How to teach in Sunday-school

Front matter

HOW TO TEACH

SUNDAY-SCHOOL

Class : 24.

CHAPTER IX Other Types of Teaching 79

1. Teaching by Discussion

2. The Lecture Method

3. The Analytic Method

4. Teaching Through Examples

5. Teaching by a Statement of Principles

6. Grouping Material Under a Central Thought

7. The Topical Method

8. Method of Co-operation and Research

CHAPTER I What is Sunday- School Teaching?

This fundamental question is not easy to answer. To teach is to instruct the pupil in the Word of God and in the things that a Christian ought to know. Its purpose is to strengthen Christian faith and character, and to prepare the pupil for his duties in the Church and in society. It is to help the pupil to fear, love and trust in God above all things, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

TO TEACH IS TO HELP GROWTH

If you should desire a sweet and serious spiritual reply taken from the Bible, and filled with the charm of life, I should say that to teach in Sunday-School is to help your flock of scholars to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. "Teaching is helping the mind in growing as well as know- 11 ing," * to which might be added "Training is helping the mind in doing, as well as in growing and knowing." f

It has been said that "hunger" is the best single word that will interpret child nature to a teacher. The living teacher seeks to cause growth byawakening and satisfying the scholar's hunger. He thinks in terms of nurture. All education must come back to this idea of response to need. It is the natural way to growth. Will your teaching respond to the hunger of your scholar's needy nature? Then you are shepherding the lambs.

Nurture is aiding the scholar to grow toward the ideal which God intends him to realize. Your teaching is to lead the scholar to see and to do; to vision and self-expression.

THE FOUR SIDES OF TEACHING

Patterson DuBois, in his book on "The Natural Way in Moral Training," under a biological conception of education, points to four kinds of nurture, viz., nurture by atmosphere, by light, by food, and by exercise.

Education by atmosphere is to nurture the f eel-

* H. T. Musselman.

t Phillips Brooks says beautifully, "He who helps a child, helps humanity with a distinctness, with an immediateness, which no other help given to human beings in any other stage of their human life can possibly give again."

ings. Our scholars' feelings are to be educated. They can be by direction, deflection and counteraction. Education by light nurtures their vision. To educate is to make truth visible, apt, vivid, wholesome. Education by food gives them material, for which they are hungry, to assimilate. Education by exercise is education by self-expression, and involves choice and will. There is no growth without exercise. Any education that represses self-expression and denies the initiative of choice, paralyzes the will, and prevents genuine growth.

TO TEACH IS TO FURNISH NUTRIMENT

The biological process of growth is attained through the giving of proper food. And we have the direct command * of the Teacher of Teachers for our work, when He says to the apostle "Feed my lambs." If you ask where the food is to come from, and feel the need of a definition less vital and more intellectual, with the inclusion of a textbook, perhaps we may say that to teach in Sunday- School is to lead the pupil into the truth and life revealed for him in Scripture. "Search

* Cp. our Lord's last great command to the eleven teachers He had trained : Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you : and lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.

the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life." All the facts of Scripture converge in the one person of Christ. He is the center and sum of all that is to be taught from the Scriptures. "They are they which testify of me." Hence to teach is to lead the scholar into "the truth as it is in Christ Jesus."

TO TEACH IS TO DEVELOP MANHOOD

If you look to the goal of Sunday-School teaching, I should say that the answer to our question is furnished by St. Paul when he tells us that God gave us pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints "till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ."

TO TEACH IS A PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESS

Psychologically, to teach Christianity is to offer its facts and spirit to the pupil's consciousness in such way that they are recognized, tested if not self -evidencing, accepted in faith and imbibed with sincere conviction; and, as they are taken up and assimilated in reflection and practice, become regenerative and upbuilding elements in the other's faith, impulses, ideals, self-determination, character and service. To teach Christ and His Word is to prepare and offer the living truth as it is in Christ Jesus to the mind, heart and spirit, so that it will take root there; and, in growing, will free, cleanse and transform the pupil's nature to its own divinely revealed and inherent ideals of perfection. The Sunday-School teacher leads the scholar into the Scriptures, where, with opened eyes, his insight into the acts of God in history, his faith in the redemption and teaching of Jesus, and his activity as a Christian and a member of the Church will develop progressively in response.

