JUN L'H 1913 BV 1520 .C635 1912 Cope, Henry Frederick, 1870 1923. Efficiency in the Sunday school I? EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL HENRY FREDERICK COPE, A. M., D. D. Efficiency in the Sunday School By, HENRY FREDERICK COPE, A. M., D. D General Secretary of The Religious Education Association. Author of " The Modern Sunday School in Principle and Practice;" "The Efficient Layman;" "Evolu- tion of the Sunday School ;" "The Friendly Life;" Etc. HODDER & STOUGHTON NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY Copyright, 1912, By GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY FOREWORD This is not a liandbook of ^Hricks and devices'' warranted to speedily insure Sunday school suc- cess. It is an attempt to consider the Sunday school seriously as an educational institution, hav- ing in mind the needs of intelligent teachers and officers who are earnestly seeking to make their schools more efficient. Several of the chapters appeared in Sunday school journals, as The Pil- grim Teacher J The Baptist Teacher , The Westmin- ster Teacher, The Sunday School Journal, The Sunday School Executive, The Sunday School Magazine, and in Church papers, as The Stand- ard and The Interior. To the editors of these journals the author renders grateful acknowledg- ment for permission to reprint. However, all the articles have been enlarged and rewritten since their first publication. August, 1912, E. F. C. CONTENTS Chaptkr. P^^' I. The Efficient Sunday School, - - 3 II. Delusive Definitions, - - - 11 III. A Church Standard for Its School, - 18 IV, Educational Engineers in THE Churches, 31 V. How TO Organize an Efficient Sunday School, 37 VI. The Significance of the Graded School, 46 VII. Why Some Graded Schools Fail, - - 59 VIII. Is This a Bible School ? The Curric- ulum Question, » - - - 65 IX. Applying Some Efficiency Tests - - 72 X. First Things First. The Equipment Test, 80 XI. Achieving the Religious Purpose. The Life Test, - 91 XII. Order and Discipline. The Organiza- tion Test, 102 XIII. Music and Worship, - - - - 111 XIV. Efficiency in the Critical Years, - 118 vii CONTENTS Chapter, Pack. XV. Church and Sunday School. A Glance into the Future, - - 142 XVI. The Extension Work of the School, 149 XVII. Neglected Aspects of Manual Work, 159 XVIII. Making the Lesson Real, - - 166 XIX. Advantages Inventoried, - - 171 XX. The Parents at School, - ~ 176 XXI. The Adult Department and the Home, 181 XXII. The Rural Sunday School, - 191 XXIII. The Rural School and Its Com- munity, 202 XXIV. The City School and the Rural School, ----- 212 XXV. The Present Opportunity in Teacher Training, - _ - 217 XXVI. Making Your Experts at Home, - 224 XXVII. The Teacher's Tool Chest, - - 230 XXVIII. Public Opinion and the Sunday School, 242 Vlll EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL CHAPTER I THE EFFICIENT SUNDAY SCHOOL Efficiency involves three elements: intelligence, ability, and energy, so related and organized as most economically to produce the largest desired effects. An efficient Sunday school is one in which the working forces understand its purpose or aim, its conditions and materials of operation, and its methods of procedure ; one in which duties are so assigned and responsibilities so clearly divided that its operations proceed with economy of effort and without waste or friction; one in which there is the application of all possible working forces and the enlistment of every aid available to se- cure desired results; one in which those who be- lieve they work with God will so work that all His work can proceed without hindrance and with cer- tainty of results. An efficient Sunday school is one which succeeds in developing most easily and completely Christian character in its people, both students and workers. An efficient Sunday school develops efficient Christians. We hear much in these days of *^ efficiency." It is a word to conjure with and it is a word which 3 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL easily may be worn smooth, and so become mean- ingless, valueless in our verbal currency. We read of efficiency in business management ; we are told that tlie ultimate aim of general education is *^ social efficiency,'' that the test, like an acid to be applied to all our public and civic operations, is their social or civic efficiency. Now, there is a moral, even a spiritual obligation resting on us to apply to all the activities and organizations of religion like tests. No church has a moral right to cumber the ground and to draw support from men unless it is developing efficiency to do its work. The church that does not give back to the world more than it gets out of it is guilty of being an ^^unprofitable servant'' and in the light of the great test of all the Master's servants is con- demned to be **cast out." From all the Lord of all looks for fruitage, for increase, and demands of us efficiency in doing our work so as to produce this increase. This is the law of the universe. That which does not grow and increase is already dying and has no claim on life. THE ECONOMIC DEMAND The criticism of the ** world" against the church is directed fully as much against its work- ing ability as against its opinions. The church is in the world to save the world, and the man who stands without complains that she is not doing it. His criticism may not have scientific grounds, but we owe it to ourselves to apply the test and ask, 4 THE EFFICIENT SUNDAY SCHOOL **Is the Sunday school doing the work which it is designed to dof When we think of the Sunday school it ought to bring to mind the immense human investment for which it stands. Thousands of lives are sink- ing their best energies into it year after year. For over a century it has been increasingly de- manding the very best people of the churches and the very best of their thought, energy, and affec- tion. It costs human treasure and human blood to run a Sunday school. On the ground of social obligation alone, when society stands and sees people pouring themselves into this institution, society has a clear right to ask whether the returns justify the investment. Do our Sunday schools pay? Do they give back to this world more than the world of men and women who love them and work in them give? Do they give back to child life more than child life gives to them? The school asks for at least an hour out of every week in the child's life; does it pay the child back? But how shall it pay back? What can the school give to the child, and what must the school give to society that shall be in any adequate de- gree a return for all the investment made in it? It must give back, just as the farm gives back for seed and tilling and toil, its own product. The product of this institution, that for which all the investment is made, is just this: lives guided to know and motived to live the Christian life, and trained to serve Christian ideals and to cause the EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL conditions of Christian living to prevail in society. A Sunday school bas to train lives to Christian living and to make them effective agencies for causing the condition of the Kingdom to come, to so educate youth that it may become increas- ingly easy for each new generation to live the right life and increasingly hard to walk the wrong way. The test of th6 efficiency of a Sunday school is just here : are the people who have come out of it, who constitute now the society in which it exists, primarily motived by Christian ideals; are those whom it has trained turning to the serv- ice of the Kingdom and giving to it trained lives? Does the school really make Kingdom men and Kingdom conditions? THE TEST OF THE SCHOOL The test of education will be educated persons and educated communities. The test is not in in- stitutions, but in their products; not in school buildings nor in university halls, but in people. No matter what the machinery of education may have to exhibit, if it cannot show people who have learned how to live and who do live right, who do live nobly and in harmony, who by their living and service make a better and a finer social order, it has failed. So is it with the Sunday school : the test of efficiency is not in organization, architecture, or curricula — all of these must