Mr. William George Jordan, a brilliant and forcible writer of New York City, in a recent number of Current Literature, thus ably animadverts upon the recent legislation in New York providing for the introduction into the public schools, of experimental study as to the effects of alcoholic drinks upon the system.
"The most eloquent proof of the inherent vitality of Christianity is that it has survived nineteen centuries of its teachers. The unanswerable proof of the indestructibility of the human mind is that it still lives despite all the efforts of modern education. And now—they have introduced Drink into the public schools. A Herod Legislature has decreed that the innocents are to be drugged with lessons on alcohol and narcotics. They will see in all detail the horrible results upon the system of excessive drinking and smoking. Probably pictures will be shown them of tissues as they appear after a few months companionship with alcohol. Young minds readily susceptible to impressions of sweetness, purity, nobility will be tainted by this criminal teaching. Does legislation think a mild inoculation of intemperance will guarantee future immunity? If such instruction be good, why does legislation stop here? Why does it not run through the whole catalogue of human sin, misery, and folly? Why does it not prepare a primary education of Murder as a Fine Art, by De Quincey? Why not have daily clinics, with Confessions of an Opium-eater as a quiz-book? Some kindly hand, keen to aid in the demoralization of childhood, could readily expand the necessary pages from Oliver Twist into Fagin Tactics for Youthful Readers, Approved by Legislation. Each of the Commandments could be made into separate manuals with graphic examples. But there is one redeeming feature of legislative insanity—it is never consistent. The whole question would be humorous if it were not supremely serious. Science and moral common sense agree in forbidding such teaching. The revealings of the latest science show the marvellous power of suggestion, the stimulation of a thought sinking into mind—mind, that in the exquisite accuracy of psychic processes never loses, never forgets. Constantly telling a child not to lie is giving life and intensity to 'the lie.' The mere negative does not amount to much, it is like a tag on a trunk—it may be lost but the trunk remains. The true method is to quicken the moral muscles from the positive side, urge the child to be honest, to be loyal, to be fearless in the truth. Tell him ever of the nobility of courage to speak the true, to live the right, to hold fast to principles of honor in every trifle—then he need never fear life's crises. So it is in the matter of temperance teaching. Drill exercises in the intoxicating effects of various mixed drinks (here the child should name all the drinks in alphabetic order, giving recipe for each) will never make a pupil temperate. The tendency will be to make him pursue the fascinating scientific method of following investigation by experiment. The individual ever flatters himself that he is clever enough to sip the sweet and avoid the bitter in all evil, and familiarity with evil tends to strengthen this, not to weaken it. Fill the mind of the child with the beauty of temperance, not the horrors of intemperance; show him ever that the only way to highest good is through sobriety. Constantly suggest this to the pupil in comments on the lives of the world's great men, their influence and example. Moral common sense shows the falseness of the theory of teaching evil as guideposts on the road to virtue. Agitating stagnant ponds does not purify them; it merely sets the filth in circulation. Subjecting our physical body to contaminating disease is not an aid to health, and this is equally true of the mind. No one ever learned morality by studying sin, but only by fixing the eye on virtue and following that as the Magi followed the star in the East. While the burden of the new law must fall on legislators, greater blame must be given to those educators who have been accomplices before the act, for from them we should expect at least a germ of reason."
Mr. Jordan's strictures are eminently just, and show to what ridiculous extremes the study of physiology is being pushed.