Gathering together these various points of view, I should say that to teach in Sunday-School is to guide the scholar into the Scriptures so wisely and intelligently at each stage of his development that his growth in saving faith, in accurate knowledge and in perfection of character may be steady and uninterrupted, leading to definite service, through the Church, for His Lord and for the world.*

TO TEACH IS TO DIRECT THOUGHT

Using a mechanical simile, let us compare the teacher to a chauffeur who starts and guides his car. He pours in and stores the pupil's mind with the materials for generating spiritual power, *. e., with the truths of God. He creates an incentive, a spark of interest in the mind. He

* Cp. the latter part of this definition with that of Slattery, "Guide for Teachers of Training Classes," P. 1.

touches the spark into action. He thus gets the wheels of thought to run. With his hand on the lines of control, he gently turns and guides the moving mind and will in the right path and keeps it progressing to the goal. The teacher cannot mechanically pour knowledge into the scholar as the chauffeur pours stores of gasoline into the tank. He presents one truth at a time and gets the scholar's reaction on it. Justice is not done in the simile to the scholar's response and his self -initiative. "Education implies the power in the learner to originate thoughts and acts beyond those taught. Children have this power. God set it in their souls. Those that guide this activity are . . teachers." *

The simile of the chauffeur and his car fails also in not bringing out the intelligent co-operation of teacher and pupil in their common pursuit, and their mutual fellow-feeling and sympathy under the vitalizing warmth of possessing a common truth. The scholar is not a mere inferior, acting at the beck and call of the teacher. In these democratic days the teacher's appeal is to the common sense and courteous self -appreciation of obligation of the pupil, rarely to authority of office. His reliance is on the power of the truth in its effect on the pupil. He is the pupil's eye opener to the Scripture, the pupil's interpreter, prophet, counsellor and guide. The

*"The Making of a Teacher," 1905, p. 1.

teacher gains and holds his leadership by intellectual, spiritual, moral and vital pre-eminence. His secret of control is the mystical tie of personal attraction and influence, and not the mechanical pressure of external authority.

TO TEACH IS A SPIRITUAL PROCESS

We have emphasized "growth in grace" as the object of Sunday- School teaching. Jesus Himself was "a teacher of human souls, not of human intellects." "Knowledge," says the writer quoted above, "dwells only in the realm of the spirit. We have not taught a thing when we have presented it to the senses. It is not taught until it is the possession of the spirit.* . . . Books are but the scaffolding that a wise teacher uses to build a human soul. But the soul itself is the product the teacher must see from the beginning, not merely the materials with which he works." f

The goal in teaching is the awakening and growth of convictions and insights, of instincts and longings for what is godly, and of recoils from what is base. So familiar ought we be with our Scripture materials that what we say will always bear the impress of our personal insight. Heavenly promises, words and deeds from the heart of God; strong and mighty purposes, not mere details of mosaic, or rich fabrics uphols-

* "The Making of a Teacher," 1905, p. 14. Tib. p. 6.

tered for effect, or dashing and splendid boldness in holding attention ; is the main material in our art.

TO TEACH IS A PEESONAL ACT

Teaching is a toilsome process. It cannot be done wholesale. Men can clothe and feed the human race by machinery, but teaching will ever remain a matter of personal contact. In spiritual education we must get down to individual work. We may be able to plant and water in bulk, but we shall ever be obliged to weed and train by hand.

Luther addresses us teachers as follows: "All ye who teach the Gospel become, as it were, a threshing-machine, through which the harvests of the field are threshed." Yet it does not do to be grinding in bulk; nor to use the sickle when the wheat is still in blade. A destructive bent in teaching may be mischievous. To do to one's scholars' convictions what Pharaoh did to the firstborn of the Hebrew children, may be drastic, but is not wise. Hare pictures the result of such excessive severity of teaching in these words: "Strength is checked; boldness is curbed; sharpness is blunted; quickness is clogged; height is curtailed and depressed ; elasticity is damped and trodden upon; early bloom is nipped."

In constructive teaching we train the scholar to search the Scriptures and help him to think out what he finds there to such a conclusion as will influence his convictions and conduct. We interest the scholar in finding and appropriating the living seeds of eternal truth and eternal life which we call the Word of God. We nurture their growth. We pluck out the weeds of error. We root the scholar in Christ. We test the scholar's knowledge and keep him growing in mind and spirit, more and more unto the perfect stature of manhood in Christ.

Our scholars usually are Christians, often only nominally so. In many cases they may be incipient or very lively heathen. We meet all kinds and conditions of human nature in our work, and fortunately the one and only Word of God we use as our means of bringing results is applicable to all. The Christian scholar already in his Baptism, or through the influence of God's living Word, has been transplanted out of the kingdom of darkness into the family of God. Teaching develops and trains him in this new vocation.

