Francis Bredestege, "Relative Position of the School and the Other Agencies Affecting Character Development" (1929)

[455] We proceed in this chapter from the hypothesis that though the school is the first instrument that occurs to the mind when education is mentioned, it is not the first, neither in time nor in the sum of its effects nor effectiveness.

Historically, as well as to-day, the family is anterior to the school, and education in the general sense, begins in the home. The relation between parents and children is the most primitive form of learning, and also the first in which there is a union of intellectual and moral education. The first gift of the grown generation to the new, viz., the mother tongue, is named after the mother, and the next two vital intellectual gifts and most intelligible units of life, viz., the father's house and the fatherland, are named after the father.

Even now, however, we are not at the beginning of the chain. If science, and specifically psychology and biology are correct, we are far from the beginning in taking only the immediate family of the educand [sic; i.e. one to be educated] as the beginning point of the process of education. We must go far back beyond the formation of each individual unit of our social fabric. Even Emerson was only partially correct by claiming that we must begin with the child's grandfather. For a complete list of the complex array of the material we are to deal with antedates the bride and groom by several centuries. We need only point to the large amount of matter recently written on the relative importance of heredity and environment to stress the point, for this angle of the question will be brought out in extenso, before we separate after this meeting. Suffice it to say then, actually man begins his education centuries before as an individual [456] he begins his existence and his training in moral and social life. The psychological factors, the bodily conditions he will inherit, and the environment into which he will be born, these really make up agency number one.

Already conditioned then, the child meets his mother and his father, who then constitute agency number two. He steps into family life, and in the ordinary course of events, he will not be free from it, in one form or another, till he closes his eyes in his last long sleep. During at least the most malleable first six years his education is directed almost entirely either for good or for evil by this agency. Family life, then, in its widest sense, though in point of time not the first, is admittedly the most important and lasting educational instrument because as soon as life begins, and before the child has even the barest conceptions of responsibility, or an inkling of morality, there come into play the assimilations on which moral training is based, those subconscious factors of thought, desire, interest, suggestion and imitation, that arise from the intimate contacts established by the common life of the family group.

This is no place to enter into a rhapsody extolling what we carry into life from home. Sentiment has invested the home with a sanctity which under normal conditions amply justifies the verdict. Mother love and fatherly sacrifice are the miraculous commonplaces not only of all literature but equally of the savage too mentally poor to have a literature. The ties of family life are reckoned too sacred to bear rupture, "to love like a brother" is a banality in every language under the sun. In the family circles are planted and nurtured the seeds of those homely virtues that make up the warp and woof of every ordered life, reverence, love, sacrifice, faith. No matter what may be the final definition here of character, we are safe in saying that it will not depart far from this paraphrase of Bishop Ullathorne's: "Character is the natural temperament completely fashioned by the home; God makes our nature, our own home makes our character".

And still, like all things human, home can fail of its destiny. The school itself is but an extension, a corrective of the home; as such it has won its unchallenged place in our social economy. It [457] is possibly significant that equally universal with the failure of the home proclaimed by every sociological amateur and professional, is the cry regarding the failure of the school. That the home has failed must possibly be admitted. Just consider in addition to the school, the day nursery and kindergarten, the public playground and juvenile court placement, industrial home and reformatory, big brother and big sister leagues, vocational guidance movement and amusement park, the whole long list of twentieth century substitutes for the home that has failed. And the verdict of failure is supported by the attitude of the Church. In spite of the fact that she had schools of high efficiency long before the present-day omnipresent state began its career, and before the sociological meddler was abroad in the land, the Church is now the one middle-of-the-road organization, that is protesting against the continual spoliation of the home, of its sanctity, of its authority and of its place as the sun of our social solar system.

