Chapter III: =The Effects of Training=

314.

A. Training prevents passions in that it:--
(1) satisfies needs,
(2) avoids opportunities for violent desires,
(3) provides employment,
(4) accustoms to order,
(5) demands reflection and responsibility.

B. Training influences the emotions in that it:--
(1) checks violent outbreaks,
(2) creates other emotions,
(3) and supplements self-control.

C. Training impresses the courtesies of life (counteracts bad
manners), consequently:--
(1) the deportment of individuals is made approximately uniform;
(2) the number of possible points of social contact becomes much
greater than where strife and contention rule;
(3) while the development of one or the other individual is
checked, the more important energies are not stifled, provided
excess of severity be avoided.

D. Training makes cautions, for:--
(1) It restricts foolhardiness,
(2) It warns against dangers,
(3) It punishes in order to make wiser,
(4) It observes and accustoms the human being to the thought of
being observed.

315. Looked at as a whole, these obvious and familiar effects of training show at once that, generally speaking, its power to lessen evil is very great, and that it is capable of effectively acting upon the interrelations of various masses of ideas. But they suggest also the presence of danger. Training, by driving evil from the surface, may give rise to clandestine deeds.

316. When this happens, the relations between teacher and pupils grow increasingly abnormal, since secret practices become general and concerted, and the pupils assume a studied behavior in the presence of the teacher.

The consequences are well known:--Inexorable severity in dealing with concealed offences when discovered; great leniency in the case of open transgressions; recourse to the machinery of supervision, often even to secret watching, in order that the system of concealment may not get the better of education.

317. It lowers the dignity of the teacher to take part habitually in a competition between spy and concealers. He must not demand to know everything, although he ought not to allow his confidence to be victimized by clumsy or long-continued deception.

Such difficulties, however, only make it more intensely necessary that the foundation of education be laid during the earliest years, when supervision is still easy, and the heart is reached by formative influences with greater certainty than ever afterward, and that, if possible, families should not for any length of time lose sight of their own members.

Ethical and moral judgments can be simulated; the finest maxims and principles may be learned by rote; piety may be put on as a cloak. Unmask the hypocrite, however, and turn him out, and, forthwith, he plays his game over again elsewhere. Nothing remains but recourse to severity which deters, and constant occupation under close supervision in another quarter, in order that he may get away from the hiding places of his misdeeds. Sometimes banishment is capable of bringing about improvement.

318. The will is most directly tractable in social relations, where it appears as common will. In infancy, the child, wholly devoted to his mother, is manageable through her; at a later period training is surest of success when it promotes attachments among the young and carefully fosters the seeds of goodness. The social ideas, purified by teaching, must gradually be added.

319. But as far back as boyhood, factions spring up and exclusive sets are formed, facts which the teacher cannot permit to elude his vigilance.

When a kind of authority is granted to some older and tried pupils over those younger and less mature in judgment, the former become responsible; but the latter are not on that account relieved of all reflection on their own part, nor are they obliged to submit to every, though plainly unreasonable, demand of the former.