be studied and must be ordered aright — but the ulti- mate test is whether in this specific agency of re- 6 THE EFFICIENT SUNDAY SCHOOL ligious education people have learned to live re- ligiously, to live in the terms of the great Teacher, to take life as the sublime chance to love and serve, whether people have been moved to make the new world of which they learned, whether the community is really more heavenly, a place where it is easier for all to go right and harder for any to go wrong. Such a statement leaves out for the present the consideration of the divine co-operation, be- cause we may be assured that if we will do our work rightly and submit it to the great tests of life, the tests which the Master Himself set, there will be no question as to the co-operation that is from above. OUR NEW OPPORTUNITrES But efficiency must be tested in the light of opportunity. Do we realize that this very day offers the largest opportunity the Sunday school has ever had? Our right to live is to be tested by whether we have entered into and possessed in any worthy way the vast realm of present-day opportunities. To-day is the Sunday school's edu- cational opportunity. Sometimes reviewing the striking changes that have taken place in the Sun- day schools in the last decade, we say to ourselves, with graded lessons and teacher-training in mind, *'What strides this school has made!'' But when we apply a test and measure Sunday school prog- ress by comparison, the advance of the church in 7 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL her educational agencies with the advance of the general agencies of education, we stand dumb, ashamed, obliged to confess that relatively we have almost stood still. And the saddest thing of all is the fact that we have stood still in the very- hour of our most splendid opportunity. Instead of the Sunday school having become obsolete or unnecessary, she has now come within sight of her true social mission. Stop to think of certain things concerning which we are all pretty well agreed. First, that there can be no formal teach- ing of religion, of the Bible, or of theology, in the public schools ; second, that the public school has the mission of preparing lives for social suffi- ciency, that is, preparing them for rendering full service to society; third, that no one can possibly be sufficient for modem social living without the religious motive, that education can never accom- plish her perfect work without religion. Are we not now generally agreed on these things'? To what agency, then, shall we turn for this abso- lutely indispensable element in education since the public schools cannot formally teach religion? True, there may be much religious education with- out the formal teaching of religious subjects. We must not think of public schools as irreligious; there is nowhere in any country a finer body of religious teachers than our public school educa- tors. The lessons in the public school class room, the influence, discipline, and training all count for the training of the life of the spirit. We need 8 THE EFFICIENT SUNDAY SCHOOL to magnify the spiritual values of what we call secular education. Yet the growing lives of youth in the school days need more than influence, atmosphere, and ideals ; they need specific instruction. They need education designed for directed religious growth. The boy needs that which the Bible has for the purposes of life, a heritage of ideals expressed in the eloquence of the soul and enshrined in great and glowing lives. If he would follow the most glorious of all lives he must know that life, and he needs some vision of the ideals that shone be- fore that life. He needs, too, that this social in- stitution of the church shall have a special edu- cational significance for him, that it shall minister to his needs as truly as do the other institutions, the school and the home. Here is the great op- portunity of the school of the church, the Sunday school, to do what no other school may or can do, to impart to the life, directly, intentionally, and with all the freedom of a clear purpose and the force of personal authority, tradition, custom, and af- fection, the impulses, ideals, and motives of the true social life. If education is for purposes of social efiiciency, the church has the specific mis- sion of furnishing to every life the only sufficient motive, the religious motive, the motive of self- giving love and service, the motive that has moved every great soul through all the ages, that stands out above all the blood and lust of ancient Hebrew legends, above all the intricacies of Jew- 9 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL ish. ritual, above all the controversies of Chris- tian speculation and metaphysics, that the most glorious thing in the world is to give up life for the world, to live for others, that the finer, fuller, and more efficient the life so lived, the greater the sacrifice and glory of living. The greatest need in education to-day is such a vision of life's purposes as will furnish a clear program for the training of lives and a com- pelling passion for its realization. We need mo- tives most of all, motives high enough for all to move in with perfect freedom, large enough to satisfy all the soul of man, deep enough to stir us to our depths and to lead us out to our best. The business of the Sunday school is to impart to lives the sufficient motives and the methods of the right life. Definitely, specifically, and not uncertainly the Sunday school has an educational mission. 10 CHAPTEE II DELUSIVE DEFINITIONS The hearing annually of literally hundreds of public addresses on the subject of the Sunday school is in itself a surprising revelation of the forces acting to retard the development of the school. One is at first interested, then surprised, and later depressed by the reiteration of three sadly misleading conceptions of the school; the conviction grows that these three current miscon- ceptions, prevailing often in the minds of those who are called to leadership and by them held blindly and even enthusiastically, constitute the most serious obstacles to the efficiency of the school in its work of religious education. When a speaker incidentally defines an insti- tution he unconsciously gives expression to his own working principles regarding that institu- tion. Your definition of a man determines very largely how you will order your life as a man. The most serious question in the Sunday school world is this, What is the Sunday school for? We never shall be able to direct or organize the school until we know what we would do with it. If you are organizing a factory, it makes all the difference in the world whether a factory is an 11 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL institution to make things or to cause things to grow; and then, granted the former, it makes a tremendous difference as to the things you would make in that factory, whether it is an automobile factory or a shirt factory. It makes no less dif- ference whether you think of the Sunday school aright. The three misconceptions one hears most frequently are the more dangerous because each one has a rather important element of truth. NOT A RECRUITING STATION Did you ever hear the Sunday school described as the recruiting agency of the church? Doubt- less. The important truth involved in that state- ment lay in the fact that it is through the Sunday school, more largely, more naturally and prop- erly, that the personal strength, the membership of the church is maintained. But the figure of a recruiting station contradicts the essential under which the Sunday school maintains the personal life of the church. A recruiting station has to do only with those not yet enlisted; its only con- cern is with the numbers to be enrolled; it has no responsibility to train, drill, educate the sol- diery. Like limitations are evidently in the minds of the speakers who seem to love this figure, for they go on to emphasize the importance of en- rollment; they fairly revel in the book of num- bers; they insist that the success of the Sunday school is to be measured by its size. They are under the spell of the damaging, deterrent delu- 12 DELUSIVE DEFINITIONS sion of bigness. Here is the most serious fault with