Religious education in the family

Front matter

J

Cope, Henry Frederick, 1870

1923.

Preface

When the Constructive Studies were first projected the church was ahnost without textbooks in religious education. The Sunday school had always concerned itself with a discussion of the passages of the Bible, but had learned Httle about proper methods of ascertaining the significance of that Hterature. The most pressing need, therefore, at the beginning of the new movement in religious education was the preparation of textbooks that should direct students to the correct method of the examination of the bibHcal material and consideration of its meaning, in order that they might construct for themselves the life, the experience, the teaching therein contained. These Constructive Studies in the Bible have now attained a practically complete curriculum, and the series will continue to be enlarged and improved.

But a thorough system of rehgious education will comprise in addition to a bibncal curriculum many other studies. And these also ought to be constructive. That is to say, students in religion and morals should be observers, investigators, using textbooks as guides that may help them to build up right attitudes, appreciations, understandings.

viii Preface

Henderson's Social Duties from the Christian Point of View, and Johnson's Problems of Boyhood are the beginning of a complete series of textbooks that will deal with the moral and rehgious problenis of life, comprising the ethical group of the Constructive Studies.

Central in these vital problems and central in religious education is the life of the family. The church has always reahzed its duty to exhort parents to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, but very little has ever been done to enable parents to study systematically and scientifically the problem of rehgious education in the family. Today parents' classes are being formed in many churches; Christian Associations, women's clubs, and institutes are studying the subject; individual parents are becoming more and more interested in the rational performance of their high duties. And there is a general desire for guidance. As the full bibUography at the end of this volume and the references in connection with each chapter indicate, there is available a very large hterature dealing with the various elements of the problem. But a guidebook to organize all this material and to stimulate independent thought and endeavor is desirable.

To afford this guidance the present volume has been prepared. It is equally adapted for the thoughtful study of the father and mother who are

Preface ix

seeking help in the moral and religious development of their own family, and for classes in churches, institutes, and neighborhoods, where the important problems of the family are to be studied and discussed. It would be well to begin the use of the book by reading the suggestions for class work at the end of the volume.

With a confident hope that religion in the family is not to be a wistful memory of the past but a most vital force in the making of the better day that is coming, this volume is offered as a contribution and a summons.

The Editors

New Year's Day, 1915

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. An Interpretation of the Family . i

II. The Present Status of Family Life . lo

Chapter I

AN INTERPRETATION OF THE FAMILY § I. TAKING THE HOME IN RELIGIOUS TERMS

The ills of the modern home are symptomatic. Divorce, childless families, irreverent children, and the decadence of the old tj^e of separate home life are signs of forgotten ideals, lost motives, and insufficient purposes. Where the home is only an opportunity for self-indulgence, it easily becomes a cheap boarding-house, a sleeping-shelf, an implement for social advantage. While it is true that general economic developments have effected marked changes in domestic economy, the happiness and efficiency of the family do not depend wholly on the parlor, the kitchen, or the clothes closet. Rather, everything depends on whether the home and family are considered in worthy and adequate terms.

Homes are wrecked because families refuse to take home-living in religious terms, in social terms of sacrifice and service. In such homes, organized and conducted to satisfy personal desires rather than to meet social responsibilities, these desires become ends rather than agencies and opportunities.

They who marry for lust are divorced for further lust. Selfishness, even in its form of self-preservation, is an unstable foundation for a home. It costs too much to maintain a home if you measure it by the personal advantages of parents. What hope is there for useful and happy family life if the newly wedded youth have both been educated in selfishness, habituated to frivolous pleasures, and guided by ideals of success in terms of garish display? Yet what definite program for any other training does society provide? Do the schools and colleges, Sunday schools and churches teach youth a better way? How else shall they be trained to take the home and family in terms that will make for happiness and usefulness? It is high time to take seriously the task of educating people to reUgious efficiency in the home.

§ 2. THE religious MOTIVE

The family needs a religious motive. More potent for happiness than courses in domestic economy will be training in sufficient domestic motives. It will take much more than modern conveniences, bigger apartments, or even better kitchens to make the new home. Essentially the problem is not one of mechanics but of persons. What we caU the home problem is more truly a family problem. It centers in persons; the solution awaits a race with new ideals, educated to live as more than dust, for more than dirt, for personality rather than for possessions. We need

An Interpretation of the Family 3

young people who establish homes, not simply because they feel miserable when separated, nor because one needs a place in which to board and the other needs a boarder, but because the largest duty and joy of Hfe is to enrich the world with other lives and to give themselves in high love to making those other lives of the greatest possible worth to the world.

