The Quest of the Best Audiobook By William DeWitt Hyde cover art

The Quest of the Best

Insights Into Ethics for Parents, Teachers and Leaders of Boys

 Virtual Voice Sample

$0.00 for first 30 days

Try for $0.00
Access a growing selection of included Audible Originals, audiobooks, and podcasts.
You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
Audible Plus auto-renews for $7.95/mo after 30 days. Upgrade or cancel anytime.

The Quest of the Best

By: William DeWitt Hyde
Narrated by: Virtual Voice
Try for $0.00

$7.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $5.99

Buy for $5.99

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel
Background images

This title uses virtual voice narration

Virtual voice is computer-generated narration for audiobooks.

About this listen

 THIS is a book for the top shelf, out of the boy’s reach. Not that its counsels are bad; though it frankly takes the risk of going behind rules and commands to principles and freedom. The reason why no boy should read it is that it describes stages through which the normal boy should pass in entire unconsciousness that such stages exist That was not a wholesome attitude revealed by a Seattle boy, who, in reply to his teacher’s question, “What is the matter with you, James?" replied, “Oh, I'm passing through adolescence."

Parents, teachers and leaders, however, ought to know these stages. For no parent, teacher or leader can train a boy aright unless he can see the boy’s natural badness as the stuff goodness must be made of; enforce artificial goodness firmly, without mistaking it for the real thing; hold high ideals for him with the certainty that he will fall far short of them; frankly reprove and freely forgive his shortcomings; and, above all, be himself, at least in avowed aim and sincere endeavor, what he invites the boy by sharing with him to become.

Between the doctrine of “Spare the rod and spoil the child” on the one hand, and the doctrine of infant free will on the other, there is room for a training which shall be firm without harshness and kind without sentimentality.

The term boy is used in the generic sense as including both boys and girls. Still I have had boys rather than girls primarily in mind, because I have known more boys than girls, and understand them better; but mainly because the stages through which they pass are much more sharply marked in boys than girls. 'A boy is more original and pronounced than a girl in both badness and goodness. A girl is much more easily induced to pass from natural badness to artificial goodness by constraint, especially if that constraint takes the form of praise and blame. For she is far more sensitive to these influences than he. As an offset to this easier suggestibility, however, she is much more likely than he to settle down in artificial conformity to moral rules and social expectations, and thus miss the zest and ardor, the dash and daring, that go with ethical initiative and spiritual originality.

This difference, however, is not absolute and universal; but rather a tendency, a difference in degree. Some girls are more positively and perversely bad, or more originally and aggressively good, than most boys. In spite of their different tendencies, and the different emphasis one would give to certain topics in books meant especially for either boys or girls alone, their problems are sufficiently similar to make a book like this, which in any case aims directly not at either boys or girls, but at their parents, teachers and leaders, serve the purpose of those who have either boys or girls to train. Christian Living Christianity Family
adbl_web_global_use_to_activate_webcro805_stickypopup
No reviews yet