organized Sunday school forces; they care more for numerical effect than for efficiency ; they urge on all Sunday school workers the "boom'* propaganda. The great thing desired seems to be to work up enthusiasm sufficient to draw in every child in the neighbourhood; beyond that they have no definite program. Like recruiting ser- geants, they are after names only. It is true that every child ought to be in Sunday school, just as it is true that every one ought to be in the public school, but either school has a right to make that demand, either morally or legally, only in the measure that it makes it worth more to the child to attend than to stay away. Children ought not to attend a "school" that does not really teach, or one that by its disorder and in- efficiency is teaching lawlessness and disrespect. It is wrong even to persuade children to go to your school until you have seriously provided for its efficiency. A mob is not a school. To put all your emphasis on gathering the raw material without a thought of organizing the institution which is to handle that material is not only folly, it is a positive wickedness toward that raw ma- terial of life. KOT THE children's CHURCH Then, have you never heard it said that the Sunday school is the children's church? The im- portant underlying truth is that what the church 13 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL is to the adult, that in a large measure the school ought to be to the child. But the capital error lies in making the figure go on all fours. We carelessly suppose that the children's church must be no other than the adult's church trimmed down to fit the child. The prevalence of this notion accounts for the fact that we have the hour of Sunday school modeled precisely on the period of church worship. First come the * ^ open- ing exercises," usually the baldest imitation of the opening numbers of the order of worship in the church, even to the *4ong prayer," and the reading of the Scriptures ; this is followed by the substitute for the sermon in at least many cases, the teachers each preaching, from a somewhat lengthy text called the lesson, to their several small congregations. To complete the imitation, the superintendent preaches another small ser- mon at the close, and the school is duly dis- missed with the benediction, usually after being invited to go through the same program again in the church service proper. Such a state of affairs exists in part because the officers yield to the inclination to play the preacher, but more because no one has stopped to think of the folly of it all. The religious life of a child is not the same as that of a man. A boy's religion is not a man's cut down. If the school is the children's church, then its life and activities must be those normal to a child. The school should stand for the child's normal, developing relation to the 14 DELUSIVE DEFINITIONS church; it should extend its functions and sphere through the week to maintain that relation con- tinuously and should devote the Sunday period much more exclusively to the work of teaching. As it is, heedlessly imitating the church service and feeling a freedom not found therein, we usu- ally excite the children to the top notch of fervid restlessness, or at least we try to do so by urging them to sing more and more heartily, etc., and then suddenly demand the impossible, that they shall immediately subside into the quiet, receptive mood for teaching. In an important sense the Sunday school is at least a part of the children's church, but it should never be an imitation church for children. NOT A THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY Then, have you heard this school described as ''a miniature theological seminary F^^ That ridic- ulous phrase is before me in print, given cur- rency by a denominational Sunday school official. The hidden truth is that the school does teach the systematized knowledge of the Christian life, but the misleading and damaging conception is that this school exists to impart to the young, in condensed form, in miniature, precisely that body of knowledge which experience iudges to be neci's- sary to the preacher's professional preparpiion. It has in mind a ''body of kiiowledge," as it used to be called, which the preacher mu-^t Kive un- abridged, which the people must have m the vest- 15 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL pocket size, the school as the one agency to give this to the people, and youth the one period to get it. Hence the school exists for the sake of the knowledge and not for the sake of character, for the curriculum and not for the child. The ghosts of educational traditions have always insisted there were certain things we ought to know, no- body knew why. The curriculum of this school is still largely determined by the theological ideal. Wise men have said. Here are the things that religious people ought to know ; the next question is-, In what order shall we teach them? But this school does not exist for the professional, philo- sophical, philological, archaBological, nor literary ends ; it exists for life purposes. The only reason these children should know any of these things is that they will vitally contribute to their spir- itual heritage, that they will quicken their spir- itual development, and will lead them to efficiency in religious living and service. This is the one agency in our life to-day which can be properly regarded as specifically the school of the religious life. Its business is to lead youth to competency for rich, full, efficient Christian living. For a change, suppose we were to try to work out a conception of the school based on thisi. definition: the Sunday school as the school of the chui-fh in the Christian life. Then ask, What workers, type of organization, and equipment wu^ild tiuai involve? IVhat materials of instruc- tion, what kinds of stimuli, and what forms of 16 DELUSIVE DEFINITIONS work would developing Christian lives need at their respective stages of development and in view of the demands made upon life to-day? And, what motives for support, co-operation, and enlistment or study would such a school be able to offer? 17 CHAPTER III A CHURCH STANDARD FOE ITS SCHOOL If we recognize the Sunday school as the school of the church for the religious life, we next pro- ceed to discover the means by which we may in- sure all the church people receiving the benefits of the system of religious education designed by the church. The Northern Baptist Convention recently adopted this statement: ''Every member as a learner in the school of Christ should teach or he taught in the educational work of the church,' ' as the standard for local churches in their rela- tion to their Sunday schools. Efficiency is ability to secure effects. The effect of the work of a church ought to be a re- generated community realizing the Christ ideal in personal character and social conditions. The matter of efficiency is our immediate concern, our imperative responsibility; if we attend to effi- ciency, He whom we serve will care for our suf- ficiency. If we agree that the effect sought by the church is the development of Christian char- 18 A CHURCH STANDARD FOR ITS SCHOOL acter and the prevalence of a Christian civiliza- tion, there can be no doubt or question as to the place of this particular article or aim in a statement of church standards of efficiency. Christian character comes not in some roseate flush of visionary hopes, not in some pulsation of emotion, not in the glow and thrill of recog- nizing our spiritual ideals afar off. It grows; it develops. Its processes are suggested in the Teacher's illustration from the flowers of the field, ** Consider the lilies, how they grow.'