The family must come to a recognition of social obligations. We all hope for the coming ideal day. Everywhere men and women are answering to higher ideals of life. But the new day waits for a new race. Modern emphasis on the child is a part of present reaction from materiaHsm. New social ideals are personal. We seek a better world for the sake of a higher race. The emphasis on child-welfare has a social rather than a sentimental basis. The family is our great chance to determine childhood and so to make the future. The child of today is basic to the social welfare of tomorrow. He is our chance to pay to tomorrow all that we owe to yesterday. The family as the child's life-school is thus central to every social program and problem.

§ 3. wider child-welfare

This age knows that man does not live by bread alone. Interest in child-welfare is for the sake of the child himself, not for the sake of his clothes or his physical condition. Concern about soap and sanitation, hygiene and the conveniences of Hfe grows because these all go to make up the soil in which the person grows. There is danger that our emphasis on child-welfare may be that of the tools instead of the man; that we may become enmeshed in the mechanism of well-being and lose sight of the being who should be well. To fail at the point of character is to fail all along the line. And we fail altogether, no matter how many bathtubs we give a child, how many playgrounds, medical inspections, and inoculations, unless that child be in himself strong and high-minded, loving truth, hating a lie, and habituated to live in good-will with his fellows and with high ideals for the universe. Modern interest in the material factors of life is on account of their potency in making real selfhood; we acknowledge the importance of the physical as the very soil in which Hfe grows. But the fruits are more than the soil, and a home exists for higher purposes than physical conveniences; these are but its tools to its great end. Somehow for purposes of social well-being we must raise our thinking of the family to the aim of the development of efficient, rightly minded character. The family must be seen as making spiritual persons.

§ 4. THE COST OF A FAMILY

Taking the home in religious terms will mean, then, conceiving it as an institution with a religious

An Interpretation of the Family 5

purpose, namely, that of giving to the world children who are adequately trained and sufficiently motived to live the social life of good-will. The family exists to give society developed, efficient children. It fails if it does not have a religious, a spiritual product. It cannot succeed except by the wilKng self-devotion of adult lives to this spiritual, personal purpose.

A family is the primary social organization for the elementary purpose of breeding the species, nurturing and training the young. This is its physiological basis. But its duties cannot be discharged on the physiological plane alone. This elementary physiological function is lifted to a spiritual level by the aim of character and the motive of love. FamiKes cannot be measured by their size; they must be measured by the character of their products. If quahty counts anywhere it counts here, though it is well to remember that it takes some reasonable quantity to make right quality in each.

The family needs a religious motive. It demands sacrifice. To follow lower impulses is to invite disaster. The home breeds bitterness and sorrow wherever men and women court for lust, marry for social standing, and maintain an estabhshment only as a part of the game of social competition. To sow the winds of passion, ease, idle luxury, pride, and greed is to reap the whirlwind. Moreover, it is to miss the great chance of life, the chance to find that short cut to happiness which men call pain and suffering.

A family is humanity's great opportunity to walk the way of the cross. Mothers know that; some fathers know it; some children grow up to learn it. In homes where this is true, where all other aims are subordinated to this one of making the home count for high character, to training lives into right social adjustment and service, the primary emphasis is not on times and seasons for I religion; religion is the Hfe of that home, and in all its common living every child learns the way of the great Life of all. In vain do we torture children with adult reHgious penances, long prayers, and homilies, thinking thereby to give them religious training. The good man comes out of the good home, the home that is good in character, aim, and organization, not sporadically but permanently, the home where the rehgious spirit, the spirit of idealism, and the sense of the infinite and divine are diffused rather than injected. The inhuman, antisocial vampires, who suck their brothers' blood, whether they be called magnates or mob-leaders, grafters or gutter thieves, often learned to take Hfe in terms of graft by the attitude and atmosphere of their homes.*

' The Corner-Stone of Education, by Edward Lyttleton, headmaster of Eton, is a striking argiunent on the determinative influence of parental habits and attitudes of mind.

An Interpretation of the Family 7

§ 5. motives for a study of the family

The modern family is worthy of our careful study. It demands painstaking attention, both because of its immediate importance to human happiness and because of its potentiality for the future of society. The kind of home and the character of family life which will best serve the world and fulfil the will of God cannot be determined by sentiment or supposition. We are under the highest and sternest obhgation to discover the laws of the family, those social laws which are determined by its nature and purpose, to find right standards for family Hfe, to discriminate between the things that are permanent and those that are passing, between those we must conserve and those we must discard, to be prepared to fit children for the finer and higher type of family life that must come in the future.

