The use of motives in teaching morals and religion

Front matter

THE USE OF MOTIVES IN

TEACHING MORALS

AND RELIGION raOMAS WALTON GALLOWAY ill!

Chapter I. Educational Methods in Religious Education

1. The meaning of pedagogy. 2. Is pedagogy 1 applicable to religion and the things of the spirit? 3. The two factors in teaching. 4. The proper relation of these two factors in education. 5. Education and evangelism. 6. A crying need of better methods. 7. Summary

Chapter II, Some Principles Accepted in General Education Which Must he Applied in Religious Education 17

1. Introduction. 2. The unity of human personality; and its corollaries. 3. Good teaching always involves getting from the pupil a complete mental reaction to truth, 4. The self-activity of the pupil is absolutely essential in moral and religious education. 5. The pupiFs interest is the surest road to self -activity. 6. The natural instincts, impulses and motives should render their service. 7. Personal satisfaction is the potent agency in all education. 8. There must be the fullest possible grading of all that concerns moral and religious instruction. 9. We must recognize that all education, and in particular moral and religious education, is in a tentative and experimental stage.

Chapter III. Some Essential Natural Elements in Education 27

1. Personality and environment. 2. Adaptation, or the adjustment of personahty to the environment.

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3. The place of personality in life and education.

4. The beginnings of personality. 5. The enrichment of the elements of personality. 6. Structure of mature personahty. 7. Choice is the critical thing in personality. 8. Two chief ways of influencing choice. 9. Training choice by impression. 10. Training choice through expression. 11. Real moral teaching involves both impression and expression. 12. Results of impression and expression on the other internal qualities

Chapter IV. The Principle of Motivation in Education. 55

1. The impelling nature of desires in life. 2. These natural impulses and desires are legitimate. 3. The attitude of the educator toward these desires. 4. The meaning of motivation. 5. Relation of ^^motivation '^ to some other watchwords of the teacher.

6. The two-fold test of the value of a natural impulse.

7. An enumeration of some of the principal impulses, instincts and desires that furnish motives in life.

8. Application of motivation in general education

Chapter V. Motivation in Sunday-school Teaching. 71

1. Of what importance to the Sunday schools is this search for motives? 2. The impulses and religious education. 3. The applicability of motivation to moral and religious education. 4. Some practical reasons why an appeal to the natural motives of the child is necessary in Sunday schools. 5. The use of motives is especially necessary because of the limited opportunity of the Sunday-school teacher. 6. The use of motives is pecuharly necessary in Sunday school because of the artificiality of much of our moral and religious teaching

Contents Chapter VL A Study of the Natural Motives.

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1. Introduction: Shortcomings of our present inducements. 2. Vague motives; their weakness. 3. Low motives; their weakness. 4. Appeals too lofty or too remote. 5. Summary of the instinctive elements to which we may appeal

Chapter VIL Motivation in the Instructional Side of Sunday-school Work 93

1. The two aspects of education: instruction and expression. 2. The pupiPs part in impression: attention. 3. Motivation of attention. 4. Peculiar value of receptiveness in moral and religious education. 5. The religious effect of partial reception of truth. 6. The effect of proper motivation upon the degree and quality of reception. 7. Sunday-school work has been chiefly instructional; but even this has not been well motivated. 8. Natural discrepancy between child motives and adult motives. 9. Our specific task. 10. Some impulses that may furnish motives for learning

Chapter VIIL Motivating the Expressive Side of Sunday-school Work Ill

1. Summary. 2, The greater meaning of expression in education. 3. Education of choice is the heart of moral and religious education. 4. More important to motivate expression then impression. 5. Superior motivation possible in expression. 6. Essential to find right motives in educating by expression. 7. Some of the natural impulses which may serve as motives for expression

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Chapter IX. Certain Principles to Guide the Teacher in his Appeal to Motives 125

1. Review of the natural motives. 2. Selection of appropriate motives. 3. Egoistic impulses arise early. 4. Later origin of the unselfish motives. 5. How reconcile these? 6. Legitimate use of the self-seeking impulses. 7. What we most need to learn. 8. The Sunday-school dilemma. 9. The upward-looking impulses. 10. Superiority of natural over artificial appeals. 11. Summary

Chapter X, Forms of Expressive Work Suitable to Sunday Schools 137

1. Review of the principle of expressional work.

2. Grades of expressional work in the Sunday school.

3. Forms of hand-work suitable to the Sunday school. 4. Summary: The service that hand-work renders

Chapter XL Forms of Expressive Work: Representation 149

1. The essential nature of this form of expression.

2. The dramatic and play instincts in the child.

3. The qualities on which these instincts depend and the states to which they minister. 4. The use of this in Sunday school. 5. Forms of bibUcal representation. 6. Summary of the educational value of the drama in Sunday-school work. 7. Worship as an expressive activity . |,

