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene - G. Stanley Hall

During the first years of school life, a point of prime importance in ethico-
religious training is the education of conscience. This latter is the most complex
and perhaps the most educable of all our so-called "faculties." A system of
carefully arranged talks, with copious illustrations from history and literature,
about such topics as fair play, slang, cronies, dress, teasing, getting mad,
prompting in class, white lies, affectation, cleanliness, order, honor, taste, self-
respect, treatment of animals, reading, vacation pursuits, etc., can be brought
quite within the range of boy-and-girl interests by a sympathetic and tactful
teacher, and be made immediately and obviously practical. All this is nothing
more or less than conscience-building. The old superstition that children have
innate faculties of such a finished sort that they flash up and grasp the principle
of things by a rapid sort of first "intellection," an error that made all departments
of education so trivial, assumptive and dogmatic for centuries before Comenius,
Basedow and Pestalozzi, has been banished everywhere save from moral and
religious training, where it still persists in full force. The senses develop first,
and all the higher intuitions called by the collective name of conscience
gradually and later in life. They first take the form of sentiments without much
insight, and are hence liable to be unconscious affectation, and are caught
insensibly from the environment with the aid of inherited predisposition, and
only made more definite by such talks as the above. But parents are prone to
forget that healthful and correct sentiments concerning matters of conduct are, at
first, very feeble, and that the sense of obligation needs the long and careful
guardianship of external authority. Just as a young medical student with a
rudimentary notion of physiology and hygiene is sometimes disposed to
undertake a more or less complete reform of his diet, regimen, etc., to make it
"scientific" in a way that an older and a more learned physician would shrink
from, so the half-insights of boys into matters of moral regimen are far too apt,
in the American temperament, to expend, in precocious emancipation and crude
attempts at practical realization, the force which is needed to bring their insights
to maturity. Authority should be relaxed gradually, explicitly, and provisionally
over one definite department of conduct at a time. To distinguish right and
wrong in their own nature is the highest and most complex of intellectual
processes. Most men and all children are guided only by associations of greater
or less subtlety. Perhaps the whole round of human duties might be best taught
by gathering illustrations of selfishness and tracing it in its countless disguises
and ramifications through every stage of life. Selfishness is opposed to a sense of
the infinite and is inversely as real religion, and the study of it is not, like
systematic ethics, apt to be confused and made unpractical by conflicting
theories.