* It comes not by toiling; the strenuous endeavor alone will not win that fullness of being; neither will it come by outer adorning, spinning fine gar- ments for your wearing. Developing that life which stands and serves in all the measure of the fullness of the stature of the Master and bringing about that Kingdom in which His will is done is a slow process, yet a sure one, la. steady and dependable one whenever the un- changing laws of the Infinite are obeyed. It is an educational process. It is governed by the laws of education, the divine and eternal prin- ciples of growth and adaptation under appro- priate nurture and stimuli. EDUCATION AND THE MISSIONARY SPIRIT The educational work of a church is wider and more important than her activities of in- struction; it includes every effort specifically di- rected to the systematic development of Chris- 19 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL tian personality. Let no man say to himself, **This educational business must be left to the educators ; as for me, I cannot teach ; I 'm not a professor or a school teacher.'' No matter Vvhat you are you cannot escape the obligation to use the agencies and potencies of the gospel in stimulating, inspiring, aiding, directing others to the enjoyment of the life that you have as a Christian. No man has the spirit of Jesus unless he has the educational spirit, the burn- ing hope and desire that men should come into the fullness of life, that they should have all the life that is theirs as the children of the Most High. At heart the educational spirit and the missionary spirit are one; both rejoice in a life that is daily renewed into greater power and beauty, and both passionately desire that all others should have this life and grow into its grace. In an important sense the educational spirit is a test of the reality of your religion. Does your religion mean growth, development into harmony, eJBficiency and fullness of character to you, and do you most earnestly desire and labour for like development in all others I There is no more important aim or ideal of efficiency for any church than the one standing at the head of this chapter ; the vitality and the very continued existence of the churches depend on it. If we fail to educate— train, guide, habituate, inspire — men and women into Christian char- acter we fail utterly. In all the criticisms of 20 A CHUECH STANDARD FOR ITS SCHOOL the churches, in all the host of foolish demands which the world makes, that world is right at the point where insistence is most marked and most common; that is, that the churches shall give to the world good men and women, people who know how to live and who actually do live according to the noblest ideals. Our pride is our shame if we can point only to long lists of names, exhaustless financial resources, intricate and often bewildering ecclesiastical machinery, or any other of the tools and trappings of our task. The world asks for, and the world dies for the lack of our real product, boys and girls gTowing up into active, efficient, divinely mo- tived, man-loving and Kingdom-serving manhood and womanhood. That is the educational task of every church. It is a task to be accomplished by learning, coming to know and love and habit- ually to follow the way, to walk in the fellow- ship of the right life. The learning is by many means, by lessons in classes and out of books, truly, but also by customs, habits, associations, duties, service, joys and sorrows, emotional ex- periences. The agencies in the church are the Sunday school, services, worship, directed activ- ities and service, organized study and play. COMING TO THE STANDAED How shall a church attain this standard? First, by a clear understanding on the part of her pastor, and then of all her people, as to just 21 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL what the educational activities of the church may be. Let a simple statement be made, a list of the opportunities in the church. Be sure they include more than the instructional work, more than schools and classes. Let the list include all that is specifically designed to develop Chris- tian character systematically by educational means. The preparation of such a list will often reveal the paucity of provision in the church for the direct accomplishment of her real task. It should also lead to a study of the degree to which such provision is adequate for the ages and stages of development in her people, for the types of temperament, for the types of racial, social, and personal development, and for the economic needs of all. Next will come a distribution of the people of the church among the educational activities. The children will be assigned to the Sunday school and to their various clubs and other groups. Of course, every endeavour necessary should be used until parents co-operate heartily with church officers to see that every child is enrolled in the school of the church. A simple and wholly legitimate aim here would be that every person, under eighteen years of age, should be enrolled in the school, either studying on Sun- day or in a class meeting during the week. But just here is the place to suggest a warn- ing or to enter a protest. Only childish short- sightedness can account for the slogan, **Every- 22 A CHIJECH STANDARD FOR ITS SCHOOL body in the Sunday school 1'' The Sunday school is a school, an institution for instruction; but instruction in classes is not the only means for the development of the Christian life, nor is it the best and normal method for the greater number of persons. All need the knowledge of the way of hf e, all need to study the Bible, but there ought to come a time when the formal study of the Bible in classes is completed. Men and women ought to graduate from the Sunday school, but not from the school of the church. We ask too much when we insist that all our men and women shall come to Sunday school, attend church service, perhaps help in Junior and Senior Endeavour, attend even- ing service, and stay to after-meeting or to a business session. That is to make Sunday exist for the church instead of for the man. Some adults, many in some churches, ought to be free from all responsibility for the Sunday hour of instruction because they have undertaken other definite duties on that day. Again, we ask un- wisely when we insist that high school students and college students shall ^'bone'* for the Sunday school, just as they have been ''boning'' for their other schools all the week. If they are earnest students they are carrying enough studies as it is; their normal place in the school would be either in teaching or, better yet, in service as officers. Are they to be exempt from this stand- ard then? By no means. Our task is to find that place in which they may either *' teach or be 23 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL taught'^ without making the life of the church seem only an added burden or a weak imitation of their ulterior educational experience. Within the school these people can always find oppor- tunities, besides teaching and service, in which they will delight. They will flock to any leader or teacher who will freely and honestly discuss their big questions, meet their doubts and specu- lations, and let them give vent to their often vol- canic and explosive feelings and ideas. Outside the school how manifold are the opportunities of service for youth! They rejoice in service; they will do things. To do anything in a fitting way for a high ideal is to develop oneself, is to be taught. To give the cup of cold water in His name is to sit in His school. The wise pastor sees to it that there is a chance for every one of his people to learn by helping others, by put- ting on the apron and taking up the tools of divine service. He tests the educational work of the church, not by the Sunday school secretary's report, but by the measure in which the church is furnishing appropriate stimulus to every life. YOUTH IN THE CHURCH Provision for the life of youth, these people of the middle period of adolescence, is still the big ed- ucational problem of our church. How does a lad of eighteen grow in Christian character? There is our basic question. First, through friendship, through association with persons in groups and, 24 A CHURCH STANDARD FOR ITS SCHOOL most of all, through the power of distinctive per- sonalities. Vain all our courses no matter how well planned, vain all our organization and ap- paratus, all our academic fuss and feathers, if these young men and women are not finding in the church and in her school dominating, inspir- ing personalities. Scarcely any of the older men remember what the great Professor Blackie taught, but none has ever ceased to feel what he was. What provision have you in your church for youth's hunger for personified ideals, for potent