The spoliation does exist. Much of it may be due to causes with which no one can quarrel. The complexity of modern life and the scientific age in which we live have made necessary a division of labor, even in our relaxations. We presuppose that the average child spends a large part of his life in the home and we are probably correct. Still, it seems an anomaly that the modifications of family life in our complex modern civilization are such that he is not entirely a pessimist who declares that when the child is ready for school, he is already too spoiled to have the school do its best work with him. For as he begins to approach school age the child makes contacts with the corner butcher and grocer, with the movies; he has possibly been taken to see or rather endure, the local counterparts of adult interests like the Lindbergh reception, floods, possibly even murder trials; he has cultivated the acquaintance of his relatives and his parents' friends, and has even been in church on occasion; his play time with his toys and neighbor children or kindergarten group really making up the routine of his waking hours. According to Bird T. Baldwin, roughly fifty per cent of his time is taken up with sleep and about ten per cent goes for meals and other bodily necessities. From twenty-seven per cent the first year to about [458] eight per cent the sixth year, or an average of twenty per cent of his time is spent alone in physical or imaginative play. Of the balance, about fifteen per cent more goes into family and non-family play and mental contacts, and about four is taken up with the rudimentary business and social contacts that introduce him to the outside world. Supposing then, that one-half or three-fourths of the time spent alone or in personal contacts is contact with the home and the family group, and is given to mental absorptions and exercise of his growing faculties, his instincts, habits and will, we still can recognize that foreign interests, so to speak, have used up from twelve to twenty per cent of his life, or one-fourth of his waking hours. What he got from these domestic and foreign influences we shall see later. For the present it is enough to recall that they are all attributed to the home. He knows love and quarreling, selfishness and sacrifice, sickness and health, he has his code of ethics and his standards of values; in spite of his simplicity and candor, he is a calculating worldling, in spite of his baptismal innocence an adept in all the capital sins but lust and sloth. So stands the home indicted.

After school life begins, the child's use of time does not change much. Allowing ten to eleven hours of sleep at the age of seven, and eight hours at the age of sixteen, we find that thirty-eight per cent of his time is given over to sleep, and approximately ten per cent to meals and other necessities.

Of the remainder of his day, we imagine school to be the big interest. But as a matter of fact, the statistics say that between the ages of seven and sixteen, the average child spends only 186 days of the year in school and the average number of hours per day is only four and a fraction, or approximately sixteen per cent. In the case of our Catholic schools, this fraction may, perhaps, be raised to the next higher integer, in view of the close connection between church and school, through daily and Sunday Mass, first Holy Communion and Confirmation preparation, confessions, serving Mass, and in the other activities where the church character of our schools manifests itself. Supposing then that the formal aspects of his character training by the school last till sixteen years of age, it still remains that the "ten years of schooling" [459] become a small fraction of all his interests and activities from birth till the day he goes out into the world. To be exact, the school has him for sixteen per cent of ten years out of the total, and allowing another hour a day for "home study", we find that he is in school only nineteen per cent of his school life, and only twenty-two per cent of all his waking hours from infancy till his seventeenth birthday. In fairness, we may raise these figures a trifle by adding the growing office of the vacation school, the gymnasium class, the children's hour in the public library, and the reading of books from the school's circulating library. But even then, the percentage is still startlingly small.

The relative disposal of his time when he has reached the age of sixteen can be seen from the following article from the press (Cincinnati Times-Star, Mar. 19, 1929), and shows how his habits have "set" by then:

"The Industrial Education Bureau of the New York State Department of Education has been trying to find out (how boys spend their evenings), and to this end has questionnaired [sic] 75,000 boys attending the continuation schools. Of this number 12 per cent must have concluded that it was nobody's affair but their own, for they sent in no reply. Sixteen per cent said they were never at home in the evening, nine per cent said they were always at home, and 40 per cent said they remained at home for two, three or four evenings a week; night classes accounted for ten per cent.

"While Cincinnati boys have not been official quizzed, one can get a pretty fair picture of their nocturnal activities. After dinner every night the average lad leaves home for a space to foregather with other lads. At least twice a week he sees a picture in what is called the 'naborhood' movie house. Once a week he goes down town. One evening a week is spent with some group or club. When he returns late, he may turn on the radio for an interval, and then study, or at least, go through the motions thereof for a little while. He reads much more than you might think, glancing over the morning paper before he breakfasts, scanning the evening paper before the nocturnal exit, and somehow contriving to get through a novel or so a week. He is not much of a hand at cards.