TO TEACH IS A SIMPLE ACT

The work is simple, vital, requiring only one step at a time. The Church is the guide of the teacher, and should tell him what to do and how to do it; so that he need not shrink for fear the undertaking may be beyond his ability. No teacher who reads this book, if he takes time to study the Scripture, prays for the enlightenment of the Spirit, possesses common sense, and a love for the work, should be disturbed by the ideals or the technicalities presented here, any more than a mother, who has been looking into a technical work on the chemistry of foods, should feel uneasy as to her ability to prepare a simple breakfast for her family.

TO TEACH IS A VITAL ACT

It is not learning nor technical skill that "makes" the teacher. It is power of conviction. Reality alone gives power. What are living teachers? asks Margaret Slattery. They are genuine, she says, like Jesus. He was real and therein lay His power.

"He was a real teacher because He had something to teach, something He believed would make men better and the world happier. He believed it so profoundly that He said it would solve all the problems of mankind. He was so glad to teach it that He sat on the mountainside, crossed and recrossed the lake, met His enemies in the synagogue, stopped on the highways and byways of Jerusalem, went to the feast and to the wedding — yes, even talked by the well with the woman of Samaria. All this that He might have the chance to teach, 'I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life/

He taught because He wanted to. No one drove Him forth, no one pressed His duty upon

Him, no one ever said, 'You ought to/ He said, 'I must' and so men listened to what He taught, women believed His message, and little children followed Him. For more than nineteen centuries men have been trusting their souls to what He said.

Yes, He had something to teach and taught it, eagerly, with enthusiasm and authority. The real teacher does that today, and he teaches with power wherever he is. The reason there is so much mechanical, empty teaching today, is just because men and women have nothing to teach. No vital, life-giving belief, no personal knowledge of the thing to be taught thrills their souls until it must be said.

When we have things to say, scholars will listen, because of the irresistible power of the living teacher, whose message springs from the depths of reality.

How many men and women everywhere in this world are living starved lives — the sympathies blunted by disuse, the emotions shallow and limited, capacity for deep friendships and large interests growing less every year. They are daily feeding their souls on the little, the petty, the mean in human life. If I am to be a living teacher, these things must not be true of me. I must give mind and soul food of the right sort, that I may daily take up my work with a spirit that is healthful, well-nourished and sane. Then the powers within me will cry out for exercise, and I shall plunge cheerfully into the work of my world with all that I am."*

TO TEACH IS TO PLANT A SEED

The Saviour has compared the teaching process to sowing seed. The teacher is not only the sower, but by continuous contact and care, aids and fosters the growth. Under this image of our Lord, we may sum up the answer to our fundamental question, "What is Sunday-School Teaching?" as follows:

To teach is to plant a fact or truth or awaken an idea in the personality of another. The process is not helter-skelter or haphazard, but so that the fact will firmly abide, and the truth or idea will take root and grow. After the planting has taken place, there must be subsequent cultivation. To teach in Sunday-School is to plant Christianity in the mind and heart of the pupil. It is to plant and nourish the living Word of God in the heart of another. That is the whole story in a nut-shell.

God does not work with uniformity in nature in causing growth in forest, field and stream. Under one general law the adaptations are numberless. Some plants absorb nourishment and moisture through a thousand roots, and some through one. Some draw chiefly from the water,

♦Slattery, "Living Teachers," p. 10, sqq.

and others principally from the air. The methods of causing soul-growth are as wide, as varied, and as full of individual life as are the methods of causing stalk growth through absorbing of food and moisture in the rootlet.

Teaching, then, is not a mechanical thing. Its work is to awaken thought as well as to lodge facts, to convey information that is dynamic, and to influence personality. To teach is to put the living Word of God into the people's souls. To teach is far more than to convey knowledge. It is not the knowledge that informs, but the knowledge that catches hold of a man, and cleanses, and turns, and revives, and puts a new spirit, a higher force into him, that will build men up. To rely on imparting any kind of knowledge to save the world is a delusion. The knowledge in religion that is of value is regenerative.

God's Word may be used as a text-book without touching a single spring of saving knowledge. The mere literary study of Scripture, and an acquaintance with the outer facts of the Bible, or with the elements of morality are not Christian teaching. Facts and dates and frameworks are as useful to the Sunday-School as the pail is to the housemaid's daily supply of water ; but the teacher who furnishes them only is nothing more than a maker or mender or merchant of empty pails. To teach the Bible is not merely to present its facts, but to apply its power.

