Ethics in the High School [excerpt]

     THE problem of the high school is to provide for its students such an exercise of their individual powers as will tend toward the development of self-determined beings; as will make internal, in so far as it can be made, the authority which has hitherto been external to the students; as will make them intelligent actors in the complex social situation into which they are born.
     We cannot, if we would, hinder the youth of today from imbibing ideas ethical, or non-ethical, from the life around him and from the national life as reflected in the daily press. For example, the week of the execution of President McKinley’s assassin, a group of Polish Jew children were found in a secluded corner of a school yard, pronouncing their sentence upon one of their comrades (an imaginary assassin) whom they were about to put to death in the electric chair. This incident is significant from an ethical point of view in two respects: the one is, that in the seclusion which they sought, in their desire not to be found out, these children showed a recognition of ethical standards in their immediate environment, and that their conduct would not receive the sanction of those placed in authority over them; the other is, that they reflected the national consciousness as they understood it; they imagined themselves the nation for the moment, in espousing the nation’s cause and administering punishment for an offense against the outraged national sense.