Methods of securing family eflSciency will not be discovered by accident. If it is worth while to study the minor details, such as baking cakes and sweeping floors, surely it is even more important to study the larger problems of organization and discipline. There is a science of homedirection and an art of family living; both must be learned with patient study.

It is a costly thing to keep a home where honor, the joy of love, and high ideals dwell ever. It costs time, pleasures, and so-called social advantages, as well as money and labor. It must cost thought, study, and investigation. It demands and deserves sacrifice; it is too sacred to be cheap. The building of a home is a work that endures to eternity, and that kind of work never was done with ease or without pain and loss and the investment of much time. Patient study of the problems of the family is a part of the price which all may pay.

No nobler social work, no deeper rehgious work, no higher educational work is done anywhere than that of the men and women, high or humble, who set themselves to the fitting of their children for life's business, equipping them with principles and habits upon which they may fall back in trying ' hours, and making of home the sweetest, strongest, holiest, happiest place on earth.

Heaven only knows the price that must be paid for that; heaven only knows the worth of that work. But if we are wise we shall each take up our work for our world where it lies nearest to us, in co-operation with parents, in service and sacrifice as parents or kin, our work in the shop where manhood is in the making, where it is being made fit to dwell long in the land, in the family at home.

Edward Lyttleton, The Corner-Stone of Education, chaps.

i, vii. Putnam, $i . 50.

A. Gandier, "Religious Education in the Home," Religious

Education, June, 1914, pp. 233-42.

An Interpretation of the Family 9

II. Further Reading The Family a Religious Agency

C. F. and C. B. Thwing, The Family. Lothrop, Lee &

Shepard, $1.60.

J. D. Folsom, Religious Education in the Home. Eaton &

Mains, $0.75.

G . A . Coe, Education in Religion and Morals. Revell, $1.35.

The Place of the Family

A. J. Todd, The Family as an Educational Agency. Putnam, $2 . 00.

W. F. Lofthouse, Ethics and the Family. Hodder & Stoughton, $2. 50.

J. B. Robins, The Family a Necessity. Revell, $1. 25.

1. Describe the changes within recent times in the conditions of the home, its work, housing, and supplies. How far have these changes afifected the community of the family, the continuity of its personal relationships, and its religious service ?

2. What are the fundamental causes of family disasters ? Admitting that there are sufl&cient grounds for divorce in numerous instances, what other causes enter into the high number of divorces ?

3. State in your own terms the ultimate reasons for the maintenance of a family.

4. What are the motives which would make people willing to bear the high cost of founding and conducting a home?

5. What points of emphasis does this study suggest in the matter of the education of public opinion ?

6. State your distinction between the family and the home; which is the more important and why?

Chapter II The Present Status Of Family Life

§ I. CONTRASTED TYPES

In a beautiful village, in one of the farther western states, two men were discussing the possible future of the home and of family Kfe. Sitting in the brilliant moonhght, looking through the leafy shades, watching the hghts of a score of homes, each surrounded by lawn and shade trees, each with its group on the front porch, where viaes trailed and flowers bloomed, hstening to the hum of conversation and the strains of music in one home and another, it seemed, to at least one of these men, that this t5q3e of living could hardly pass away. The separate home, each family a complete social integer, each with its own circle of activities and interests, its own group, and its own table and fireside, seemed too fine and beautiful, too fair and helpful, to perish under economic pressure. Indeed, one felt that the village home furnished a setting for life and a soil for character development far higher and more efficient than could be afforded by any other domestic arrangement— that it approached the ideal.

But two weeks later two men sat in an upper room, in the second largest city in America, dis-

Present Status of Family Life ii

cussing again the future of the family. Instead of the quiet music of the village, the clang of street cars filled the ears, trains rushed by, children shouted from the paved highway, families were seated by open windows in crowded apartments, seeking cool air; the total impression was that of being placed in a pigeonhole in a huge, heated, filing-case, where each separate space was occupied by a family. One felt the pressure of heated, crowded kitchens, suffocating Httle dining-rooms; one knew that the babies lay crying in their beds at night, gasping their very lives away, and that the young folks were wandering off to amusement parks and moving-picture shows. Here was an entirely different picture. How long could family Hfe persist under these conditions where privacy was almost gone and comfort almost unknown ?