24 HOW TO TEACH IN SUNDAY-SCHOOL TO TEACH IS NOT TO PREACH

Jesus was the greatest of teachers. He seems to have taught more than He preached. Many do not appreciate the distinction between preaching and teaching. It is a valid one. It is actually drawn in the Bible throughout. Preaching is a free lightning flash, traveling ever outward. Teaching requires a return wire to complete the circuit. The return does not travel through a universal medium like the air, but involves the use of a special wire to every mind and heart. The truth must run as readily on the return trip from scholar to teacher as it does in the original direction from teacher to scholar.

To preach is to proclaim and impress. To teach is to impart. To preach is to announce; to teach is to enforce. The best teaching is often done in a class of one to one. Preaching sets forth convincingly, declares with power, exhorts with fervency. Teaching shows the pupil how to understand in detail and to do that which has been set forth, announced, and declared with such convincing effect. After our Lord discoursed on the right and wrong mode of prayer, the disciples came to Him and said, Lord teach us to pray.

Teaching does not rest until the response is adequate. Unlike preaching, it does not simply attempt to cause another to know and to do; it does not merely implant a living and burning knowledge in the soul ; but it endeavors to ascertain in how far the knowledge offered has not been grasped. With a keen questioning instrument of steel it probes for the defective spots, and when it has found them, it repairs them one after another. Preaching is essentially a powerful presentation. Teaching is essentially a searching and probing process.

The word "Teacher" comes from the old English taecen, which means not to talk, but to show how to do. Teaching, therefore, is not merely proclamation or exposition; it is an actual showing how. The Anglo-Saxon taecen is closely allied with the German zeigen.

Preaching is reminding a man ; teaching is helping him to remind himself. The whole theory of the pulpit is in the living testimony of the witness at the martyr's stake. The whole theory of the school is in the lisping and faulty reply called forth from the child on the mother's knee.

Teaching, then, is not lecturing. Dr. Johnson once said you cannot, by all the lecturing in the world, enable a man to make a shoe. As little can we, by lecturing our Sunday-School scholars, give the boys and girls a training in Gospel truth.

The pastor of any congregation is its head teacher. He is also its preacher. It may be more important that he should be successful in teaching than in preaching. His lessons to single souls may instruct, convince, and save more than his sermons to many. In the church, as elsewhere, private and personal training is likely to affect more than public discourse.

WHAT IS SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHING?

The Answer.

The Answer Amplified.

To Teach Is :

1. To Help Growth.

Four Particulars in Growth.

2. To Furnish Nutriment.

3. To Develop Manhood.

4. A Psychological Process.

5. To Direct Thought.

6. A Spiritual Process.

7. A Personal Act.

8. A Simple Act

9. A Vital Act.

10. To Plant a Seed.

11. Not to Preach.

CHAPTER II The Old and the New Idea in Teaching

the new emphasizes the joy of self-expression

The new education is right and wrong. It lays emphasis upon the joy of doing as over against the drudgery of doing. It walks the old teacher, with his iron rod, out of the room; and says to the scholars, "Come, let us enjoy the delights of knowledge." It relies on the point of contact, for kindling intellectual zeal. It upholds the joyous spontaneity of childhood. When the boy comes into the class, he should not be expected to lay aside the freedom of his home and his plays. The aim of education is to bring the child to richer and freer self-expression. If any child does not learn, or is restless, or refractory, the new education, instead of advocating compulsion, sets it down that the teacher has failed to understand the child and to properly adapt the work to the individual.

In higher schools, the scholar is invited,, through an elective system of studies, to choose what he will and to walk like a king through the gardens and palaces of learning. The will of the scholar and his interest and good feeling at the moment are the teacher's only dependency. The new way in education is a good thing. Joy in work leads to harder work and larger results, and children are not naturally lazy. If you give boys and girls a difficult game or a hard puzzle to solve, they will put no end of energy into the task. Every healthy youth is a storage battery of power waiting for opportunity. The scholar needs active work in which he is interested. Instead of "discipline and repression" the new education sets up the motto of "development and expression."

THE EXTREME OF THE NEW EDUCATION

All this is good, and is a great advance on the narrowness of the old time. But it is an extreme. One cardinal fact in human nature, and in this sad world of ours, is left out of consideration. This is the fact of sin. Our boys and girls today, no less than in time past, are born a perverse and stiff-necked generation. In bringing up children, we are not dealing with baby angels. Father and mother have discovered that. Satan quickly plows an avenue through the infant heart to corruption. Human nature is not a steady bit of energy which needs only "a little intellectual delight" to incline it to the good.

