The pupil and how to teach him

Preface

Among the great forces that make for individual and social righteousness the Sunday-school holds a strategic position. An organization which in our own country alone secures the systematic study of the Word of God by thirteen million pupils is the radiating center of forces that are stupendous in their power of accomplishment. To realize its full possibilities, the Sunday-school must develop within its ranks the most efficient leadership.

The importance of an efficient Sunday-school ministry appears in the light of a clear conception of the dignity of the Sunday-school teacher. The teacher who works with God in fitting men and women for His kingdom is engaged in the most momentous undertaking that can enlist the energies of man. The importance of capable instruction is recognized also from a consideration of the standards of efficiency which obtain in secular education.

The movement in favor of better prepara-

IV PREFACE

tion for teaching is the key to true Sunday-school success. The most important factor of the Sunday-school is the teacher. He must be a real "fisher of men." His qualifications will include a knowledge of fish, and the divine art of baiting a hook and casting a line.

This little book aims to be of service to those who desire to qualify themselves for teaching. Its purpose is to make available for the teacher the primary facts of mental and spiritual growth, and the fundamental principles which underlie the impartation of instruction. It makes no claim to originality, but has appropriated from various sources material to which no one has the exclusive right. The effort has been to present the facts and to draw conclusions in untechnical language and in popular style. The book has been endorsed by the Educational Committee of the International Sunday-school Association as a suitable text-book for the First Standard Teacher Training Course covering the subjects, The Child and The Teacher. Some classes may be able to do supplementary reading from books mentioned after the last chapter.

If this book has a useful ministry in help-

PREFACE V

ing to prepare men and women to be co-laborers with God in the service of the Sunday-school, it will afford the deepest satisfaction to the author.

Eldon Grant Burritt.

Greenville, Illinois, January, 1910.

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from The Library of Congress

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Religious' Education ----- 11

II. The Study of the Child - - - 20

Introduction

Successful Sunday-school teaching requires not only a knowledge of the Bible, but also a knowledge of those to whom the Bible is taught. The same methods of presentation will not do for the primary class, the boys and girls in their early teens and the adult class. No one probably will deny this, and it may seem a needless statement of a selfsvident commonplace. But the characteristic differences and needs of different ages are founded largely on different physical and mental conditions. The study of these conditions has doubtless been of much help in arranging the courses of study and the methods of teaching in the secular schools. Some quite clearly defined facts seem to have been discovered and to have been confirmed by extensive observation and practise. These facts, in large measure, are as important for the Sunday-school as for the day school, and it must necessarily increase a teacher's efficiency to become acquainted with them and put them in operation.

X INTRODUCTION

Men are studying with increasing intensity the principles of business and laws of trade, the life history of corn, of chinch bugs, of cotton boll weevils, of bees, of horses, cattle and hogs. Is it not worth while to study the nature, growth, and needs of children and young people?

For that purpose this book has been written; and the author is peculiarly well qualified for the task. From childhood he was brought up in the Sunday-school. For years he has been a Sunday-school superintendent and an instructor of children and young people. Since serving as president of Greenville College he has paid special attention to the teaching of subjects in the field of mental science. He thus knows the problem well, both from the theoretical and also the practical standpoint, and he has handled it not only ably, but also devoutly, with a refreshing absence of the evolutionistic materialism that appears in so much of the present literature on this subject. May the blessing of Christ richly attend this endeavor to increase the efficiency of the great work of the Sunday-school. John LaDue.

Greenville College.

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.

To understand the place and function of the Sunday-school, we must know something of the nature and end of all education, and the place of the Sunday-school in our general educational system.

True Education Religious

"What is a Christian teacher, charged with the education of the young?" asked the celebrated Rollin, two hundred years ago. "He is a man in whose hands Jesus Christ has placed a certain number of children whom He has redeemed by His blood, in whom He lives as His temple, whom He regards as His members, as His brethren, as His co-heirs; of whom He wishes to make kings and priests who will reign and serve God with Him and by Him through all eternity. And for what purpose has He confided children to them?

Is it just to make poets, orators, philosophers and scholars of them? Who would dare say or even think that? It is for the purpose of making true Christians of them. This is the end of education, and all the rest holds the place of means." This spiritual or religious conception of the purpose of education, though frequently obscured by false and narrow views of life, has inspired the greatest teachers of the past, and claims the acceptance of an ever increasing number in the present.

