Character is such a frequently used word that its connotation is diffused in the common speech of the day. Almost everybody as something to say about it and often something sensible and helpful. Yet our ideas about character are none too clarified. Character is too complex a human expression for analysis to reveal fully its ravelled skein. Our knowledge of character is however, sufficient to help us to realize its importance and to approach it with the hushed spirit of inquiry it deserves. Character is a question of human worth, the determining factor in man. It is the compound of all of the man's action and thought. It is the cast of his self's countenance which is above his powers of display or disguise. More than the face is the index of the mind character is the index of the whole of him. Character is at once the summary and sum total of the man.
The educationist asks, "Is character native or acquired?" and receives the answer that it is both. Although it is not known for certain it is generally believed that we are born with our characters partly made and that we make it fuller and fuller as we grow. Heredity is often said to be a more powerful influence in human life than it is generally supposed and the hereditary elements in character are often described to be far from negligible. There is no doubt that we come into the world with mental and bodily tendencies. The old belief in the attendance of fairies at the `arrival' of children to give them legacies, good or bad, is a picturesque explanation of a more or less fundamental fact in human life by an impressive fable. Our fathers have remembered us in their wills but every inheritance has its price and their sins in varying degees might have been visited upon us.
These considerations incite irresponsibility on the one hand and induce a measure of helplessness on the other. We are often persuaded to put on the abandoned supremacy of leaves blown in a storm and since it cannot be helped be regard life with lordly indifference. This attitude is however without justification in experience. Our native helplessness is immeasurable only because it is unmeasurable. The history of human endeavour is a blended archive of triumph and failure and the volume of failure is not bigger than that of victory. Perhaps it is much less. Progress is the testimony of man's power to shape his destiny. Science speaks his opportunities. Philosophy shows the pilgrimages open to him. Individuals prove their fitness to bear the brunt of battle and to brave the blows of circumstance. Look wherever we may from the raging of blind elements perhaps issuing from the dim regions that stretch behind our births from the wrecks of failure from the jaws of defeat, man standing on the whole undefeated and undismayed, is able to bear fresh laurels home. It needs no psychology to come and tell us that although we are born each with his fate on his head the inevitable bundles can contain without themselves the alchemy for changing themselves. We live in an age of universal synthesis of transmutations of magic metals. The uprising of gold from mercury shows man's power to change the character of things. Man too, in a sense can and does change himself. The artificial man is already half come. The bad fairies and their gifts are perhaps extinct. Cannot the leopard change his spots ..?
Democratic education not only consider all classes of people but also all conditions of intelligence. The feeble-minded have as much right to and as much expectation of finding themselves as the quick-witted. The Voltairian disbelief in the immutability of human inequalities can be now said to be bearing fruit. We are trying to explore the origins of personality to understand how best we might adapt them to the call of common and individual welfare. The results of this endeavour have however here and there, tinged the temper of modern educational movements with a certain amount of gloom. Students of heredity and child-mind have in recent years greatly increased our wondering respect for children but this new child-sense is often found to contain elements of anxiety to escape the blame of mishandling them and of uneasy doubts if it is quite within our power to help them and to change them for the better. Psychological educationalists are often inclined to exalt the native side of character to something like primacy and to suspect the teacher's efforts to engender and build up the right tendencies and impulses in his pupils. This scientific recrudescence of armoured fate is an equivocal force in the educational field. It is possible to understand children too well. Free inquiry if pushed too far sometimes comes full circle and results in new obscurantism. Whatever fears and doubts psychology in its excavations into the infant human mind throws up teachers have to go forward without gratuitous qualms discovering the young for themselves. Voltaire is still good for them.