personality? You can doubtless get a phonograph to teach the bare facts about Isaiah; you will need a splendid personality to make youth feel his force and aspire to his faith. Next, youth grows through what it does. No church is really seeking to realize this item of the stand- ard of efficiency unless it is seeking to find a task for every young man and young woman, patiently learning their dispositions and aptitudes and training them to take places of responsibility. If only some church officers would learn the grace of resignation and give some of the younger ones a chance to learn the joy of service ! Here is the school where our men must learn in youth loyalty and love for the church. WOBK FOB ADULTS And what of the adults? Is it possible to arrange that they shall all either ^' teach or be taught r* Yes; they have work to do which, if 25 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL they attempt it honestly, they dare not carry on without being taught. The need of the church is trained workers. The church must educate her own people to do her work. An efficient church is simply an organized group of efficient persons and the efficiency of the whole depends on the education of the unit But there are things to ** teach or be taught" going back of this and more radically important. Our very civilization depends on whether our people are educated to religious living. All our modem problems go back to roots in personal character, and personal character traces more roots in the home than any- where else. Let all who are parents pledge them- selves to teach their own children, to set aside periods in the home for this duty. That will lead the parents inevitably to the need of study. Let the church offer classes for their instruction in the duties of Christian parenthood, in making Christian homes, becoming Christian neighbours, and training Christian children. The periods and means of such study must be planned with care, having in mind the habits and needs of parents as students. We can not insist that weary mothers shall strain their nerves with the un- wonted exercise of a church service and school coupled together. Many will do this and do it with ease and joy. Let those who have the gifts — ^whether of endurance or of grace — continue. But those who really suffer with the strain of so long attention will both teach and learn no whit 26 A CHURCH STANDARD FOR ITS SCHOOL the less in other ways. The quiet afternoon class in the week will accomplish much more than the hurried forty minutes in school on Sunday, at least for many. This simply means that in all our educational plans we have to abandon all wholesale and factory methods if we would reach the desired goal. We have to study persons and to suit our organization to actual conditions and to the needs of different groups and types of people. It cannot be accomplished by simply saying, ^'Here is our Sunday school; everybody get right in it and either teach or be taught." I would not take one jot from the importance of the school which meets on Sunday; I would still urge its supreme place in the work of the church, believing it should be counted as the most fruitful agency of Christian service. But we need a broader vision of the educational work of the church, and we need a more comprehensive gauge than that of Sunday school attendance. A CHUKCH SCHOOL BOARD What definite steps shall a church take toward this goal? First, organize a strong Board of Religious Education, consisting of pastor, Sun- day school superintendent, heads of departments in the school, and others responsible for direct instructional work, as directors of boys' clubs, etc., and also some persons of broad educational inter- est. See that the members of this board get the wider conception of religious education. Take 27 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL pains to acquaint them, through the abundant available literature, with recent developments and present plans in religious education. Educate your own leaders. Note that every one of the successful educational experiments in churches is led by a person or persons inspired by the litera- ture of this movement and identified with its or- ganization. Second, take a review, a survey of your pres- ent plans to accomplish the ends of religious edu- cation. In what sense and in what ways is your church really organized to systematically develop Christian character? Set everything down in black and white. Make a diagram of it for your board. This is no waste of time. This is the method of every business that is doing business. Then fill in the gaps, set down in outline the complete plan. PERSONALIZING YOUR PARISH Third, over against the list of opportunities and activities in the church (both those existing and those which ought to be provided as a result of your study) set the names of your people. Having provided for the children in the Sunday school, see that they are all provided for also in clubs, in recreation and social opportunities through the week. Next, take the people of your membership and congregation one by one. Study each one until you find just the place in your whole scheme of education to which you can urge 28 A CHURCH STANDARD FOR ITS SCHOOL that one, if it happens that he does not have al- ready a suitable place and duty. Then, by cor- respondence, invite each one to pledge himself to that duty and opportunity, giving, usually, some alternative for his choice. Follow up the corre- spondence personally or through a member of the Board of Religious Education, assigning cer- tain persons to each member of the board. Changes and adaptations will have to be made, but in the end it will be possible to have every one pledged to a certain place in the educational organization of the church. Such a pledge ought to be mutually binding, respected by the pastor as well as by the member. When a man has selected his duties, do not try to load others on him. Church membership ought to mean a mutual agreement between an individual and an associa- tion of individuals as to the duties of each. Some one objects: all this takes more time than a busy pastor has to spare. Many pastors are ever lamenting that they are too busy simply because they do not know how to be busy; they waste time because they spend no time in plan- ning work. Platting out a membership and adapt- ing persons and activities is one of the best labour- saving, time-economizing methods. The people who try to save time by doing all things right hot off the bat seldom even get to first base. But it is true that so comprehensive a scheme in any large church demands all the time of a trained worker, and so it has come to pass that 29 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL many churches employ educational specialists, and that seminaries and some other schools train these specialists. They are usually known as *' Direc- tors of Eeligious Education.*' They are the edu- cational engineers of the churches. 30 CHAPTEE IV EDUCATIONAL ENGINEERS IN THE CHURCHES Mr. Booker T. Washington called attention re- cently to the need for duly trained and qualified ** educational engineers'' for the rural public schools. There is also a need which, though it may not be as common is just as keen and im- portant in each case, that of educational engineers for the churches. While those young men who look forward to devoting their lives to ideal ends in religious service are being halted by the dis- cussion on the over-supply of men for the min- istry, they need to know that there is one at- tractive field in which there is not only no over- supply, but, on the contrary, an alarming defi- ciency of qualified workers. One of the best known leaders in a great religious organization said recently: **We have thirteen highly im- portant positions, all paying good salaries; and not a man for one of them. yes, hundreds of applicants, but none trained and efficient for the places." A pastor of one of the most influential churches in the West spent several days search- ing personally for a man, at a salary nearly three times the amount shown by recent Government reports to be the average in the ministry; he also wrote a large number of letters of inquiry, only 31 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL at last