Ultimate End of Education

True education aims at moral excellence and social efficiency. It is the process by which moral character is developed and the individual fitted for the service of life. It is an "adjustment to the spiritual possessions of the race." Among these possessions is religion. Education involves, therefore, an acquaintance with God, the appropriate conduct due to our relation to Him, and the institutions of the church in which our religious ideas find outward form and expression.

Any consideration of the real purpose of education reveals the exalted place of the

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 13

Sunday-school and the dignity of the Sunday-school teacher. The position of the Sunday-school as an educational institution is central. The place of the Sunday-school teacher is full of honor, his opportunities great, his reward beyond compare. "They that be teachers (margin) shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever" (Dan. 12:3).

Agencies of Education

The most important agencies contributing to the formal education of child life are three :

1. The home. "The family," says Laurie, "is the chief agency in the education of the young, and, as such, it ought never to be superseded." Its influences are exercised early and continuously, and are prompted by feelings of love and responsibility. Conscious instruction is given in speech and deportment, and emphasis is placed upon the ideals of morality and religion. The home is responsible for the child's fundamental attitudes toward nature, society, religion and God.

2. The public school. This is the great agency of formal instruction and discipline. It operates through the plastic period of child life. It is of great importance, since it can modify the environment of the child, and introduce him to the greatest amount of experience in a given time, for the purpose of achieving a definite and conscious end. This end is more or less clearly conceived of as ethical and social, but with too many it is narrow and selfish. The great problem is to unite in a popular system a scheme which will combine a practical preparation for the vocations of life with a development of moral character and the cultivation of the religious spirit.

3. The Sunday-school. With the deepening conviction that education should include morals and religion, the Sunday-school assumes a new and larger importance. Many homes are morally incapable of supplying this element and others seem to be indifferent. We are informed on high authority that it cannot be supplied in our present system of public education. The Bible is given practically no place in the instruction of our public schools. It devolves upon the Sunday-

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 15

school, therefore, to complete our educational system. The education of the Sunday-school is confessedly religious. It seeks to influence conduct and to implant and develop right character through an appeal to the religious motives and the development of the religious impulse, resulting in the transformation of heart and life through faith in Jesus Christ. There is no substitute for this instrumentality. To depreciate it or to neglect it is a crime against education as it is against morals and religion.

Double Relation of the Sunday-school

Completing as it does our educational system by emphasizing morals and religion, the -Sunday-school has a two-fold connection:

1. Related to the church. Organized to teach religion, and morals which find a sound basis in the Christian religion, it is naturally affiliated with the church, whose specific object is the promotion of religion. The church should organize and control it, and the whole church should feel an interest in it and attend it. It is a service of the church, and its exercises are acts of worship. Its true and ultimate aim should be to win souls to Christ, develop them in Christian character and train them in Christian service.

2. Belated to the school. The firm foundation upon which Christianity and Christian character rest is a knowledge of the Bible. The second aim of the Sunday-school, therefore, is to impart this knowledge. This aim has important connections with the various educational questions with which secular education is concerned, such as courses of study, qualifications of teachers and methods of teaching. The Sunday-school is an educational service, at which a knowledge of the Bible, its biographies, histories and doctrines, are actually taught and learned. "To conceive of it in any way which will obscure its function as an educational institution will be fatal to any right conception of its work." Any principles or methods that have been found useful in secular schools ought to be understood and applied as far as possible by the Sunday-school teacher. A prime essential to any great or permanent success in Sunday-school work is scientific instruction. The teacher must be able to impart such instruction.

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 17

The Qualifications of a Teacher

It is unanimously agreed that the important problems of the modern Sunday-school are teacher problems. President Little declares that "the educational problem of every century is to find the schoolmaster, not to find the school." Professor Hamill is quoted as saying that "the trained Sunday-school teacher alone is the key to the perplexing problem of the modern Sunday-school." Professor Brumbaugh asserts truly that "the transcendent need of the Sunday-school is teachers." All the suggested accessories of a modern Sunday-school may be present, but they do not make a Sunday-school if the right sort of teacher is lacking. It is the teacher that makes the Sunday-school. The teacher of the right sort will know three things :

1. The Bible. It is his text-book. It contains the subject-matter of instruction. He must know it — its history, geography, great characters, and its great moral truths. His teaching must be drawn from it, not from his own opinions or prejudices. It will be his text-book in every department, with every pupil. It is adapted to the primary and to the most advanced classes. Hence the teacher must know it comprehensively and analytically. He will study it by books, paragraphs, sentences and words. To be a precise Bible student should be the great ambition of the teacher.

2. Methods of teaching. A wise teacher will know the tested methods by which knowledge is communicated to pupils, how the feelings are stirred, and how the will is moved. These methods are based upon educational principles which are universal and unchangeable.