"Obviously the modern lad is accumulating a far greater store of experiences, observations and social contacts than the lad of [460] a generation ago. Whether he ever mulls over this mass of raw material we shall not attempt to say."

But what we can say is that the home represents a small fraction of the average youth's guidance and character formation. Arbitrarily assuming that one-half of his play, non-theatrical recreation and other interests are in the home or its immediate environment, we have only an average of three and three-fourths hours of his waking day under home influence ,including newspaper reading, parental conversation, social and business visits, etc. We have already seen that the school gives very little more.

Greater than home and school, then, are the forces that make up agency number three, the greater group life. We have already seen that the growing child has thrust upon him fringes of social contacts, parts neither of home nor school, and ranging form his neighborhood playmate to the distant cities he visits with his vacationing parents. As he grows, there increase in number and power the common associations and forces of our institutional life, educational, religious, legal, political and economic, such as divorce, selfish individualism of public characters, the zeit-geist, organized philanthropy, organized sport, big business, etc.

Now there is still to be brought into the picture educational agency number four. We might call this group the non-professional educating agencies, to denote their indirect but formal participation in the school's function of giving information, health habits, economic training and a moral outlook on life. Specifically it is only necessary to mention as examples, the press with its variations, the lending and public library as avowedly educational, and the still more informally educational organizations like the boy scouts and girl scouts, and the large variety of well-intentioned and often well-endowed adult activities and leagues for the young, such as civic leagues, park and playground associations, civic theatres, etc. Besides them, potent for good or evil, stands the theatre, and its illegitimate half-brother, the movie.

In last place we shall mention the Church, not because its influence, at least with us is smallest, but because unfortunately its [461] influence is last with perhaps eighty-five per cent of our total population, and with a proportionate percentage of the school boys and girls of the land. With the total school population of our country (1926) in excess of 26,900,000, and with only 2,300,000 of them in private schools, we see the comparative place of the Church in its contacts on the growing mind of America. To the Church must then be added the growing influence of the weekday religious school, and of summer and vacation catechism classes. The temptation to disparage their importance as an adjunct of the Church is worth pointing out, as possibly half of our Catholic children are in public schools.

Thus then, do we group the character-building forces that surround the child: home, school, economic society, sociological agencies, and the Church. Now the chief fundamental in character-building is impression. Constancy and intensity of impression become the dominant factors in the formation of habits and ideals. Consider the stresses, the pushing and the pulling, the attractions and repulsions of this assembly of agencies all working for good or for evil in the development of the child's character. What a storm of impressions, what a crowd of examples, what a hurricane of correct and distorted attitudes, of genuine and sorry ideals rain down into the unanalyzing mind from these sources. We hear so much of the socially unfit, of the wave of youthful crime, of the bleak outlook for the future, and of the hopeless helplessness of the home, and the impotence of school and Church.

Are we justified in adopting pessimism? As Churchmen, we cannot consent to the proposition that the family, founded by nature and sanctified by God, has failed, much as individual families may fail. When we see the large number of young people passing into an efficiently and even heroically moral manhood and womanhood, we can see a new meaning in the trite proverb: There's a special Providence that watches over children.

And as school men we repudiate the statement that the school has failed. We must perhaps revise our estimate of the degree of influence the school may exercise in fact, but we must keep in mind, in the case of the school as well as of the home, that the [462] time element is not indicative of the relative weight of that influence. Home and school are still the first agencies that receive the child, and first impressions still are deepest. Much though encroachments on the past monopoly of these two educational agencies may be true, it should also be true that the power for good represented by home and school is first in possession of the child's soul, and should be able, with honest exertion, to hold it to its first conscious allegiance. Knowledge is power, and both these agencies must use their power with the knowledge that perhaps a majority of the educational instruments we enumerated above, are all but unfavorable to the work of character building and its conservation in the individual.

