Page:Education as the Training of Personality.djvu/27

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TRAINING OF PERSONALITY.
23

it is just because the school makes him more of a person, and it does this by helping him to achieve in some form or other one or more of the types of interest we have distinguished. I cannot attempt to work this out in detail, but must content myself with illustrating it by considering one interest only, the boy's interest in the ethical ideal.

Let us notice first that the school is a place specially adapted for the development of this interest. I do not mean merely that the ethical interest can be achieved only by active membership in a society, and the school is a very intimate society. I mean also that in the school the ethical ideal takes a very real and practical shape. For in the school we meet with most, if not all, the problems of our moral life in their most simple and natural form. Life is here lived upon a smaller scale than in the world of men; boys' instincts are more direct, their motives usually less complex than those of older people. The side issues which confuse us in later life are largely absent, and it is easier to view the events of daily life in the light of the ideal. A boy, for instance, is guilty of some petty act of meanness, perhaps one which would be hardly noticed in the world outside, but you know and you have to help him to realise that he has sinned against one of the great laws of social life. This imminence of the ideal is particularly evident in school games, and gives to them their ethical significance. "A game," says a wise schoolmaster, "has in 'a boy's' eyes certain high spiritual affinities which are missed by our older selves. In his inner thought they have a