to give up the quest in despair. He was seeking an educational director for his church — a man, trained by graduate work both in divinity and education, to be its educational engineer. There are now (1912) over forty men in the United States employed by churches as superin- tendents of education. They are designated, usu- ally, as Directors of Eeligious Education. In nearly every case each one is employed wholly in a single church, though in a few instances one director serves a group of churches, as those of one denomination in a city, or a neighbourhood group of several denominations. The field is a new one, or at least one only recently recog- nized; it has many attractions, especially for those who appreciate the possibilities of the min- istry of teaching and, at this time, the demand for trained workers is far beyond the supply. PROFESSIONAL LEADERS Since the churches have come, in at least many instances, to a recognition of the part that the educational process plays in the work they seek to accomplish and, consequently, to keener appre- ciation of the importance of their own specific educational activities, there has been a steadily increasing demand for the services of trained ex- perts in religious education in the churches. This demand took the simple form, at first, of the em- ployment of *^paid superintendents" in the Sun- day schools. But there came quickly the realiza- 32 EDUCATIONAL ENGINEERS tion that the direction of the educational work of a church was a matter including much more than the problems of the Sunday school and call- ing for far higher powers and more expert knowl- edge than one might well expect of even the better kind of superintendents. The ideal of any church with a quickened educational conscience includes an efficiently conducted, properly organized Sun- day school, but it regards that school only as the nexus of a far-reaching and well co-ordinated plan of religious education. The new educational ministry in the church grows out of a new, two- fold conception: (a) the educational significances and potentialities of every form of life and serv- ice in the church; and (b) the educational validity and reality of the instructional work of the church, especially of that which is designed spe- cifically for educational purposes. The first part of this conception calls for knowledge of and sym- pathy with the principles of education on the part of all the servants of the churches; the second calls particularly for a special ministry prepared specifically for educational service, as competent as that in any trained profession, one able to bring about the educational efficiency of the church and its unity in this respect with all the educational experience of its pupils. PROFESSIONAL COUESES The theological seminaries answered to this newly recognized need with remarkable readiness. 3 33 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL In many institutions, notably at Union Thelogical Seminary, the University of Chicago, Yale, Drake, and at several of the colleges, departments of Eeligious Education have been established, spe- cial instructors engaged, and courses presented. The work usually includes full courses in psy- chology, the history of education, pedagogy, edu- cational method and organization, with special courses in the psychology of religion and in Sun- day school methods and organization. These are in addition to the usual courses in religious his- tory and literature. The courses are usually ar- ranged so that those who look forward to the pastorate may elect sufficient to gain a working knowledge and sympathy with educational work, while others may specialize in preparation for educational leadership. The churches are also responding to this new conception of a dual ministry. The reports re- cently presented by Commissions on Religious Education in both the Northern Baptist Conven- tion and amongst the Congregational churches presented a remarkable parallel of conclusions which were reached quite independently. In both instances it is recommended that all the educa- tional work of the church be unified and co-ordi- nated about the work of the Sunday school, so that there may be a complete curriculum of re- ligious knowledge and complete training in Chris- tian character and service without duplications or lapses. The Northern Baptist Commission explic- 34 EDUCATIONAL ENGINEEES itly recommends that *' every churcli cremate a standing commission or board on religious educa- tion," that ^^all the educational work undertaken by such organizations'^ — '^Sunday school, Young People's Society, Boys' and Girls' Clubs, and the like" — ^^ should be co-ordinated under the educa- tional commission of the church, ' ' that ' ^ the school of the church — should include not only the work now done in the Sunday school, but the educational activities of the church." The plan presented above is by no means a mere paper scheme. Not only are there at least forty churches which are following it with so great seriousness as to each employ a minister devoting his whole time to this educational or- ganization, but there are large numbers carrying out similar plans under the disadvantages of a single salaried worker or with the voluntary aid of teachers and others, while there are many churches only waiting until there are men enough properly trained to direct their educational work. Some of the best examples of thorough serious- ness in loyalty to this ideal in churches where Directors of Religious Education are employed are the First Presbyterian, of Buffalo, N. Y. ; the First Congregational, of Winnetka, 111. ; the First Methodist, of Evanston, 111. ; the Second Baptist, of St. Louis, Mo.; the First Congregational, of Los Angeles, Cal. ; the Brick Presbyterian, of Eochester, N. Y., and the Pilgrim Congregational, of Cleveland, Ohio. 35 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL Here is a splendid newly opened field for men who desire to do worth-wMle work; here is an opportunity for ideal leadership, especially for those who have in mind the ministry of teaching. The church needs trained educators. Men who hunger for toil, who long for fields of wide scope and high demands for work where the widest and most thorough preparation will count, men to whom the word education has the splendid fas- cination of a significance greater far than aca- demic honors or laboratory research, men who seek to know the laws of life and apply them to leading out other lives to their fullness, have a splendid opportunity before them here. But this new profession promises splendid things for the future of the Sunday school. Given the continuous application of trained minds to her problems, given the accumulated wisdom of years of expert work and specialized experience, given the values of general educational experi- ence applied to the school, we ought to be able to meet its problems and to lead it out into the larger usefulness which the future demands of it. The only hope of making the church adequate to its new and tremendous task of religious education, of developing the lives of its people to competent, eflScient, sufficiently motived religious character is by the service and leadership of trained, de- voted experts in her educational department, the Sunday school. 