Another point that must be remembered is the fact, that even granted the handicap of relatively less time, the school is but the extension of the home, and that the alliance between the two is productive of a strength that is not the sum, but the product of the two. But an effective "union between the two is the first requisite for enduring success. There should be a continuous friendly understanding and cooperation, sanctified by the spirit of Christian faith and charity, and the earnest conviction of a common responsibility to God", says Monsignor Oechtering. However, when we come to analyze this union concretely, we find that there has in general not been an understanding of these reciprocal possibilities. We need only mention the Parent-Teacher movement as a belated recognition of the fact that teamwork could be improved. But in this alliance nothing will be gained by the pot calling the kettle black. The home admittedly has its faults to answer for. We have already seen the general nature of the indictment against it, namely, a surrender of its functions and prerogatives in general, and an inclination to "pass the buck" to the school in particular. And as education becomes more technical, the parent feels justified in a continuation of this policy on the score of inability to assist intelligently. Any one of our Sisters, to keep the question within our own system, can tell how much contact she has with parents in the course of the year, and how much of this precious little is due to parental wrath only. And on the other hand we know, too, how little [463] the average Sister knows the economic problems and domestic worries that result from our indoor sport of keeping up with the Joneses.

The school then, may in justice excuse itself from a great deal of the responsibility for the imperfect character building of the past, since it was handicapped by receiving no help from the home in trying to educate the already spoiled child deposited with a sigh of relief at its door. But the school, also, in its shortsightedness made a tactical error so to speak, and to this extent it cannot excuse itself. the error lay in the fact, that when the school saw that the home was not accomplishing its task in the dual work of character building, and perhaps was often not even appearing to attempt it, the school forgot its own limitations and volunteered to take over the major portion of the work, even that which was formerly the fully recognized work of the home. The nursery, the kindergarten, and the other infant interests that supplement the home, are in reality an independent unit, an ally if you will, but certainly not a legitimate part of the educational machinery as we knew it from tradition. But the school tried to make them an integral part of itself. The same thing is occurring at the other end of the elementary ladder even now. The matter of vocational guidance, and even vocational training is also an usurpation on the part of the school. These are really a successor of the apprentice system, also a character forming agency if you will, but even then a rather limited one, and an oblique one. With it the school ought to live in peace, of course, but not to make a part of the school system. Apprenticeship was originally in the home, and the advent of the factory system took it out of the home to give it to the factory master and the foreman. Nor does the fact that its original home form gave it some opportunity for character training become a reason for the school to annex it as soon as it leaves the home environment.

Now it is has only been in the very recent past that a cautious word of warning has been taken up here and there, that the school was attempting too much. Nor was the school very anxious to listen to that word, because of the implication that its over-ambition was foreordaining it to failure in its narrower and more [464] legitimate sphere, collective educational activity in the nobler sense. In that narrower sphere the school has a special opportunity of aiding the home by inculcating the domestic virtues. "It should ever strive to foster reverence, love and obedience by religious instruction and respectful deference to parental authority." But how can it inculcate for the home it has despoiled? As long as the skeleton of the home even remained, the whole process is but lost motion, if the inculcation is not based on a mutual understanding with the home as to complementary duties of inculcation and practice. So it would seem that perhaps the school as well as the home, did not understand its task in the alliance. Its ambitions outran its abilities, and in its vanity it saw not that the failures of its ally were being imputed to itself.

Another point that must be kept in mind is that it took the work of character building with woefully unfit tools. Historically, character building is not the first connotation of school life as we know it. The pedagogue of ancient Greece, and the educator of pagan Rome were but slaves who accompanied the pupil to a place where he was expected to acquire nothing more than literacy. And to-day to the man in the street, school means an intellectual relationship between a teacher and an ignorant person for the imparting of knowledge and skills. The relation between an educator and his pupil is a much later derivative, and is founded on the realization of a power for good in the educator that comes only by implication and in virtue of his personal contacts. Originally children were sent to school to learn arbitrary but necessary skills, the three R's, and it was not till the advent of Christianity, and in proportion to its vigor that the fourth R, religion, gave proof that the school also was baptized, and learned its higher destiny from the Church. Hear the average educational theorist outside of the fold to-day, and his theme will still be the same as the old pagan idea, social efficiency, not for the sake of the individual but for society, and if he mentions character at all, it is only the lubricant in the social friction. From this it follows then, that education, as a quantity production job, is possible only in so far as it is an intellectual job; as soon as you attack the moral angle you must descend to the individual. It is the scholastic [465] parallel to the pulpit supplemented by the confessional, and the blackboard supplemented by drill pad.