In the village separate home integers appear ideal; in the city they are possible only to the few. The many, at present, find them a crushing burden. Desirable as privacy is, it can be purchased at too high a price. It costs too much to maintain separate kitchens and dining-rooms under city conditions.

§ 2. COMMUNAL TENDENCIES

Present conditions spell waste, inefficiency, discomfort. The woman Hves all day in stifluig rooms, poorly Hghted, with the nerve-racking life of neighbors pouring itself through walls and windows. The men come from crowded shops and the children from crowded schoolrooms to crowd themselves into these rooms, to snatch a meal, or to sleep. How can there be real family life ? What joy can there be or what ideals created in daily discomfort and distress? Little wonder that such homes are sleeping-places only, that there is no sense of family intercourse and unity. Little wonder that restaurant life has succeeded family life.

Many hold that we are ready for a movement into community Hving, that just as the social Ufe of the separate house porches in the villages has become communized into the amusement parks in the cities, so all the activities of the family will move in the same direction. How long could the family as a unit continue under these conditions ?

The village life will persist for a long time; it may be that, when we apply scientific methods to the transportation of human beings in the same measure as we have to the moving of pig iron, we can develop large belts of real village life all around our industrial centers. But more and more the village tends to become like the city; in other words, highly organized communal life is the dominant trend today. Just as business tends to do on a large scale all that can be more economically done in larger units, so does the home. We must look for the increasing prevalence of the city type of life for men and women and for families.

§ 3. THE ECONOMICAL DEVELOPMENT

It is worth while to note, in some brief detail, just what changes are involved in the tendency toward communal Hving. At the beginning of the industrial revolution which ushered in the factory period, each family was a fairly complete unit in itself. The village was Httle more than a nucleus of farmhouses, with a few differing types of units, such as workers in wood, in wearing apparel, and in tools. The home furnished nearly all its own food, spun and made its clothes, trained its own children, and knew scarcely any community endeavor or any syndication of effort except in the church.

The industrial revolution took labor largely out of the home into the factory. Except for farm life, the husband became an outside worker and the older boys followed him to the distant shop or factory. Earning a living ceased to be a family act and became a social act in a larger sphere. But in this change it ceased to be a part of the family educational process. Boys who, from childhood up, had gradually learned their father's trade in the shop or workroom, which was part of the house, where they played as children in the shavings, or watched the glowing sparks in the smithy, now missed the process of a father's discipline and guidance as their hands acquired facility for their tasks. The home lost the male adults for from nine to twelve hours of each day, more than two-thirds of the waking period, and thus it lost a large share of disciplinary guidance. In the rise of the factory system, to a large extent the family lost the father.

When the workshop left the home its most efl&cient school was taken from it. The lessons may have been limited, crude, and deadly practical, but the method approximated to the ideals which modern pedagogy seeks to realize. Among the shavings children learned by doing; schooling was perfectly natural; it involved all the powers; it had the incalculable value of informality and reality. The father gone and the mother still fully occupied with her tasks, the children lost that practical training for hfe which home industry had afforded. On the one hand, the young became the victims of idleness and, on the other, the prey of the voracious factory system.

This condition gave rise to the public-school system. It appealed to Robert Raikes and others. The school appeared and took over the child. Of course schools had existed, here and there, long before this, but now they had an enlarged responsibility; they must act almost in the place of the parents for the formal training of children. Having lost the father and older males for the greater portion of the day, the home now loses the children of from seven to the "'teen" years for five or six hours of the day. The mother is left at home with the babies. The family, once hving mider one roof, now is fomid scattered; it has reached out into factory and school. Its hours of unified Ufe have been markedly reduced.

But the factory system soon had a reflex influence on the home. That which was made in the factory came back into the home, not only in the form of the articles formerly made by the men, but in those made by the women. Clothes, candles, butter, cheese, preserves, and meat — all formerly home products for the use of the family producing them — now were prepared in larger quantities, by mechanical processes, and were brought back into the home. Woman's labor was lightened; the older girls were Hberated from the loom and they began to seek occupation, education, and diversion according to their opportunities in life.

That last step made it possible for people to think of the communization of home industry, to think of eating food cooked in other ovens than their own, to think of one oven large enough for a whole village. Many interesting experiments in co-operative living immediately sprang up. But the next step came slowly and, even now, is only firmly estabKshed in the cities, in the actual abandonment of the family kitchen for the community kitchen in the form of the restaurant. In such families we have unity only in the hours of sleep and recreation.