36 CHAPTEE V HOW TO ORGANIZE AN EFFICIENT SUNDAY SCHOOL It is a great help toward knowing how to do anything to first know just what it is we want to do. "Whether the Sunday school will be rightly organized will depend, most of all, on whether we have clear and right conceptions of what it is for. The situation is clarified immensely if you will get a straight answer to this interrogation: *^What is the precise purpose of this institu- tion r' I suppose the readiest answer to the question proposed is that the purpose of the Sunday school is to teach the Bible. But do we not need to go back of that and ask, Wh^ teach the Bible? AVhat is the ultimate purpose of this school I The teach- ing of the Bible is a means and not an end. There would be no advantage in teaching the Bible if the only result should be people who are learned in the Bible, people who are able to answer all sorts of questions of Biblical research and curi- ous inquiry; who are, in a word, walking ware- houses of Biblical information. A walking ware- house of Biblical information is worth no more than a walking warehouse of any other kind of 37 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL information unless that information has fruitage in life and character. It is not the Biblical learn- ing that we desire as an end, but it is the Biblical type of life. So that the aim of the Sunday school is not a book, but a being, a life ; or, better, a great many beings, many lives. The Sunday school ex- ists that people, especially the young, may be trained in the ways of the religious life, the Christ life through the Christian Sunday school. THE AIM OF THE SCHOOL The church in all its services has practically the same aim, the development of Christian char- acter, the training of its people in Christian use- fulness. The distinguishing mark of the Sunday school, that which separates it from the other departments and activities of the church, is that it seeks to accomplish this purpose by teaching. It is engaged in educational work. It is not a meeting, it is not a worshiping assembly, it is not a creche in which children may be deposited, it is not a little organization planned and sus- tained to give a few people the pleasure of hold- ing office or the publicity consequent on their per- formance. It is a specially organized department of the educational work of the church. We have already defined a Sunday school as an educa- tional institution, meeting usually once a week, under the direction of a church engaged in teach- ing religious truth and training in Christian char- acter and service, and suggested that it should 38 HOW TO ORGANIZE well be called ' ' The School of the Church. ' ' Thi s conception must determine its organization. If we had no traditions behind us ; if we could imagine we had never seen a Sunday school, and were told to plan the organization of a religious teaching department for a church, to meet at reg- ular intervals and at least enlist all the younger people in the community, how would we proceed? Where would we begin? What would be the char- acteristics of this organization ? Surely we would plan in view of its purpose. If others came and said. We never have done things this way, we might answer. Then it is time we did. Beginning from the first, we would plan an institution for teaching purposes and, therefore, first of all, we would provide teachers; next, se- cure pupils to be taught, and then provide for their working together under the best possible circumstances. Here is the working axiom for the school: if it is a teaching institution, the taught, the teachers, and the teaching are the factors determinative of all its plans. These, the essential features of its work, must receive its largest attention. It is a good test of any Sunday school to ask: Is it planned about its function of teaching, with teaching as central, or is its teaching an incidental matter as compared to some other aims? The rest of the work will not take care of itself, but it will never be worth while unless teaching is first and dominant. Efficiency demands the clear determination of 39 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL functions and duties and their assignment to the proper agencies. Our emphasis on teaching at this point is magnified because teaching is the special function of this school in its gatherings on Sunday. In the organization of these groups of pupils and adults on Sundays there is one single, simple aim, their efficient grouping and guidance for purpose of teaching the religious life. Remember, we are discussing here only the Sunday school, the activities of the school of the church as it meets on Sunday. This particular teaching organization is only a part of the larger organization for religious education, just as teach- ing — even in its broadest sense — is only a part of the whole process of education. If the church first secures an efficient organization for teaching purposes in this school meeting on Sunday, it will be prepared to move forward in securing efficiency in the whole round of education for the religious life of its people. To clarify our pur- poses at the point of efficiency for teaching in the school proper will help to make clear the way to provide for all the religious educational needs of the lives of those for whom the church is re- sponsible. If the Sunday school really teaches, services of worship must inspire, directed activities of service must train the habits, social groups must stimulate the life and develop the will. The effi- ciency of the teaching depends on the support 40 HOW TO ORGANIZE of worship, service, and the social life. But the main point here is that the function of teach- ing furnishes a simple, plain point of attack ; we can secure efficiency here and move out from that into the all around program of education. It is surely hardly necessary, to-day, to say that by ** teaching '^ we do not mean that to which teaching is technically limited, viz., instruction; still less simply talking or telling. Here teach- ing means all that a good teacher will do in train- ing, guiding, developing, co-operating with and stimulating the pupil. ORGANIZATION- Sunday school organization would be a simple matter indeed if each school had only one teacher. The fact that we have to have many, and that they must teach many kinds of people of many ages, complicates the situation. We cannot have these teachers working at random; we cannot have them meeting at various seasons, teaching subjects without reference one to another, or con- ducting their classes in blissful unconsciousness or willful ignoring one of another. Because we have many teachers we must have those who serve to guide groups of teachers, who supervise their work, direct it, set times and bounds and seasons. In the small school one such officer will be enough ; we call him, then, the Supervisor or, usually. Su- perintendent. In the larger school the personal touch and proper" direction of the work of every 41 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL teacher would be too mucli for one man, and so we group the teachers into divisions, according to the great broad life-grades or divisions of the pupils, and place each group of teachers under the charge of a division director. It makes little difPerence what you call these officers, except for convenience in understanding one another, so long as you grasp the simple proposition that these officers are to bring together, unify, direct, co- ordinate the teachings and all activities of the grades or groups under them. There ought to be those who advise with these officers in regard to the special interests of the school as a whole, the course of study as a whole for the school, the relation of the school to the church, to other interests, the plans for the ex- pression of the spiritual life of the pupils. It is a good thing to have some man whose special business it is to plan the course of study, another whose special business it is to care for the music of all the school — except in those large schools where several such musical directors will be needed; another, preferably the pastor, who will seek to unify all the work of the school for its spiritual ends. These are special officers, just as the librarian is the special officer having charge of the literary life of the pupils. THE PUPILS Some people stop right here when they think of organizing a school. So far this might be the 42 HOW TO ORGANIZE kind of an organization planned by those who never allow their planning to come under the dis- traction of practice. That which is, after all, really the primary and finally decisive factor must never be forgotten — that is, the pupil. You must plan your school around your pupils. That is what we have been doing; we have planned this as a teaching agency because teaching, educating is the way that Christian character is to be pro- duced in these pupils. So all the life of the school must in a right sense follow the life of the child. We fail if we forget that and seem to think we can shape our school as we will, treating the chil- dren as so many bricks, or so many noses to be counted. The first thing you must do is to get these pupils, and then you must do, not what they say, but what their lives