MORAL EDUCATION. IT will probably be generally acknowledged, that in our schools the department of moral education is in the rear of all the others. It is not that the principles by which the conscience and the heart are to be reached, are less sure or less attainable than those which we obey in cultivating the intellect ; but that they are less generally understood, and have a much slighter influence in regulating the practice. Every teacher feels that it is his direct business to secure the progress of his pupils in the arts of reading, writing and calculation; but we leave the affections and dispositions of the heart to grow as they will, and it is to be feared that the atmosphere of the school-room withers and blights, as often as it protects and sustains. Suppose that some lover of statistics were to go through the families among whom we respectively teach, with the view of collecting from them authentic information in regard to the intellectual and also to the moral progress of their children. Under the first head we may imagine the enquirer to ascertain precisely what progress in the various branches of school instruction has been made. He may enquire into the state of the intellectual powers of the pupils when they entered school, and learn whether any, and if any, what progress in reading, spelling, writing and arithmetic, has been made from month to month, and year to year. The result of such enquiries would unquestionably be the evidence in almost every case of a steady, though perhaps slow advance. The boy who enters, ignorant of his letters, does, in process of time, somehow or other, learn to read. There is no school so entirely unsuccessful but that its pupils do, as months roll on, acquire the power of writing. They do by some methods, good or bad, learn to add a column of figures, and to calculate, slowly and awkwardly perhaps, the sums they receive and pay. A school is in these respects never a failure. The children may advance slowly, and in a rather zigzag direction. Still they do advance. But suppose our enquirer were now to open his budget of questions relating to the moral progress of the pupils. He would in most cases, we think, obtain a very different result. Let us imagine such questions as the following to be addressed to the parent. "Has any apparent change taken place in the character and conduct of your child since he began to go to school?" "Has he become more amiable and gentle, or more rude and selfish and ungovernable?" "Has his regard for truth been increased or diminished by the influence of the school? "Is he more or less docile at home?" "Has he acquired bad language, or bad habits of any kind, or have previous faults of this character been gradually corrected? "Do you find that, on the whole, his connexion with the school is a means of moral improvement,-or is it chiefly a source of temptation from which you find it difficult to protect him?" It would certainly be a very interesting experiment, if an individual would visit the families of some intelligent district, with a list of such questions, both on intellectual and moral improvement, more full and methodical indeed than these, but having the same general object, of ascertaining through parents themselves, the actual operation of the school upon the minds and hearts of their children. If such an en |