Parallel to this is the point that as the character training idea has been added to the function of the school, extra curricular activity has risen in the estimation of those responsible for educational practice. The inference is easy that the imparting of information, as an educational function was not able to enlist the individual as an individual, so the school has ben forced to take the educand out of the classroom into the football field, the office of the school paper, or the school traffic squad to give him the opportunity for moral training, because there he could really act as an individual and develop his character. Of a piece with this fact is also the increased emphasis on individual attention and needs in the classroom exercises themselves; as their training value was better perceived, these subjects were more and more given over to the pupil and taken away from the teacher.

What we need then is a restatement of the real place of the school in this work of character building, and a more humble recognition of its limitations. The limitation is first due to the fact that the school is primarily intellectual. And this must be borne in mind in spite of the fact that the school, just as any other agency that gives men the opportunity of thought and conduct, gives opportunity for the exercise and development of character, but it does so incidentally. Even the parochial school is only a tool in the hands of the teaching Church, and must not try to claim credit for what grace and the Church are accomplishing.

As an arbitrary institution with intellectual ends it follows that Dewey's famous statement that the school is society is only partially true, and to add to the difficulty the child coming to school is only a limited social being, both his objectives and his vision being still very narrow. Consequently the school can fulfill only partially Charter's demand to "require practice with satisfaction", because as an arbitrary and specialized agency it stops short of "generalized practice". It can go part of the way with the pupil, but the time comes when it must stop and allow the youngster to go farther in the company of the other agencies [466] we have listed above. It can instruct and warn what is to be awaited of them, but it cannot be there when the crisis of actual conduct occurs. In fact, even in school the teacher is limited by its narrow arc; as Lommen says, it can "secure an inventory of the positive conduct qualities", but only a fraction of them will be given sustained and healthy exercise in the school atmosphere; it an "build up a positive program of activities", but can oversee their realization only in a small fraction of the total opportunities; it can fall back on "an intensive reading program", "but already we are trespassing on the vicarious", and are actually calling a non-school agency to take our charge in hand. This vicarious nature of the school is then the central weakness of the school's position in the entire process of character building. 

On the other hand, the very formal character of school work is one of the factors for its power in the task. As an instructor, it gives man his moral vocabulary; it gives him an exact appreciation of moral worth and its gradations; it holds up to his gaze the great successes in moral development in the heroes of religion and history; it defines the canons of good conduct and sharpens his conscience for their better evaluation and supplies the motives for their prompt appearance in action at the fitting moment. It furnishes in this way the fundamental attitudes towards "such acts as spring from habits of diligence, frugality, economy, simplicity, contentment, punctuality, order, cleanliness and loyalty to the family circle". (Msgr. Oechtering, 1919) To these it adds very clear ideals as part of the mental equipment that will insure such action.

"The ideals fostered by Catholic Education", says the Hon. Pierce Butler in St. Paul in 1915, "elevate the importance of the individual, develop consciousness of the duty and the power of choice between right and wrong. Character, that is, morality based on religion, must be maintained and strengthened from generation to generation, respect for authority of government and for the teachings of religion, subordination of self in the interests of fellow men and loyalty to the laws, traditions and ideals of our country must continue to be inculcated as to become part of the life of every rising generation".

In second place, we must fashion a clearer idea of just what the school must put together as the constituents of the ideal character. [467] This has so far not been done, neither for nor by the school, nor has the next step, the careful grading of what is possible and desirable of the child both in his age relations, in his classroom relations and the out-of-school contacts. We can see the hodge-podge of alleged virtues and socially desirable qualities from a random selection of almost any standard volume. Witmer, for instance, (Psychological Clinic, Oct. 1922, p. 129) speaks glibly of the "six universal categories of behavior", and names "attendance and promptness, general attitude, initiative, cooperation, self-improvement, esthetic appreciation and rating in other moral qualities". Note this last pair in particular, and then try to follow the mental process by which the entire list is lumped as "citizenship qualities" under deportment, and required as a school mark on his ideal report card. Touton and Struthers, in Junior High School Procedure list as objectives of the guidance program a list which defies rational unity, namely, common sense, imagination, information, initiative, planning, reasoning, thoroughness, ambition, cheerfulness, helpfulness, honesty, industry, perseverance, self-control, self-reliance, loyalty, reliability, etc. Charters himself took a fling at the game (Journal of Education, May 29, 1924, p. 607) with a small list of cleanliness, leadership, democracy, honor, and independence.