Chapter XII . Forms of Expression: Original Personal Behavior 163

1. Introduction. 2. Furnishing motives for conduct, or practise in righteousness. 3. An illustra-

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tion: giving. 4. The task. 5. The possibiHties. 6. Some dangers. 7. Some methods. 8. Motivation of right conduct through sympathy, a desire to serve, and kindred quahties — coupled with desire for approval. 9. Use of the quahty of chivalry in motivating conduct. 10. Appeal to the spirit of tractabiHty or obedience to authority. 11. Motivation of life in the home. 12, A suggested program of graded social expression. 13. Conclusion

THE USE OF MOTIVES

IN TEACHING MORALS AND RELIGION

Chapter I Educational Methods In Religious Education

1. The meaning of pedagogy.

Pedagogy merely means the science of teaching. The word indicates that teaching human beings may be reduced to a science. This impUes that results are produced by definite causes in personality and character, just as in physics and chemistry and medicine. The idea is that in education one must know what results are desired and what elements he has to work with, before he can go intelligently about finding a method of work.

All this means that the structure of human personality is not lawless, but is definite and can be discovered by study. It means that character grows and matures in an orderly and natural, rather than in a haphazard, way. It suggests that we may, if we learn how personality grows, use the facts we have discovered about life in such a way as to help insure that it will be sound and right. Pedagogy says that we must not conclude, because the human mind, or spirit, is complex and difficult to understand, that it is therefore without order and is to be trained according to our impulse and whim.

All of this seems commonplace enough to a modern student of education, and would not need to be restated here but for the fact that there is still a good deal of antagonism in the minds of some reUgious people because more and more emphasis is being placed on the pedagogy of morals and religion. They feel that in some way this discredits and minimizes the spiritual and rehgious elements in life. These higher things and the ancient methods of dealing with them are thought of as too sacred to be subjected to scientific examination and improvement. In a journal of some standing in one of our prominent denominations this protest was voiced in these words: ''What we need is more faith and less pedagogy.''

Such a point of view as this indicates is clearly narrow and unwise. There is no matter so important, none so concerns all right-thinking people, as that of getting our children firmly grounded in righteousness and disposed to accept the way of Christ with respect to Ufe. In our efforts to reach this end we cannot afford to neglect anything that promises to give Hght on this greatest of human enterprises. This book is an effort to apply some of the principles of modern education to the whole development of personality, including morals and reUgion.

2. 7s pedagogy applicable to religion and the things of the spirit?

This is only another way of asking whether rehgion and the highest quahties in our nature are lawless and without fundamental connection with the rest of our being, or whether they too are orderly and natural and have laws that we can discover and follow, so that we may form rules for culturing them. If the spiritual part of us and our religious and moral natures are closely connected with our physical and mental qualities; if these spiritual qualities grow and reach their best according to inherent, natural, God-given laws; if they can be influenced and definitely changed by forces that may be brought to bear on them from the outside; and if we may say that certain causes tend to produce certain effects in morals and religion and in our spiritual characteristics, — it is at once clear that we may organize these facts into a common-sense system by means of which we may consciously influence the lives of our children toward character and religious efficiency just as really as toward physical or mental efiiciency.

If it is once agreed that the moral and spiritual nature is a part of the natural endowment of mankind, indeed just as natural as the qualities of our body and mind, it follows that we can get light on the spiritual qualities by a study of them, just as we can by a careful study of the bodily and mental characteristics. Furthermore if we agree that the moral and spiritual states are closely related to, and determined in great degree by, the states of body and mind, we must recognize that the common-sense study of these lower quaUties will also throw light on the pedagogy of the spirit.

Most modern teachers feel all these propositions to be true and feel that we have not done as well in our efforts at moral and rehgious education as we might have done, chiefly because we have been slow to give to it that careful and critical study which we have given to ordinary education. Such teachers feel that Jesus was uttering a very profound truth when he said to Nicodemus that the individual spiritual and moral nature is ^^ born,^^ — that is, begins in a small way, — and therefore must develop just as really as the intellectual and physical. They feel that we have made this revelation of Jesus, which he gave us to enable us to understand and guide the culture of the growing soul, do service as a kind of pious excuse for a lazy dependence on mystical and supernatural processes. We may well beheve that the Father has infinite resources for the inspiration of the human spirit; but we have no right because of this to ignore the perfectly manifest and equally divine natural agencies he has placed in our hands to secure the soul-culture that he desires.