Character is invested with a double sovereignty. Its counsel is supreme in the iconography of individuals no less than in that of social values. Character fixes the individual's place in society no less than it fixes the individual himself. The function of the school is to bring these two apparently ill adjusted half parts of character into proper correlation. The innate and often explosive energy of selfishness has to be subdued by soft degrees to the ennobling appetite for service. The ill conducted passions swaying the individual mind have to be sublimated into a fairy jewelry of self-oblivious ideals. The ultimate aim of education is to discover the individual for himself in society to adjust difference with uniformity without detracting much from either to make every individual a pride unto himself and at the same time a pillar of society. Unity and individuality in harmony are the goal. Anger can become an ally of soul-force greed a golden hunger lust a warm infusion of love and hatred an imperative impatience with evil. Society must value the individual and the individual must suffer society and serve it as well. Education cannot plead inability to see the wood for the trees or the trees for the wood. The ultimate test in both aspects in character.
The present day is gone hoarse with lamenting disorganized characters and disorganizing influences. Education is accused of extirpating he old standards of conduct. The rule of religion is said to be waning and science is suspected to have advanced so far as to be able to encourage superstition. And comparing the old times with the new that great bald original thinker, George Bernard Shaw asks, and which is the healthier mind? The saintly mind or the monkey gland mind? It can hardly be gainsaid that human character is sadly tempted today to achieve fashionable contortions and illicit freedoms and that much delirious nonsense prescribed by u-tube philosophers is finding its may into young minds. If man is coming by the occult power to be his own physician and architect he is also getting near certain intoxicated ideas that would have him pull himself down. There is need to erect some sort of sanitary ring fence against the new seduction. The task devolves on the masons of character who are almost entirely supplied by the teaching profession. Can it be doubted that it is an all important task?
The agnosticism induced by the hand untouched syllogisms of modern times and attempting to rebuild the universe often achieves the annihilation of conduct. Even if there is not God but only Evolution the vast majority of mankind must find it hard to live without Him. Evolution is perhaps enough and to spare for the small minority that can draw all the sustenance life requires from a `fourth dimension existence. The bulk of mankind however need a living God to inform their lives and if this psychological necessity is denied them they will probably go and redress the balance by selling themselves so to speak to the devil by cultivating principles of conduct whose only virtue is that they are not present. The illumination of Heaven in the consciences of men and women has always been the beginning of behaviour and it is difficult to find a proper substitute. The school must therefore, be spiritual in its core if not to its core before it can think of upbuilding personality and modulating character. Formal religions instruction has its perils. Formal religious instruction seeking to implant harmony in conduct is often surprised by the sight of monkey propensities somewhat firmly entrenched in it. Fanaticism comes from emotional formality but the cultivation of the spirit which is the heart and soul of character is not bad because fanaticism is bad. The teacher confronted by the problem of character will feel the need of being or becoming a super-preacher relying more upon his silent sermons than upon his spoken maxims. His conduct has got to speak instead of borrowing speech. His character has got to hold some holy microbes to render it infectious. His personality has got to be good enough to be shown as example. These might seem almost naccessible things but the necessity to attain them is a blessing if in disguise just as it is a blessing that the poor man has got to make his bread while his wealthy neighbour is left with his grievance that he has not got to make it. To be plain, character will escape the teacher that has it not. He may try to correct the defect by constantly conjuring with a bag of ethical headlines but the effect will last about as long a time as that of the magical rabbits condemned not to go inside hats but to come out of them at the behest of an uncanny man.