3. The child or pupil. A knowledge of human nature, the periods of human development, the characteristics of each period, and the appropriate instruction and training for each period, is included in the equipment of the successful teacher.

Realizing what is involved in the great work of education, and the essential connection of the Sunday-school with this work, that the Sunday-school is as really educational as it is evangelistic, and that careful preparation is necessary in proportion to the interests involved, surely the Sunday-school teacher will work and pray for such an equip-

&ELIGIOUS EDUCATION 19

ment, in the knowledge of the Word and of those whom he serves, that his ministry may be in the highest sense fruitful in the formation of Christian character and the cultivation of lives of power.

II. The Study Of The Child

Preparation for teaching was for a long time conceived to be a mere knowledge of the subject of instruction. It is now believed that a teacher can take higher vantage ground in the additional knowledge of the persons to be taught. We expect a physician to understand not only materia medica and chemistry, but anatomy, physiology and hygiene, as well. He must know as much as possible about quinine and calomel, but an indiscriminate dispenser of quinine would likely do more harm than good. A physician must be concerned with diagnosis and intelligent prescription.

So a teacher must know his pupils, as well as the subject he is to teach. Otherwise he is likely to prescribe a genealogy or an imprecatory psalm where the demand requires the beatitudes or the ten com* niandments. If it is desirable for a farmer to understand scientifically his growing crops; for a fruit-grower to have a sympathetic and intelligent knowledge of trees; for a stockman to comprehend the nature of his horses, cattle and sheep; surely the Sunday-school teacher will draw from every source that accurate and classified knowledge of child nature that will enable him to minister to the needs of his pupils, to enable them to develop character and bring forth fruit to the glory of God. The scientific study of apple-nature and pig-nature has resulted in superior apples and pigs. It ts believed that the same study of human nature will contribute to a superior quality of manhood and womanhood. A careful study of the child will reveal :

The Significance of Childhood

Human life is marvelously complex. Its relations and duties are various and intricate. The range of its activities is wide. For this complicated life of manhood and womanhood, an elaborate preparation is required. To make this preparation the childhood of a man is characterized by two features :

1. A lengthened infancy. This is full of importance for the development of the individual and the race. In this respect man is different from the lower animals. They are practically mature at birth, or reach maturity a few months later. But the human infant is the most helpless of all infants, and after passing through a lengthened period of dependence, he gradually comes to mature manhood after many years. Animals find their preparations for life largely ready made, laid down in an inherited structure. But man finds his preparation in the opportunities of a lengthened childhood. To further assist the child in making the fullest possible preparation for life he has:

2. Extraordinary plasticity. As compared with the lower animals he is far more responsive to external conditions. He is more impressionable to environment and preserves this sensitivity for a period of time corresponding to the excessive demands of later life. In this plastic structure of the child are stored up organized experiences which constitute centers of interest in after years. The wise parent will take advantage of every opportunity to introduce the child to a wide range of valuable experience during the impressionable period. The Sunday-school teacher will think of childhood as sacred and his relation to it attended with the greatest responsibility. The Rev. Pascal Harrower has said that "no ideas can become the permanent possession of the world which do not first enter through the door of childhood. The woof and web of Christian character and faith are wrought out during the school period of life." When this period is passed it cannot be recalled, and although comparatively long, it is not too long to make adequate preparation for the demands of after life.

The Ttfo Factors of "Development

Effective in the making of an individual are two essential factors. One of these is what he is at the beginning — the powers and forces contributed by heredity. These various powers at first exist only as latent possibilities. The other factor is the external environment which stimulates into actuality and growth these sleeping forces. It is now quite generally agreed that this factor plays a much more important part in human life than the factor of heredity. The plasticity of the child renders him susceptible to remarkable modification in the process of his development. The doing of a thing or the thinking of a thought makes him a different being. The parent and teacher may choose what the child shall do or think, and so to a large extent determine what he shall become. In this fact lies the great opportunity and responsibility of a teacher. The Sunday-school teacher especially will seek to furnish his pupils with such an environment of divine truth and Christian example as will call forth in symmetrical development the latent possibilities of soul and life.

The Basis of Child Study

In recent years the subject of the child has assumed great importance and yielded results of much value to teachers. Child study is found to rest upon the following facts :

1. Children are different from adults. They are not merely men of smaller stature. They have characteristics, physical and mental, peculiar to themselves. Children differ from adults in powers of endurance and in the physiological processes of circulation and respiration. Children are frequently overtaxed. Physical exhaustion is frequently mistaken for stupidity, a perfectly normal restlessness for total depravity. This superabundant activity, inquisitiveness and mischievousness will be very exasperating to those who look upon children as little men and little women ; but the teacher who understands will not be "easily provoked."

