The Adolescent Boy and Girl, Part 4

Parent and Child, Volume III
by Mosiah Hall

(Page 9 of 10)

The highest human thing in the end is character, and character is formed very early, very shortly before the boy leaves the high school. Just how it is formed I do not know, but I know one thing, that while I cannot tell anything about how successful a man will be intellectually in life from what he does in college, or, sometimes, I cannot tell very much about how large he will grow mentally, I know that boy will not rise very much higher morally than he stands in college when you send him there. If, then, he has secured a moral training and influence, I firmly believe he will stay so. If he does not come to us in that shape the probability is that he never will change for the good, but if he is filthy he will remain filthy still. His character is made very largely in the high school.

How can you reach it? I think you can reach it a good deal through literature. I do not see how anybody can read Mr. Hawthorne or Mr. Emerson, and not long to be a gentleman, and feel as if he would like to be worthy to kiss the hem of the garment of those literary gentlemen. You can read history. You can make history a dreary chronicle. You can learn of kings who never ought to have been born, and when they died, when they ought to have been dead fifty years before, and all the long list of battles fought which never ought to have been fought. You can make it just such a weary chronicle. You do not, nowadays, thank fortune; I have seen teachers that did. Or you can make that history the Eleventh Chapter of Hebrews, and you can write your own Eleventh Chapter of Hebrews, if you will, for that chapter never was intended to be finished; and if you cannot add to it with your pioneer history of those who fought their way across the plains here fifty or more years ago, then you are teaching history to mighty little effect to this generation here in Utah. The whole story is just this, if you can saturate your pupils with the character of just such men and women as that, then you have trained a generation of heroes and nobody can spoil them.

That is what, it seems to me, Mr. Martineau means in that dark passage, "We shall never have a proper system of education until we have a proper religion." We are a good deal lacking in the study of the Bible nowadays. We go to it to prove the text, to "break the scales" of our adversaries, and for other purposes. I do not use it for that purpose myself. If you will read that old book until you can walk the street arm in arm with Gideon and David and Jepthah and old Samson, too, yes, heaven bless him, and Moses and Samuel, the prophets, then we are reading it to some purpose. Until you know them all as your best friends, you have not begun to read that book; for that is what it was intended for. The Bible is an advanced text book of biology, the science of life. If you will train your boys and girls to walk the streets and live with the heroes of the world, make them form an intimate friendship with them, then you have trained those boys and girls to be heroes themselves.

Did you ever try reading to them the defense which old Socrates makes, which Plato wrote down for us? I do not know whether Socrates ever said it, but it was worthy of him. Read it to your boys and girls some day. See what they say about the Apology. And read the Crito. Let them sit with Socrates in his prison there on the hillside and listen to his discussion, until, as he says, he hears the voice of the law ringing in his ears and he cannot hear anything else, and stays on to die. When the prison door is opened for him to walk out, provided he would walk out with dishonor, he will not go. Let them see the old hero die in Athens as the sun goes down. You have not only awakened a new interest, you have evoked a higher life, and that is what we are after, that is what you and I are here for, that is the only way in the end to beat the record. That is the essential power of great leaders, of great prophets, and of great teachers, and the seat of it is in their personality.

I don't know what I am talking about there either, for personality defies analysis and it defies resistance. It leaps from soul to soul just like an infection. We hear a great deal about the infectiousness of bad things and people are always talking about infectious disease and of corrupting influences in the world and all that sort of thing. Do you suppose the Lord has made this world so that everything that is bad is contagious and everything that is good is not contagious? Are you going to slander the Lord like that? It is about time that we wake up to the fact that the real genuine article of goodness is a good deal more contagious than smallpox.

Heroism and hero-worship is the central thought of history from the time of Gideon to the time of Sheridan, and down to our present time. Virtue, we must remember, should strike just like electricity from a dynamo. You remember that was the continual word of that Great Master of ours. Someone in the crowd has touched me, Virtue has gone over into somebody else. Virtue has gone out of me; strength has gone out of me and gone over into somebody else. I am talking about something that I do not understand; but something that you will know. Have you never, at the close of the day, when you were tired, discouraged, wondered whether it is worth while to keep up the fight? When you had been knocked flat and were pretty sure you were out, and then you sat down for a little time by some strong man or strong woman, and probably they did not say a great deal to you. They were men and women of few words, and you did not say a great deal to them, but after a little it began to come upon you that come what would you would fight again? Courage had come into you. You do not know where it came from, or how it came in, but you borrowed it and you go on your way the stronger because of the infection from that strong man.

We must be healthy and strong and sympathetic. We must be a child with the child and a boy with the boy, and yet we must lead and not follow. We must be firm and patient and hopeful and courageous, and we must infect these boys and girls with the very best that we have in us and something that is a little better yet, and how are we going to get it? Why, we must be continually infected from others; that is the only way. I don't care how big your reservoir is, your irrigation reservoir, if there isn't a stream going into it, it is going to be empty sometime. Look out for the streams which come in from the hills and the heights of glory into your lives.

Child Study and Training
1916