The new education has made things charming by putting "delight in doing" in the foreground. But it has done a sad thing in putting the word

OLD AND NEW IDEA IN TEACHING 29

"duty" in the background. Children are raised under the idea that only that which interests them and for which they have a natural attraction, is what ought engage their attention. They are left under the impression that no one has a right to impose on them anything from without. This is a background of pure selfishness from which the future activities of life are to spring. In so far, the new education is an extreme; and time will show that it is perhaps as evil as the other extreme of olden days in which the inclinations of the scholars were not consulted in childhood.

It is not what a boy or girl likes, nor even what he feels he needs, that should be our chief concern in developing his character. If Christianity amounts to anything, and "love of God above all" is the ideal of the Christian; and if the chief concern of our young people is really to be a "seeking of the kingdom of God and His righteousness," then that system of education which depends for its results on the child's own delight and pleasure, rather than on the law and the love of God in Christ, which the teacher is to bring to the child from without, and which are to be made the real potential factors within his development, is a failure ; and will prove itself to be such as the generations go on.

THE EXTREME OF THE NEW EDUCATION

In this respect the new system of education is wrong. It makes no proper allowance for the disinclination, the evil disposition, in human nature. It has no method of drowning the old Adam. It tries to develop the new man, instead of getting the heart, in Christ, to put on the new man. It assumes that all that is needed to educate our young people is the proper expression of their own inner nature. The old education failed in trying to impose a system of knowledge and power on the child; the new education fails in trying to develop everything out of the child's own inner nature. Both are wrong. As over against the old, we have learned from the new that education is self-realization. As over against the new, we ought learn, as spiritual creatures, that the starting point in education is regeneration.

We must unite the old and the new and avoid the evil extreme in each. We cannot develop a good manly character out of the natural materials as given in the boy. This is another way of saying "That which is born of the flesh is flesh." On the other hand, we also hold with the new education that we cannot preach or pound character into any youth. We recognize the great pedagogical fact that expression is a part of the process of acquisition.

RESPONSE MUST BE HAD

There is no effective teaching where response

OLD AND NEW IDEA IN TEACHING 31

on the part of the pupils is lacking. There is no impression without expression. The little child must not only learn a story, but tell the story in its own words, and work it out. The chief work of teaching is to lead the child not merely to recite from the mechanical memory, but to do gladly as it has been taught. One-half of the educational process lies in getting the pupil to transform impressions into acts. "If any man will do . . , he shall know." The old method of preaching to children and applying numerous practical lessons, without leading the child into an exercise of its own powers of activity, produces the impression that religion is an external veneer to be acquired, not an inner spiritual life and faith and character.

Religious education is under investigation. Many churches meet the trying situation by giving up the one thing valuable in religion, which is the redemption in Christ Jesus. We should meet the situation not by putting the child into superficial touch with Christ, but by having His redemption vitalize and energize the process of teaching.

INSTRUCTION AND TRAINING

Education is not chiefly instruction; but it is instruction and training. The congregation that establishes a Sunday- School and forgets the need of training in the Christian life, is not doing its duty. We have a vital center of training in the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. All that follows in the education of the child is a development by the Word of God of that divine seed. Our conception of educating children is central and vital. Many Sunday- Schools practically overlook the need of co-operation in child training. Church and home, teacher and parent, must co-operate. A most important work is to instruct and train the parents. The teacher, the pastor, the deaconess are the ties that bind home and scholar with the school. If you do not know the scholar's home, you often cannot understand the scholar. A teacher out of touch with the home may do much harm.

CO-OPERATION IN EDUCATION

We know that you are too busy to become acquainted with the children's parents and homes. We know also that many mothers, with their household and social cares, have no time or will to make the teacher their friend. But this is a serious business. You ought find time, and you will not only receive God's blessing in such work, and gain much spiritual experience, but will begin unexpected and valuable friendships.

A child's health is a leading feature in its behavior, and should be taken into account in the treatment you give it. The mother knows more of this than any one else. A child's home often

OLD AND NEW IDEA IN TEACHING 33

determines the lessons and personal advice he needs, and the parents of your children should learn from you how earnestly you are trying to give these lessons, and for what purpose. You should be on good terms with the parents, so as to be able to explain if anything should arise in connection with the child's behavior or attendance. If home and school are divided in the principle of training, the child will accept neither as an authority. His faith and character may perish in the breach. It is sometimes a question which perhaps you should decide, whether you should retain in your class and mingle in your training the docile lambs of the flock, with the children of those homes where the will of the parent is not to be counted as on the side of the Church and the Gospel. Where the will of the parent can be depended on to support the will of God and the school, many matters of conduct and training can be remedied by a confidential conference, and by mutual co-operation between parents and teacher.*