3. The two factors in teaching.

If, then, teaching may become really scientific, and if individuals may be educated in respect even to the deeper moral and religious nature, it becomes essential that we try to see what results we aim to get through our teaching and what resources we have with which to get them. In a study of this kind it is important that we strip ourselves, for the time, of all traditional and theological conceptions and try in a common-sense way to find and to state our problems.

As Christian parents and teachers we are seeking with all our powers to develop right and complete, which is to say Christlike, character in the individual. This means that we take the young child and secure in each individual, by information and inspiration and training, the development of the disposition and the power to choose from within in righteous ways. Jesus himself labeled the child as already the type-member of the kingdom of heaven, endowed naturally by the Creator with all its gradually unfolding powers, including the religious and spiritual.

Choice or decision is the central thing in all character. It is the human state in which morality and religion are most fully shown. No Christian can be more than one who, in all his relations in life, desires the right things and is able and willing, because of his internal qualities, to choose and to do the right things. One who has less than this is not a complete Christian, no matter what he believes, how much he knows, nor what upturning emotional or intellectual experiences he may have had.

In the effort to train the individual in this quest for right character that will choose the right in practise, we have just two assets with which to work: (1) the inherited personality, with all its original, native,

God-given, developing qualities, tendencies, and powers; and (2) the facts and truths and relations of the universe as these have been revealed to us. It is our business so to use these truths as to produce just the right results in the personality. To do this we must know and respect truth, whatever its source. Equally we must know and respect the elements and laws of the whole of personality that determine these choices. Our task is to get the best results with the personalities and the truths at our disposal.

4. The proper relation of these two factors in education.

It is our appreciation of these two factors that determines how we shall proceed. It is the relative value that we give to these two things that determines our pedagogy. It is the modern viewpoint that the personality of the pupil is the central thing, and that truths and systems and science and institutions exist for, and are to be adapted to, the child, and not the child to these. This view has complete support both in the discoveries of the students of childhood and in the teachings of Jesus.

In much of our general teaching we teachers have, in effect, been saying something like this: ''The subject we are teaching (whether mathematics, language, or science) is the result of long study by scholars. It is organized in the best way we know. The children must come to this subject and take it in the way it has been organized and interpreted by our mature thinking. If the child is not interested in it in this form, or cannot grasp it, so much the worse for the child. This is only evidence that it is not normal.''

We are not completely away from this sort of thing in any of our teaching; but we are rapidly getting away from it. We understand, in theory at least, that the nature of the child is not to be bent to the logic of the subject, but that the subject is to be picked to pieces without any respect to our mature science of it, and it is to be used in the way which will best arouse, stimulate, feed, inform, and nourish the child. The child assimilates suitable portions of truth and grows by it into truthfulness.

In our religious education particularly we fall into this error of letting our mature ideas of the subject, rather than the child, dominate the teaching. We say: '' In the Bible we have the truth of God. This is the text-book of the religious life. Our theologians and denominational philosophers have organized some of it into a system. This commends itself to our mature minds. This is the doctrine delivered to the saints. This must be given to our children so that they too may have our views of divine truth.'' There is no more justification for this attitude in religious matters than in mathematics. Indeed more danger will come in the former than in the latter case from this unpedagogic attitude.

The child's religious nature, just as its conception of numbers, is a native and growing thing. It is not just the same in any two individuals, nor at any two periods in the same individual. As its body and mind, so the spirit of the child must have food suited not merely to its comprehension but to its interest and growth. The sacredness of the spiritual nature does not make it any exception to the principle that the child is the center of all instruction, and is more sacred always than the material of instruction. The only value the Bible or any other body of religious teaching has is that human beings may be taught by it. Material for religious teaching must be grad^^d and presented solely with the child's needs in view This is religious pedagogy. It is common sense applied to the proper development of humans, physical, mental, social, moral, and spiritual. Our sole test must be so to apply truth as to develop by means of it the disposition and the power to make right choices in life.

5. Education and evangelism.

In this task of leading youth into right habits of choice two methods have been stressed by religious people. Unfortunately these methods have been looked upon as antagonistic to one another. One attitude is illustrated by the more f ormalistic churches, such as the CathoUc, Lutheran and Episcopal. These have emphasized chiefly instruction and the formation of early habits of right action. All students of religion must be impressed with the hold which these churches have been getting upon their young people. It may be that much of the matter that has been included in this teaching has not been very vital or developing. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that the nature of the training is such that the influence of the teaching is long-lived.