Children have their own peculiar ways of thinking and feeling. They are concerned with the immediate and the near. They are not easily moved to present self-denial to secure some future blessing. They are concerned with the concrete, not with the abstract. Justice, mercy and truth as qualities are quite beyond them, but they do under stand and appreciate these qualities clothed in living personality. Adults restrain and control their feelings, but children live in a succession of highly emotional states. They feel intensely. Tears and laughter alternate in rapid sequence. Yet such feelings as love, sympathy, mercy, sacrifice, and sorrow, are rudimentary. The higher intellectual, social, moral and religious feelings are undeveloped, and appeals to these feelings will result frequently in disappointment to those interested in their training.

2. Children pass through certain well defined stages in their lives. Kirkpatrick says that "child study is concerned with all the changes that take place in human beings before they reach maturity." The various instincts culminate at different times. Perception, imagination, memory, judgment, and reason successively mature.

3. Children have individual peculiarities. No two possess the same attitudes and tendencies. Each has characteristics peculiar to himself. In weight, size, temperament, capability, and opportunity, each is different from the other. The recognition of individual differences lies at the basis of scientific education.

Child study, therefore, has a sound basis in facts. It investigates the factors in human development, studies the natural order of growth, determines the modifying effect of various conditions and activities at different stages, and seeks to establish educational values and the best educational methods. Its end then is training in character on Christian principles for life's duties.

Methods ot Child Study

There are three ways by which we come to a knowledge of child life.

1. Books and papers. A growing literature is available for prospective teachers and others interested in child life. Excellent books are issued on the study of the mind and the principles and methods of teaching, popular in style and sound and thorough in treatment.

2. Direct observation. We may study the child himself as he grows into youth and manhood. We may observe the development of his senses, the unfolding of his powers, the awakening of his moral sense, his ambitions, occupations, and language, his ideas and his pleasures. We may study not only one but many children, comparing those of different conditions and environments.

3. Self study. We may recall our own unfolding experience, our points of view in childhood, our attitude toward various conditions, our hopes and fears, our childish aversions and aspirations. Happy for us and our pupils if we can go back over the pathway of our life and look out again upon life through the eyes of childhood, and see and feel and love and trust again as we did in those early years. Only so can we fully understand children. Though we may have attained to the full stature of maturity, yet for the children's sake we must become children, that they, through our childlikeness, may come to manhood.

Urgency of Child Study

At least two strong considerations prompt earnest and thoughtful teachers to know and understand their pupils:

1. Great interests are at stake. The entrance to the pupils' hearts involves not merely worldly success and temporal prosperity, but spiritual life and eternal destiny. Who can know the value of a soul? The development of soul must proceed according to natural laws. These natural laws are God's ways of working. To understand God's plan of human development is to qualify us to be co-laborers with Him. Failure here must inevitably end in spiritual deformation, disease and death.

2. The time is short. The teacher's opportunity is a brief half-hour a week, or, counting the average period of attendance

THE STUDY OP THE CHILD 29

for a Sunday-school scholar to be fifteen years, thirty days for a life-time. A minute unused or misused is criminal prodigality.

III. Stages Of Development— Be- Ginners— 3 To 5

The charm of childhood lies in the possibility of development. No matter how perfect the little one may be, we do not wish it to remain a child. Its beauty is the beauty of the early dawn, advancing to the fulness of the morning and the golden glory of noon. It is the beauty of prophecy, silently day by day unfolding its sacred mysteries, till the beneficient Father looks upon it and says it is very good.

The Unfolding Life

Many figures have been used to suggest the possibility hidden in the life of a little child. Any figure must fall far short in some phases, for God has given to no other earthly creation a life so rich, so beautiful, as the life which is our own. Yet the often used figure of the opening flower is an excellent one, and in many ways suggests the unfolding life of the infant. Closely wrapped in the tiny seed are all the possibilities of foliage, flower, fragrance, and fruit. The dark bulb conceals the promise of the lily ; but the seed is not the plant nor the bulb the beautiful blossom. In many respects they are different and need different culture and environment. Closely hidden within the mind and heart of the smiling infant or the rollicking boy, dwells, all secure, that em bryonic life, which is destined for an eter nal unfolding. He is not the developed man the great organizer, the unselfish statesman the profound scholar, the unquestioned saint but he may become such.