Along with abandonment of the separate kitchen there has proceeded the abandonment of the parlor in the homes of the middle classes. To lose the old, mournful front room may be no subject for tears, but the loss of the evening family group, about the fireside or the reading-lamp, is a real and sad loss. The commerce in amusements has offered greater attractions to vigorous youth. The theater and its lesser satellites, amusements, entertainments, lectures, the lyceum, and recreationby-proxy in ball games and matches have taken the place of united family recreation. Of course this has been a natural development of the older village play-life and has been by no means an unmixed ill.

Now, behold, what has become of the old-time home life! The family that spent nearly twentyfour hours together now spends a scarce seven or eight, and these are occupied in sleeping! Little wonder that the next step is taken — the abandonment of this remainder, the sleep period, under a domestic roof, as the family moves into a hotel!

Along with the tendency toward communal working and eating we see the tendency to communal living by the development of the apartment building. Since roof-trees are so expensive, and since in a practical age, few of us can afford to pay for sentiment, why not put a dozen families under one roof-tree ? True we sacrifice lawns, gardens, natural places for children to play; we lose birds and flowers and the charm of evening hours on porches, or galleries, but think of what we gain in bricks and mortar, in labor saved from splitting wood and shoveling coal, in janitor service! The transition is now complete; the home is simply that item in the economic machinery which will best furnish us storage for our sleeping bodies and our clothes!

We are undoubtedly in a period of great changes in family Kfe, and no family can count on escaping the influence of the change. The one single outstanding and most potent change, so far as the character of family Hfe is concerned, is, in the United States, the rapid polarization of population in the cities. The United States Census Bureau counts all residents in cities of over 8,000 population as "urban." In 1800 the "urban" population was 4 per cent of the total population; in 1850 it was 12.5 per cent; in 1870, 20.9 per cent; in 1890, 29.2 per cent; in 1900, 33.1 per cent; in 1910 it was estimated at 40 per cent.^ Here

'Figures taken from C. W. Votaw, Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the American Home, 191 1.

is a trend so clearly marked that we cannot deny its reality, while its significance is familiar to everyone today.

However, the village type remains; there are still many homes where a measure of family unity persists, where at least in one meal daily and, for purposes of sleeping and, occasionally, for the evening hours of recreation, there is a consciousness of home Hfe. Yet the most remote village feels the pressure of change. The few homes conforming to the older ideals are recognized as exceptional. The city draws the village and rural family to itself, and the contagion of its customs and ideals spreads through the villages and affects the forms of Hving there. Youths become city dwellers and do not cease to scoff at the village unless later years give them wisdom to appreciate its higher values. The standard of domestic organization is estabUshed by the city; that type of Hving is the ideal toward which nearly all are striving.

The important question for all persons is whether the changes now taking place in family life are good or ill. It is impossible to say whether the whole trend is for the better; the many elements are too diverse and often apparently conflicting. Faith in the orderly development of society gives ground for belief that these changes ultimately work for a higher type of family life. The city may be regarded as only a transition stage in social evolution — the compacting of masses of persons together that out of the new fusing and welding may arise new methods of social living. The larger numbers point to more highly developed forms of social organization. When these larger units discover their greater purposes, above factory and mill and store, and realize them in personal values, the city life will be a more highly developed mechanism for the higher life of man. The home life will develop along with that city life.

§ 4. PURPOSEFUL ORGANIZATION

At present the home is suffering, just as the city is suffering, from a lack of that purposeful organization which will order the parts aright and subject the processes to the most important and ultimate purposes. The city is simply an aggregation of persons, scarcely having any conscious organization, thrown together for purposes of industry. It will before very long organize itself for purposes of personal welfare and education. The family is usually a group bound in ties of struggle for shelter, food, and pleasure. Such consciousness as it possesses is that of being helplessly at the mercy of conflicting economic forces. The adjustment of those forces, their subjection to man's higher interests, must come in the future and will help the family to freedom to discover its true purpose.

It is easy to insist on the responsibility of parents for the character-training of their children,. but it is difficult to see how that responsibiHty can be properly discharged under industrial conditions that take both father and mother out of the home the whole day and leave them too weary to stay awake in the evening, too poor to furnish decent conditions of hving, and too apathetic under the dull monotony of labor to care for Hfe's finer interests. The welfare of the family is tied up with the welfare of the race; if progress can be secured in one part progress in the whole ensues.