On the other hand, and largely as a reaction from this formal method of bringing the individual into the church, there has arisen a group of religious leaders who look on such teaching as of minor importance. These people look upon an emotional response, made up largely of hopes and fears, as of the first importance. This is the idea of the so-called evangelistic churches, at least in so far as they are to be distinguished from the others. This idea has had a marked development in the last two hundred years.

Both of these ideas and the methods growing out of them are extreme. There is no question that the emotions and desires have a large and fundamental place in determining choice and character in reference to spiritual things, as elsewhere. In this the evangelistic idea and method are sound. On the other hand it is equally true that information, training, and habits have very much to do with choice and character. Training in making right choices prepares for the great choice of Christ as Savior of life, and for the after choices which test this great choice. In this the non-evangelistic churches are equally right. The weakness of the formalistic churches is that the choices may lack the emotions that give them power. The weakness of the evangelistic churches comes from the fact that they read into the one great choice more meaning than it can possibly contain, and this tends to minimize the importance in their minds of the practical choices that follow, and of the character that makes them certain.

Real Christianity can only suffer by any such effort to narrow the basis of religion. Religion includes the whole of man. Its purpose is to give a sense of proportion, — a sense of values, — to cause one to make choices in the light of the whole of life rather than by a portion of it. The evangeUst errs in not realizing that morals and religion based on information and training are just as vital as any that can grow out of the appeal to the more primitive emotions. The only thing we are concerned with is right character, guided from within into right choices. It is absolutely a matter of indifference how much of it comes through the emotional side and how much through the intellectual and habit side, — provided always that the right actions of the individual are the outcome of his own right states, — and that these are permanent states.

It is further necessary for us to remember that education is not limited to the training of the intelligence merely. The emotions can be educated and need education just as much as the intellect. Much of what has been called ^^ heart religion '' and " experimental religion '' is an emotional spasm and not even a permanent and rightly trained emotional attitude. It too often lacks constancy because the emotions are not trained and not balanced by corresponding training of the other qualities that help to make choices sound.

The church, when it comes to understand the pedagogy of the rehgious nature, will not therefore make an antithesis between education and evangelism. It will rather train the emotional life wisely from the beginning alongside with information and reasoning and habit, by every teaching device known to us. And on the basis of all this it will use the evangelistic appeal as warmly and sanely as possible, — not as something different from education, but as a part of education. It will seek to have every choice, from that which accepts Christ as the Master of life to the little hourly choices which are so much more difficult to make, involve the self-activity of the whole of the personality. This is the only way to get a religious life that does not involve a continual conflict between the desires and the reason. We are greatly at fault that we have undertaken to emphasize either at the expense of the other.

6. A crying need of better methods.

It can scarcely be claimed by any student of the subject that our success in rearing our own children to the type of character and conduct that can fairly be called Christian is so great that we need not look for better methods. It is true even in Christian homes and churches that a very large proportion of the children are not safely developed into what we desire in respect to personality. Instead of comfortably charging up these failures to supernatural forces of evil, it would be more sane and honest to seek out the points where we as religious teachers are most signally failing, and try by good pedagogy and sound evangelism to increase the measure of our success.

There is just now a crying need that all the constructive forces of society unite in finding better methods of getting right moral and religious results. The formal, traditional instruction of the non-evangelical churches is failing to make real Christians in any large numbers. The emotional evangelism of the evangelistic churches is in its turn failing to develop right character in practise. The homes, the schools, the Sunday schools, and the churches should find a way to join in this, the most important enterprise of human society. The only possible way to correct the situation is to take what has been found really valuable in the emotional approach and add to this the best training and habit-formation we can get; vitalize all these methods by the best insight we can get from the scientific study of the child and of its development. This we must do with minds continually open to possible improvement in our methods. For we are, as a matter of fact, just beginning to experiment on this most complex and difficult phase of human education. Our efforts at religious education until very recent years have been much like the practise of medicine three hundred years ago, — a mixture of quackery and superstition.

Morals and religion, to have any value, must include the physical, the intellectual, the emotional, and the social in relation to the spiritual. It is therefore more complex and more difficult than any or all of these. But, because it includes these, whatever we have learned about education in these simpler fields will help us in the higher and more complex task of religious education, if we but have the insight to use it. We cannot afford to ignore it.

