"The pupil has before him constantly a living model of a wellordered community. It is a community whose members cooperate freely and gladly without any calculation of the exact balance between give and take. This model is not merely a picture he looks upon from without, it is rather a life which embraces his own, whose nature he feels because he is a part of it and it is in a very real sense a part of him. A craving for harmony of purpose, a desire to live in unity with one's fellows, to breathe an atmosphere of mutual confidence and good will, are the normal outcomes of such an experience. In the more favorable instances this will mean an impression which continues and determines ideals and conduct through life."

1

It is often imagined by educators that the sheer routine of the school life when ordered and smooth will insure training in character. For does it not entail punctuality, neatness, truthfulness, accuracy, and a host of other virtues? But the socalled school virtues are in and of themselves no more valuable than other virtues of the office, the mill, or the department store. So long as the horizon from which the school virtues are measured is the four walls of the school they will have little social significance. For true morality requires the whole point of view. That is to say, these routine virtues, that might be called the indispensable moral minimum to the existence of the school's life, must be integrated in some way with the larger social situation. They must be vitalized by some sort of intelligent relation to the community. Here is the necessary point of contact between school and social conscience. They stand in mutual need of each other. The school needs the inspiration and power gained through contact with the moral sentiment of the community. The social conscience needs the school for enlightenment, criticism, and above all as the instrument for the training of efficient citizenship.

In some schools the attempt has been made to secure direct training for citizenship by enlisting high school students in movements for the civic betterment of their own

1 Education for Chracter, p. 105.

communities. A most interesting experiment of this sort is the high school of Two Rivers, Michigan, in which a "flaccid debating society" was transformed into a Young Men's Civic Club, including practically all male high school students. This club was instrumental in renovating the cemetery, establishing public bath houses, and creating a park. Of the moral effect of this upon these students and community, Professor Sharp says, "This makes not merely for municipal and national patriotism. It makes, or at least tends to make, for trustworthiness and good will as between man and man, and indeed all the feelings which knit men together and give them a sense of solidarity. If this work is continued its cumulative effect upon the life, especially the moral life, of that little city will in the end be tremendous. Of all the agencies for moral training thus far described this seems to me by far the most effective." 1

§ 9. MORAL THOUGHTFULNESS

In the college and the university and to a certain extent also in the high school moral instruction and criticism become of equal importance with moral training and personal influence. The fundamental ethical attitudes of the average college student have been formed. It is now rather a question of subjecting accepted norms to critical examination. The problems of the moral life must be approached consciously and reflectively. Earlier habits will serve to keep the character balanced while ethical sanctions are under the fire of criticism. Furthermore, the academic aloofness of the college student and the absence of immediate necessity of taking part in the social issues give leisure for reflection and for the reformulation of ideals if necessary. The constant emphasis by writers on education of the school as part of the social order and of school life as the actual process of living one's self "into citizenship" must be materially modified, therefore, with regard to college and university. More often the college career is a process of living one's self out of old conven1 Op. cit., pp. 137 f.

tional ways of life. Indeed, it may be doubted whether the school can ever rival the family and the church as agencies for moral training. They are natural while the school is artificial. The school's chief rôle lies in the clarification of intelligence. The church and the family will ever remain society's chosen agencies for cultivating religious and moral attitudes. The end sought in moral instruction in college and university should be a mature moral thoughtfulness which implies the habit of subjecting to critical analysis all ethical questions. As a result of such critical analysis the second characteristic of moral thoughtfulness will be attained, namely, reasoned conviction. By far the larger parts of our beliefs on the great issues of life are matters of convention or parts of the social heritage taken over uncritically from the community. The relation to our lives, therefore, of this social heritage, in so far as we absorb it uncritically, must necessarily be somewhat arbitrary and accidental. These sanctions do not become parts of our lives in any thoroughgoing and intelligent fashion until they have been made matters of reasoned conviction.

