The major source and demonstration of moral values available to a child is
Romantic art (particularly Romantic literature). What Romantic art offers him
is not moral rules, not an explicit didactic message, but the image of a
moral person—i.e., the concretized abstraction of a moral ideal. It offers
a concrete, directly perceivable answer to the very abstract question which a
child senses, but cannot yet conceptualize: What kind of person is moral and
what kind of life does he lead?
It is not abstract principles that a child learns from Romantic art, but the
precondition and the incentive for the later understanding of such principles:
the emotional experience of admiration for man’s highest potential, the
experience of looking up to a hero—a view of life motivated and dominated by
values, a life in which man’s choices are practicable, effective and crucially
important—that is, a moral sense of life.