Apart from the teacher and his personality which are certainly supreme among the factors that help the enterprise of founding character the school itself taken as a whole and functioning collectively may suggest signposts of thought and action to its juvenile inhabitants. A school without a tradition is nearly like the play of Hamlet without the prince. Traditions are active elements influencing character. The atmosphere is an invisible agent of change in body and mind. The presence of a great man is an inspiration to the small more often than it is an envy. The Headmaster of a school has therefore got to have a personality of his own and a compelling sense of wholesale identification with the institution to build for the school a body of traditions so that the pupils through their silent influence may become better and better if necessary in spite of themselves and even without their knowledge. The school must have a stamp to impress upon its children but this does not mean making them the same but to making them strong each with himself and loyal each to his inner voices. If the school is well supplied with sincerity and love with discipline and freedom with hungry satisfaction with omnivorous zeal, with visible lineaments of courage and nobility great pictures and haunting dreams if would be possible to wish it prosperity in its call to handle character. The school house may be simple but the class room must be inspiring. The teacher must naturally always remain the source of inspiration the dominant actor in the play but the footlights and scenes help. The class room is a laboratory of character and the class rooms mingling their mild forces make the tradition of the school which the Headmaster sitting apart from indistinguishable from its assambled life fosters and guards with jealous care. The tradition of the school thus becomes the guarantee of its standards.
Nor should Nature be neglected. Green is good for the eyes. Woods and pastures blow bracing air on the mind. Gardens beckon thought and dream and lend them beauty. There is rich mental festival in pageants of plants and the children can by themselves make these pageants. If they do they should become beautiful which is it so very bad a thing to do? Nature the mother of all flowers helps character bloom. Let every school bear this in mind for there is need.
The curriculum of the school may as easily be made a cordon to keep away the sins as a mere manger for examination going folks. It is possible to make it a sort of class room scouting an indoor exercise of the intellectual emotional and aesthetic elements that combine to produce character. Poetry, for instance is the sum of life and the most elegant guide to the feelings. To be able to appreciate poetry is to import a soft and soaring culture into the mind that cannot fail to leaven the whole life. Teaching poetry leaving appreciation unasked is much the same as teaching Nature without so much as requiring the students to look at her once. The appreciation may be little or great but when it totally fails the Mue gives the class the slip if more in shame than in annoyance. Poetry is the greatest school subject to give just the desired tonality to the primary chords of character and it should be better and kindlier to banish poetry the school than to lay at on the operation table to excise its bone and cartilage. The value of the school derives from the aspirations dreams and devotions it offers and not from the bulky avoirdupois of instruction it daily releases. This is an ancient fact which is consigned to oblivion for the amiable reason that it has been known to everybody from time out of mind; but the teacher who forgets it salving his qualms with the superior meditation that it is common and old gives capital short weight. Poetry with its overshelming joy and sorrow, beauty and truth, adventure hallucination and vision is the food of the gods for the little beasts clamouring at the school gateway for their characters which they think not quite wrongly have been somewhat unlawfully detained in its inner recesses.
Imagination on the teacher's part should indeed enable him to bend every school subject to the purpose of building character. In a sense all that comes to his mill could be grist. History will give him human characters to emulate or fly from. Geography will uncover to him the characters of human beings in combination. Mathematics will come to him holding out the lure of abstracted intellect, of its service in the solution of human problems and of this unimpassioned influences like oil on troubled waters upon the passionate cauldron which it so very often is of the human mind. Science will tell him the supremacy of natural laws over all things including man and of the glory of understanding obedience to them. The school curriculum even when inadequate in quality or excessive in contents, can to some extent be made to give embodiment to the principles that underline conduct. If this is not generally done or perfunctorily done it is perhaps because it is easier to explain a subject than to ask it to stir the heart or to make it speak without the aid of an interpreter to the mind. There are sermons in stones and it is wonderful how instructive these could be incurably dumb as they are.
The playground is more senses than is common to suppose is both a rearing place and a trial house of character. There is the most intimate contact between player and player. The individual is all important while the team is the ultimate factor. Competition waxes furious but actual conflict would be fatal to the common interest. There are the overseeing rules and everyone must play the game. It would be deemed a victory to strive nobly and to suffer defeat if that be the result cheerfully, as it would be deemed ignominious to spy out a chance to pinch a winking rule or to steal a march. The game is thus a faithfully representation of the industrious honourable and mutually helpful and beneficial life that we meet with although none too frequently in a well ordered society that knows its job and therefore affords excellent apprenticeship to the citizens of tomorrow. Games obviously develop the body and stimulate its functions but this is not their chief pride, which they would rather keep secret. They develop character and prove it more they create it and endow it. A school without games is something like a public meeting summoned at the fag and of day without even the attraction of the presence of a single good speaker.
