all the more effective if they appear to be informal and incidental, there should be system in the teacher's mind. The teacher should have clearly before his mind's eye at the beginning of the session what he wants to teach the children, and should constantly ask himself, "Am I succeeding in teaching what I intended to teach?"
(2) The teacher should also remember that merely to impart knowledge about right and wrong and good and evil is not moral instruction. The comparative failure of moral instruction in France has been due almost entirely to the fact that this apparently obvious truth has been overlooked. In his sympathetic report on moral education in France, Mr. Harrold Johnson, Secretary of the Moral Instruction League, says, "No child need leave the French public primary school in ignorance of the fundamental moral distinctions. And so far this is excellent. But one is not always so sure that he leaves with firmly embedded moral principles and with any considerable driving power towards good. Moral instruction of a kind he has. Has he not committed to heart hundreds of résumés of moral lessons; repeated hundreds of them word for word; inscribed countless maxims in his copy-books; composed numerous compositions on all the virtues; gazed daily on mottoes on the blackboard and the walls; copied them in the writing-lesson—by every means, at every hour, has he not had moral facts impressed on his memory, even if they have not penetrated deeper into his constitution?"[1] If these are the only results moral instruction has to show, it stands self-condemned.