Two Tendencies

Left to itself, we are told, the infant rosetree of most magnificent strain, which should yield its annual wealth of American Beauties, will develop into a ragged shrub and produce only a few unlovely blossoms. Thus it reveals its tendency toward the imperfect. By the wise culture of a strong hand and a devoted heart, the child may know a perfect development, or left to himself and yielding to the wrong tendencies of his heart, he will produce only the unlovely fruits of evil. Happy indeed would it be if no tendencies but those toward beauty and virtue dwelt within the little heart. Unhappily, the work of the ages past has not been perfectly done, and the child finds himself the possessor of a double inheritance of tendencies, one leading him toward truth and God, and the other calling him into forbidden paths. The successful teacher will recognize the good tendencies, which need food and encouragement and culture, and will also be conscious of the evil, and patiently lead the little one to see Jesus the Redeemer, who alone can cleanse the heart.

Stages of Development

There are stages of development, the florist tells us, in the life of his flowers. There are times when much moisture is required, and other seasons when protection from showers is necessary. Sunshine is important, but sometimes the shade is more conducive to the perfect growth. There are certain clearly defined periods in the life of the child. These are not simply a difference in age and size, but are marked by definite physical and mental changes, by difference in needs, in tastes and possibilities. "There is a time to sow and a time to reap," and there is a time when certain definite work can be done in the mind and heart of a child, and there is no other time when it can be done so well. Every teacher should be acquainted with these periods and adapt her work to the present need of the unfolding life. As there is no fixed day upon which we can say that the little one passes from infancy to childhood, so there is no particular time which invariably marks the transition from one stage to another; but in the life of every -child these transitions occur, and each presents to the wise teacher special opportunities for effective service. As usually outlined for Sunday-school work, these periods are :

The Cradle Roll, from 1 to 3.

Beginners, 3 to 5.

Primary, 6 to 8.

Junior, 9 to 12.

Intermediate, 13 to 15.

Senior or young people, 16 to 25.

The Cradle Roll

The 'Cradle Eoll is for the babies. The work in this department will not be so much for the babies directly as for the parents of the babies. Much can be done for the child before it has reached the age of three years; but this is the special privilege of the mother and the home. A sincere interest in the children, however, manifested by calls, friendly inquiries and small attentions, will do much to interest the parents and may attract them to the Sunday-school or other church service.

The Beginners

The Beginners are the tiny tots who are just bidding good-by to the nursery and the cradle roll, with ages ranging from three to five. The Sunday-school is their first venture into the great mysterious world. Upon the first impressions received here much will depend. Happy indeed is that teacher who shall lead the beginner to love the house of God. Who does not recall a vivid picture of some sun-bonneted little maiden, firmly holding the hand of an elder brother, timidly entering a little country Sunday-school? And that precious card. Oh! the delight of it.

Object and Media

Dr. Haslett states the object of the Beginners' department of the Sunday-school to be, first, a kind, active and obedient child; and second, a sense of God's power, nearness, and kindness. The work of the teacher of Beginners should be to train the child in kindness and obedience, and to call forth in the child mind the consciousness of God's presence and power. The child at this age is concerned not so much with Christian doctrine as with Christian practise. The media through which the above object can t>e realized in the child are six: Sense-perception, memory, imitation, suggestion, general intelligence and imagination.

Careful observation and study will reveal much of the lives of children, their abilities and their needs. The Beginners show the following characteristics :

Restlessness

Activity is the delight of the child-nature. It is also its necessity. It is as unnatural for a wide-awake child to be long quiet as for a grown man to play shinny or pussy-wantsa-corner. He must be active. Constantly to restrain his activity is cruel and harmful. To direct and use it will require sound sense and tact. The bright boy is likely to prefer the open air where he can talk and laugh and watch the butterflies and catch tadpoles and build sand palaces and fly kites and inhale the rich perfumes of flowers, to the small and often unattractive room Where he must sit quietly for a whole hour and just be told how to be good. But if this small boy and his equally active small sister can be introduced to a neat and pretty room, well ventilated, light and warm, filled with other boys and girls of like mold and presided over by a teacher whose heart is warm with love for the children and for the children's Savior; if he can be given the privilege of building his sand palaces and calling them Bethlehem; if he may watch the tiny fish in the child's aquarium, while he listens to the story of the disciples who left their nets to follow Jesus; if he may examine the delicate petals and inhale the sweet perfume of the flowers while he listens to the story of the beautiful Christ-life, it may be that he, like the shepherds, will seek the Babe of Bethlehem, and learn to love Him who was the