But why continue? The one characteristic is vagueness of definition, and the lack of a reference back to a central controlling factor, what we theologians would term a cardinal or principal virtue. As a consequence, the parochial school, leaning on the infallible authority of the Church, ought to be able to blaze a clear trail here, and I understand that a beginning has already been made.

There is however still another angle to this question. After the list is made, it must be rearranged to meet the mental development of the child and his opportunities for practice as well as of appreciation. Patriotism, for instance, for him can be little more than a laying of foundations for his later life, and a building out of indefinite ideals, which can come to definiteness and fruition only as circumstances dictate, as when he has assumed the responsibilities of cheerful tax-paying, of choosing between two [468] dubious candidates for office, and of giving equal attention to the Volstead Act and the traffic laws, and of the other homely virtues that are being disguised as patriotism in our civic texts. A beginning has also been made in this. Parker, for instance (Types of Elementary Teaching and Learning, p [sic] 502) to mention only one, clearly indicates that some civic-moral training may be through actual behavior, and some that can be only through discussion. Coupled with a frank religious tie-up, such as is possible in our parochial schools, results based on an understanding of the limitations of school procedure ought to be genuine, granted a real teacher. Outside our own system, the real difficulty has always been, to make religious instruction an integral part of the subject-matter, a blessing we do not always advert to. The lack of a dogmatic foundation and an adamant sanction can have no substitutes, for "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom". (Ps. 112)

In conclusion then, it would seem that with home and school separated there is not hope for final success, between them they ought to dominate the field, if not in time at least in effectiveness. But they must be a unit, in their outlook, in their cooperation, and in a candid acknowledgment of the forces that are allied against them, because the mathematical factors make them a minority. The exact mathematical proportions cannot be given in decimals, of course, probably never will be, for it is in another guise the old problem of heredity and environment. The final results between home and school on the one side and the non-school agencies on the other, are a problem of the sum result of concomitant factors. Suffice it to say then, that ,granted the best possible contribution by the school, the number of exponents of the highest type of character must increase, because the average is affected by the individual items, and the school as the ex professo determiner of the knowledge element of character composition and development can give us the truth regarding virtue, and the "truth shall make you free" to exemplify it and realize it in life and in action.

[469] Bibliography

School and Society, May 9, '25, p. 543: School not the cause of the Present Immorality.

School and Society, June 13, '25, p. 695: Importance of Attention to Character Development in Pre-School Children.

Educational Review, Nov. '26, p. 180: Faults of Children are Due to their parents.

Mental Hygiene, Oct. '26, p. 735: Effect of Home Environment on Children's Conduct.

School Review, Oct. '26, p. 594: Data on Extent to which Vocational Schools Prepare for Vocations.

Religious Education, Feb. '27, p. 148: Correlating Church and Home.

Religious Education, p. 176: Defects of Character Education in the Public Schools.

Religious Education, May. '27, p. 477: Religious Education and Catholic Schools.

Journal of Educational Method, Mar. '27, p. 291: Educating for Desirable Attitudes in Conduct (Lommen).

Bird T. Baldwin: The Pre-School Child. Riverside Press.

Baldwin and Wallace: The Nursery School. Ibid.

Elementary School Journal, Dec. '24, p. 264; [sic] Two Factors in the Teaching of Ideals. (W. W. Charters)

W. W. Charters: The Teaching of Ideals.

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Source: Francis J. Bredestege, "Relative Position of the School and the Other Agencies Affecting Character Development," National Catholic Educational Association Bulletin 26, no. 1 (Nov. 1929): 455–469.