Do punishments help in building character? The question is more readily posed than answered. A wise writer has said that many things could be borne when the intention is good. The well intentioned Headmaster that applies the birch to an erring boy is often like captive good attending captain ill Prison reform is proof of the failure of prisons. More hanging is frequently followed by more capital crime and when hanging is abolished capital crime is not unoften ashamed to rear its head. Punishment is sometimes provocative of the very offences it would put down and if punishment is vindictive or is meted out as a warning it, having not even the excuse of good intension is extremely apt to be an incitement to more misdoing. Tyrants have always tried terrorism and have always failed. It all means only this that mankind is brave and still cherishes in its bosom the sin of its original unsubmissiveness and that men and women could be made to do or not to do many things which they would or would not do under the minatory forefinger of fear. The school must be the last place for corporal punishment to be practised in or rather the first place for it to be tried to be thrown away the next moment for good. Many a wild colt has turned out a noble steed in understanding sympathy. In kindly severity apart from physical punishment many that come to scoff remain to pray. On the other hand, how often a bad enough boy becomes worse and worse in the hands of teacher none of whom can get to like him probably because they would not seek to know him and how often the same boy the instant he is convinced that one teacher likes him becomes all right and one better to him. It is high time one is tempted to say that the birch was withdrawn from the hands of the educational profession for when punishment goes wrong and ninety nine out of one hundred times it is inflicted it is more than likely to go wrong it becomes to say the least of it a menace to character.
After all for the school to redeem its promises it must be a society. It must be a society every time it calls itself a school or answers to that name if it is to exert any tangible and beneficial influence on the juvenile springs of character. And the importance of the school lies in the fact that it can be made a model society not only for its own purposes but also for the immediate benefit of the neighbourhood. The school cannot only be a preparation for the life but life itself at least in a measure as it should be. Every class can be a unit of self-rule with its own cabinet and code of laws and sanctions for breaches. Every class can contain the just juxtaposition of collective responsibility and individual vigilance. Every class can be its own parliament in which every citizen enjoys his right of say full democracy not the representative democracy of today which is often only symbolic self rule. The larger school with its thronging numbers will be content with representative Swaraj but with nothing less than the best and most compact representative Swaraj. Unless the school thus blends life with learning character cannot come and the young individuals cannot see where their true natures lie, nay even learning must slowly vanish like a worn down stock of words. The atmosphere may thus become the breeding ground of many evils. The indefatigable energies of the young being denied the best channels of expression they must capture for themselves any means of expression which are often terrifying, both in their novelty and bravery. While their over wise elders engage themselves in not but generally barren discussions whether character could be made or amended or whether the children should be taught the mechanism of the genital organs or the etiology of too early sex, the sapient little ones, themselves tumultuously and emotionally rendezvoused in another place give exhibitions of their holy incorrigibility regaling one the other with their auticipations of sexual bliss.
The conclusion of the matter is that our academic discussions and new gotten wisdoms promise no great help in the dual task of giving knowledge and kindling the right character. Mother wit often wins where the gliftering devises of intelligence are prone to confound the understanding. Perhaps the sceptical attitude some people oppose to things fresh from man's ingenuity is at bottom sound and healthy. Discipline is still good. Difficulty must always be an impetus and hardly anything is perhaps past cure. If the teacher bases his outlook on common sense, it would be better and not worse for building character. Example and precept backing each other, life and learning mixing together work and play succeeding each other changing activities following one another discipline guarding freedom, service saving joy and the soul of the school presiding over all such is the air in which individuals grow to their highest worth.
It is indisputable that the present must be seen in terms of the future and practice in terms of the aim for progress to become possible.