Morality and Citizenship in English Schools by Susannah Wright

Author:Susannah Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

‘A New Kind of Missionary’ 53 : Frederick James Gould in the USA and India 1911–14

As the MIL’s Demonstrator, Gould travelled throughout Britain. Between 1911 and 1914, however, this position also took him overseas, an indication of growing recognition of his work among international educationalists at this time. His demonstration lesson at the IMEC in 1908 had been attended by international visitors. His books, along with the MIL’s Graduated Syllabus and other texts, were being used in a number of countries and had been translated into different languages. 54 Gould’s tours of the USA and India between 1911 and 1914 offered the MIL the opportunity to disseminate its version of non-theological moral instruction on a world-wide stage, and to demonstrate to educators on the ground that it could work in different national and cultural contexts. Gould’s personal views and activities were, as already noted, by this stage linked more with the Positivists than any other freethought group. Still, Ethical Movement personnel, activities, and networks more than anything else facilitated and shaped this international aspect of his moral education work.

Gould’s first visit to the USA in July and August 1911 was organised through the American Ethical Union. The Ethical Movement did not organise Gould’s second American tour from September 1913 to April 1914 or Gould’s tour of India in January and February 1913. But the Movement’s previous activities in connection with the MIL and IMEC had helped to open up the channels of communication and to stimulate the interest in moral education that made these later tours possible. The tours were, moreover, consistent with the International Ethical Union’s ongoing aim of developing moral instruction leagues in ‘all civilised countries’. 55 Gould was not the only activist who crossed the Atlantic in connection with the Ethical Movement. Coit’s move to England in 1887 and Adler’s European tours in 1891–92 have been mentioned already. In the early years of the twentieth century, there was movement again, but in the opposite direction. Horace Bridges worked with Coit in London from 1904, before moving to Chicago in 1911 to lead the ethical society in that city. George O’Dell, who had been executive secretary of the West London Ethical Society 1907–13 and chair of the Council of the UES 1909–11, went to St Louis and Philadelphia in 1913. 56 The MIL’s Quarterly and the moral education column in Ethical World carried news about publications and conferences related to moral instruction in America. 57 Reference was made on a number of occasions between 1908 and 1913 to the possible, or probable, building up of an American moral instruction league, after preliminary steps were taken at the annual meeting of the American Ethical Union in 1907. 58 The Report of the International Inquiry and IMEC of 1908, as well as Spiller’s report produced in 1909 for the International Union of Ethical Societies, provided further information. 59

In 1911 Gould was invited on a two-month demonstration tour under the auspices of the American Ethical Union, planned by Mrs Garlin Spencer. He arrived in New York on 25 May, and sailed back to England on 22 July.

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