7. Summary.

The educational method as applied to rehgion merely means that better results will be had if we study the factors in the religious life of human beings and undertake to meet and utilize all these factors in a scientific and complete way. By studying the nature and content of the religious qualities, by learning how these are related to our other characteristics and how they grow, by knowing how truth and situations may best be used to develop the qualities we desire, we will increase the chances of bringing our young people into full use and enjoyment of their moral and religious capabilities. Many of the natural qualities, as instincts, desires, emotions, ideas, habits and the like, have much to do with our choices. Choice is at the very heart of morals and religion. All of these things may be modified by training.

1. There are two great factors vv^hich we, as teachers, must understand and take into account :

(l) Personality J which is natural and native; contains at the outset the germs of all that can develop later; is central and determines the whole process; is plastic and capable of development.

(2) The Materials that we may use to stimulate personahty. What are they?

2. Pedagogy consists merely in trying to find out so much about both (l) and (2) that we shall get the best possible results from applying (2) to (l).

3. Rehgious Education is not an education of a part of personahty. It is the education of all of personality into a particular attitude. It must include emotions, desires, reason, ideals, habits, choices, wiU.

4. The religious nature is dependent on the nature of the body and mind. What are the coroUaries of this?

5. Practical possibilities of combining evangelism and education.

6. The idea of '^ progressive decisions ^^ in respect to reHgion.

Is there yet a real science of education? When can it become so? Do we use the same degree of common sense in our training for morals and reHgion that w^e use in training for the various life-professions and calhngs? Is pedagogy destructive of faith? Do we rule God out of hfe when we say that rehgion is a natural human quahty? Why must we fail when we present religion or anything else to youth in our mature form? Why are we so prone to try to bend the child to our mature sj^stems? On what internal elements does right choice depend? How much emotion is desirable in making choices? How much knowledge? Do you think that any child can, once for all, make an acceptance of Christ that is adequate and complete? What then? What are some of the corollaries of a ^^ spiritual birth '7 Why does undue magnification of the great decision tend to minimize religion in practise? What is right in the matter?

1. The practical education of the emotional states. Must be properly educated, just as other qualities. Emotions must have practise and expression. How can we secure practise of the emotions? Education sometimes means control and restraint rather than increase. Answer in terms of some of the following emotions: — sympathy, love, fear, anger, jealousy, kindliness, joyousness, gratitude, etc.

2. The modification of desires. The formation of desires. How accomplished? Trace in your own experience the growth or waning of some desire. What elements entered into this? Bearing of this on practical education. Can one desire ever be made to aid in the development or control of another? Illustrate.

Bagley: The Educative Process. The Macmillan

Co., N. Y. $1.25 Coe: Education in Religion and Morals. Fleming H.

Revell Co., N. Y. $1.35

Galloway: Educational Function of the Sunday School, in Encyclopedia of Sunday Schools and Religious Education, Thomas Nelson and Sons, N. Y.

Home: Psychological Principles of Education. The Macmillan Co., N. Y. §1.75

James: Talks to Teachers on Psychology. Henry Holt & Co., N. Y. S1.50

Kirkpatrick: Fundamentals of Child Study. The Macmillan Co., N. Y. §1.25

Chapter II Some Principles Accepted In General

EDUCATION WHICH MUST BE APPLIED

IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

1. Introduction.

There will be no effort in this chapter to discuss at length the principles of teaching, either in general or in religious education. The writer feels, however, that mention should be made of a few of the accepted beliefs in respect to the general problems of education which seem most fully to bear on the moral and religious training. There is no thought that we can apply directly to religious education all the devices that have been found helpful in the common schools. Nevertheless any educational principle which has been shown to have deep meaning in the education of youth is more than likely to throw light on these higher forms of education that depend on the lower. Some of these fruitful ideas which will help solve our problems in religious training are enumerated in this chapter.

2. The unity of human personality; and its corollaries.

This principle means that personality is not really divided up into separate faculties. For convenience we sometimes speak as though it were. In fact, however, we cannot separate ourselves into bodily, intellectual, emotional, social, moral, and spiritual faculties. On the contrary these quahties mutually influence one another. No one of them can be trained without all of them being modified by it. None can be neglected without the suffering of all. When I am thinking or feeling or willing my whole personality is involved in the act, and not merely a special faculty of me. When I am making moral and religious choices the same is true.

Some of the most important corollaries of this truth for the teacher of religion and spiritual things are these: — (1) We must seek to win and hold the whole of the child's nature and make it all contribute to and be included in the result; and (2) we have more handles or starting-points in our task than we have thought. In other words we may start anywhere in personality and reach the spiritual if we only have insight enough to follow the laws of personality in taking our steps.