Character and Conduct – 11 December – Moral Education

REMEMBER that the aim of your discipline should be to produce a self-governing being, not to produce a being to be governed by others.   Were your children fated to pass their lives as slaves, you could not too much accustom them to slavery during their childhood;  but as they are by-and-by to be free men, with no one to control their daily conduct, you cannot too much accustom them to self-control while they are still under your eye.   This is it which makes the system of discipline by natural consequences so especially appropriate to the social state which we in England have now reached.   In feudal times, when one of the chief evils the citizen had to fear was the anger of his superiors, it was well that during childhood parental vengeance should be a chief means of government.   But now that the citizen has little to fear from any one – now that the good or evil which he experiences is mainly that which in the order of things results from his own conduct, he should from his first years begin to learn, experimentally, the good or evil consequences which naturally follow this or that conduct.   Aim, therefore, to diminish the parental government, as fast as you can substitute for it in your child’s mind that self-government arising from a foresight of results…

All transitions are dangerous;  and the most dangerous is the transition from the restraint of the family circle to the non-restraint of the world.   Hence the importance of pursuing the policy we advocate, which, by cultivating a boy’s faculty of self-restraint, by continually increasing the degree in which he is left to his self-restraint, and by so bringing him, step by step, to a state of unaided self-restraint, obliterates the ordinary sudden and hazardous change from externally-governed youth to internally-governed maturity.   Let the history of your domestic rule typify, in little, the history of our political rule.   At the outset, autocratic control, where control is really needful;  by-and-by an incipient constitutionalism, in which the liberty of the subject gains some express recognition;  successive extensions of this liberty of the subject, gradually ending in parental abdication.

Education, HERBERT SPENCER

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These quotes are from ‘Character and Conduct’ A selection of helpful thoughts from various authors arranged for daily reading.

Collected by Constance M Whishaw and first published in 1905 as a follow up to her volume of Daily Readings for members of the Being and Doing Guild who asked for an additional volume

In her preface Whishaw writes:

‘This collection of noble thoughts expressed by men and women of past and present ages who have endeavoured to leave the world a little better than they found it.’

It is my hope in publishing them here is that readers may be inspired to imitate the example of the authors.