The aims of teaching in Jewish schools

Front matter

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THE AIMS OF TEACHING IN JEWISH SCHOOLS

Preface

In view of the fact that religion is a central influence in life, the teaching of it is a prime concern. But no subject is so conventional and so slow to avail itself of large views and the efficient practice of modern education. Religious Pedagogy is a new science and still lacks both the dash of pioneers and the vision of innovators. These pages are offered as a modest contribution, in the hope that they may call attention to the possibilities which lie in the new Reform of Jewish Education, This reform will go deeper, I am certain, into the life of the Jews, because it will be more constructive than was the synagogal reform of fifty years ago.

Louis Grossmann.

Cincinnati, April 3, 1919.

Introduction

It has been a real inspiration to me to examine the proof of this book, which is by far the best treatise on reUgious pedagogy that has anywhere yet appeared. It places reUgious education on its proper scientific and constructive basis. It is fitting that the Jews should take the leadership in this field, and this is the psychological moment for them to do so. I do not believe Rabbi Wise's Centenary could be celebrated in any better way or commemorated in any more fitting manner than by the adoption of some such splendid plan as this. Dr. Grossmann boldly and rightly takes, for the first time in this field, adequate account of our new knowledge of child nature and life. He finds fit place, too, in his scheme for biography, story-telling, and myth, music, nature and utilizes the kindergarten principle and adjusts the rich material to the successive stages in the child's psychic life and development.

I am glad, too, to see the stress he lays upon the Hebrew language. In my long experience as a University teacher, who has had many Jewish students, I have come to regard the degree of familiarity which they had acquired in this language as, to some extent, an index of their docility in general. The library of books that constitute the Old Testament (and as a Christian I should like to be permitted to add those of the New) is the world's greatest text-book on pedagogy, and even their order in the canon follows in a masterly way the stages of the development of the child, which itself recapitulates that of the race.

Education the world over was at first and for a long time almost solely religious, and, while it was once a master stroke of toleration to eliminate it from the school, in doing so we cut loose from genetic history and nearly lost from our educational system the greatest of all the motives that make for virtue, reverence, self-knowledge and self-control. Now we are beginning to realize the wrong we have committed against child nature and are seeking in various ways to atone for it.

If the Jewish leaders of this country can unite to put in operation some such scheme as is here set forth I should think they would be doing the greatest possible service to the interests of their own race in keeping its priceless traditions vital and effective in the new world now opening to us, and would set an example not only to Protestants and Catholics to reconstruct their own methods to fit the needs of the new times, but would suggest to other stirpes and races in our country that to loyally conserve their own past and to avoid the break with it which coming to~ this country often involves, they would make themselves thereby not less but more loyal Americans and be able to say of their own past that they could not love it so much, loved they not this country more.

G. Stanley Hall.

Clark University, March, 1919.