A not unimportant result of moral thoughtfulness is that through it we get the moral perspective and the whole point of view. The note of relativity is writ large over the moral life of the modern American. This relativity is the inevitable accompaniment of the intensely pragmatic and factual character of our national life. The average American, says Mr. Rodrigues in his brilliant analysis of American life, The People of Action, has no thought-out philosophy of life. He lives for and through action. His ideals are not arrived at in the quiet of reflection and meditation. They are struck out, like sparks, white hot from the forge of action. Hence the elements of relativity, of adventitiousness that are so conspicuous in American society. In everything there is a large element of the accidental, in the plan of our city streets, in the architecture of our homes, in our educational systems, in business or politics or national policies. Nothing is perhaps so needed in the make up of the social conscience of the average American community as habits of reflection. As

a nation we have yet to recognize the moral obligation of being intelligent, that is to say, of seeing life steadily and seeing it whole.

The scholar and the higher institutions of learning have been for generations society's chosen instruments for enlightening the sentiments of men. The rôle of science in rationalizing and liberalizing the social conscience is simply incalculable. The social dialectic through which revolutionary ideas such as the helio-centric astronomy of Galileo or the thesis of Darwin have gradually become embodied in the thought and life of the average man is not the least interesting phase of the advance of human thought. Viewed pragmatically this social dialectic seems to be largely a struggle between ideas, the "logical duels" made so much of by Tarde, those ideas finally surviving that best meet the need for intellectual and social harmony. A more intensive analysis perhaps will show that what we have is a constant interplay between the innovations or particularizations of great minds and the slow process of generalizing or testing out these ideas by the masses of men. Moral progress thus becomes the resultant of the individual as a particularizing force and of society as a generalizing force. The variations or new points of departure are provided by the genius while the test of the truth and value of these new ideas is found in the ability of the average man to make them part and parcel of his daily way of life.1

§ 10. ACADEMIC FREEDOM

The question may be asked, however, what is to safeguard college and university in the exercise of their function as cultivators of moral thoughtfulness? This brings us face to face with the question of academic freedom. Academic freedom has three phases, first the right of the school as society's expert agent to determine the nature and scope of education, secondly

1 Accounts of the effect of science upon the sentiments of men have been given by Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe; A. D. White, The History of the Warfare of Science with Theology; Bury, History of the Freedom of Thought; and Benn, History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century.

the right of free and unrestricted search for the truth, and thirdly the right to proclaim that truth. Freedom of policy, freedom of investigation and freedom of teaching are all but phases of the larger problem of the relation of the institution of higher learning to the community it serves.

Freedom of investigation was opposed from the very rise of the great European universities. All sorts of compromises were attempted such as restricting discoveries to the purely academic sphere and forbidding their practical applications. In the days of Galileo and Bacon it was not uncommon, for example, to hold that what was true for science or philosophy was not true for theology. More recently it is not unheard of to find the principle of evolution in denominational schools admitted in biology or geology but tabooed in psychology or the history of religion. With the growing emphasis in a democracy upon the spread of knowledge and the belief that increased efficiency in business or otherwise is a matter of the application of scientific principles to practical problems, all restrictions upon freedom of investigation tend to disappear.

The cases of academic freedom that attract public attention turn almost without exception upon the question of freedom of teaching rather than freedom of investigation. It would appear strange that after admitting freedom of investigation there should be opposition to freedom of teaching. For the freedom to discover the truth is meaningless without freedom to communicate it to others. But freedom of teaching raises many practical problems. It has been contended, for example, that the sudden communication of new truth to the masses often has a revolutionary effect. The stability of the social order and the preservation of the forms of civilization, it is argued, are after all of more immediate practical value than the abstract truth. This argument influenced even as great a thinker as Descartes and made him withhold some of his writings from publication.

Freedom of teaching is sometimes opposed also on the ground that it is inimical to the practical needs of daily life. The average man or woman must have a certain body of