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Page 20
5. Do you on the whole feel that the subject matter you are
teaching your pupils is adapted to the aims you seek to reach in
their lives? If not, how can you supplement and change to make it
more effective? Have you a broad enough knowledge of such material
yourself so that you can select material from other sources for
them?
6. To what extent do you definitely plan each lesson for the
particular children you teach so as to make it most accessible to
their interest and grasp? Do you plan each lesson to secure a
psychological mode of approach? How do you know when you have a
psychological approach?
FOR FURTHER READING
Betts, Class-Room Method and Management, Part I.
Coe, A Social Theory of Religious Education, Part II.
DuBois, The Point of Contact in Teaching.
CHAPTER IV
RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE OF MOST WORTH
The child comes into the world devoid of all knowledge and
understanding. His mind, though at the beginning a blank, is a potential
seedbed in which we may plant what teachings we will. The babe born into
our home to-day can with equal ease be made into a Christian, a
Buddhist, or a Mohammedan. He brings with him the instinct to respond to
the appeal religion makes to his life, but the kind and quality of his
religion will depend largely on the religious atmosphere he breathes and
the religious ideas and concepts placed in his mind through instruction
and training.
What, then, shall we teach our children, in religion? If fruitful
knowledge is to be one of the chief aims of our teaching, _what_
knowledge shall we call fruitful? What are the great foundations on
which a Christian life must rest? Years ago Spencer wrote a brilliant
essay on _knowledge of most worth_ in the field of general education.
What knowledge is of most worth in the field of religious education? For
not all knowledge, as we have seen, is of equal value. Some religious
knowledge is fruitful because it _can be set at work_ to shape our
attitudes and guide our acts; other religious knowledge is relatively
fruitless because it _finds no point of contact_ with experience.
To answer our question we must therefore ask: "What knowledge will serve
to guide the child's foot-steps aright from day to day as he passes
through his childhood? What truths will even now, while he is still a
child, awaken his spiritual appreciation and touch the springs of his
emotional response to the heavenly Father? What religious concepts, once
developed, will lead the youth into a rich fullness of personal
experience and develop in him the will and capacity to serve others?
What religious knowledge will finally make most certain a life of
loyalty to the church and the great cause for which it stands?" When we
can answer these questions we shall then be able to say what knowledge
is of most worth in the religious training of our children.
THE CHILD'S CONCEPT OF GOD
The child must come to know about God, even as a little child. Long
before he can understand about _religion_, he can learn about a heavenly
Father. This does not imply that the child (or that we ourselves!) can
know God in any full or complete way. Indeed, a God who could be known
in his entirety by even the deepest and wisest finite mind would be no
God at all. Yet everyone must give some meaning to God. Everyone does
have some more or less definite idea, image, or mental picture of the
God he thinks about, prays to, and worships.
The child's idea of God develops gradually.--We need not be concerned
that God does not mean the same to the child with his mental limitations
that he means to us. Meaning comes only out of experience, and this will
grow. The great thing is that the child's fundamental concept of God
shall start right, that in so far as it goes it shall be essentially
true, and that it shall be clear and definite enough to guide his
actions. More than this we cannot ask for; less than this does not give
the child a God real enough to be a vital factor and an active force in
his life.
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