say. You must shape the school according to their needs. As to getting together the pupils. Make up your mind as to what ones you ought to get. Invite every one of these into your school. Then invite them again. Follow up, and keep on fol- lowing up. But be sure you have something to invite them to. The effects are fatal so far as future interest is concerned if you invite them only to disappointment, to confusion, and chaos. The best recruiting agency any school has is the high quality of the school itself. Nothing wins people like worthiness, nothing holds them like helpfulness. A card list of possible scholars may be as necessary and valuable as your card index 43 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL of present scholars. Keep on transferring the names from the first to the second. Be sure you know what you are going to do with the pupils you get. Do not herd them; or- ganize them. If educational reasons did not de- mand it, the nature and interests of the pupils would — and after all, these are both the same. With what purpose shall they be organized? In order that they may hold offices, wear badges, or that others m^ay be drawn into this petty scheme of whirling wheels? Organize your scholars for the aims of the school, for purposes of training, educating, teaching. Therefore they will first be organized according to their needs in teaching. You will bring them together in groups accord- ing to their levels of development and attain- ment. Do not imagine that you have to go to work to mechanically grade your school; rather, simply recognize the fact that the pupils are al- ready graded, they are at various stages of de- velopment, varying ages; nature grades them; all you have to do is to follow the lines of grada- tion already made. (Gradation is more fuUy dis- cussed later.) Keep in mind the simple statement that the Sunday school is a teaching agency, that it has to do principally with teaching those who are in the years of most rapid development and who, therefore, vary vastly among themselves ; that its work of teaching is its central and determinating 44 HOW TO OEGANIZE activity. Therefore, you will have no officers and no parts of the organization that do not relate themselves to and justify themselves by the teach- ing function of the school as the agency of the church for the education of youth into the full religious life. 45 CHAPTER VI THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GRADED SCHOOL The graded Sunday school is in danger of be- coming a fad. Grading is likely to be regarded as a specific for all the ills that schools are heir to. Standing by the bedside of the sick Sunday school, its officers say, ' ' Come to, let 's grade. ' ' At vari- ous times various similar specifics have been sug- gested. The panacea once was a perfect Pri- mary; later, homoeopathic doses of the Home De- partment were prescribed. Then, for a brief while all the Sunday school drug departments carried signs reading, **Take a Messenger Serv- ice for that tired feeling.*' Next came Supple- mental Lessons for soporific schools. In a sim- ilar manner the Adult Department and even Teacher-training have been regarded as ready reliefs from that real labour and earnest study which are the sole conditions of the solution of the Sunday school problems. All these suggested improvements have made contributions to the Sunday school only in the measure that they have been regarded, not as fads or specifics, but as the logical application of the fundamental principles of the Sunday school to conditions as they arose or as they were more clearly realizedl 46 SIGNIFICANCE OF GRADED SCHOOL It is of first importance, if the present move- ment for the gradation of scholars and the adap- tation of material in the Sunday school is to have permanence and value, that we shall realize just what are the underlying principles of gradation and what relation they bear to the wider move- ment of religious education in general. It is im- portant to see that the graded Sunday school is not a specialized propaganda; not a freak propo- sition; not a fad or craze of some small group of extremists; not the ideal conception of some theorist who stretches his feet under his desk in his study, but never sets them inside the distract- ing precincts of an actual school; who imagines what the ideal school ought to be, and then what he might do with the puppets who would be its pupils and the professional paidologists who would be its pedagogs. Neither is the graded school a panacea for diseases or derangements. WHAT IS GBADING? Precisely tvhat do we mean hy grading the Sunday school? Grading is: (1) The classifica- tion of pupils according to their ages and capaci- ties. (2) The assignment of pupils to classes ac- cording to this classification. (3) The arrange- ment of these classes into larger groups or divi- sions. (4) The provision of teachers especially qualified for the work of each grade. (5) The provision of material for study selected accord- ing to the needs of each grade. (6) The pro- 47 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL motion of pupils from grade to grade on the basis of their developing life needs. Gradation is recognition of and adaptation to facts already existing; the children are already graded by nature, by custom, and by school grades. It is important to remember that the pro- vision of material of study selected according to the needs of each grade is perhaps of even greater importance than that which usually receives major attention, namely, mechanical arrange- ments of pupils in groups and grades. Some elementary principles in the selection and ar- rangement of the curriculum must be borne in mind. (1) The material will be selected on genetic considerations; that is, its choice will be determined by the nature, the life history, process, and progress of the pupil. (2) It will especially have in mind the epochs or crises in that de- veloping life. (3) The course will be unitary. That is, organized into a coherent whole in itself without breaks or chasms from grade to grade, moving steadily to definite ends. It will, as far as possible, be unitary with all those other studies and interests of the pupil's home, public school, and religious life. (4) It will be sufficiently com- prehensive to meet the pupil's actual religious needs under present-day conditions. (5) It will seek the discipline of the whole life for its full- ness, its harmony with all life, and its efficiency in Christian social service. 48 SIGNIFICANCE OF GEADED SCHOOL PROGRESS IN GRADATION One cannot pause to survey the progress of the adoption of principles such as these. A few years ago, however, the graded Sunday school was an object of derision by the relatively small number who were conscious of its existence. To- day it is the object of opposition only of those who object to anything that would break up their indolent apathy and paralysis of prejudice, that would disturb the deadly peace of that fool's paradise of past attainments in which they live; who fight with vigour whatever strikes into new paths, forsakes yesterday for to-morrow, or threatens to place them under the necessity of endeavouring to think. Yet the graded Sunday school is coming so rapidly that even the most conservative are recognizing its constituency as worthy of consideration and as forming so large a part of the Sunday school world as wholly to reverse policies that were supposed once to be impregnably immutable. Observation covering nearly every State in the Union convinces one that the graded school is not the creature of some small group of peculiarly fortunate schools, but is the attempt to realize an ideal adopted by every school that is conscious of a definite teach- ing mission. Perhaps nothing is more impressive in the matter of Sunday school progress than a glance at the literature both of the theory of this type of school and of the material provided for its 49 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL use. Ten years ago there was not a single im- portant book committing the school to this prin- ciple. To-day one finds it difficult to enumerate all the good books written in its advocacy. Ten years ago there was scarcely any provision of the most roughly graded material. To-day there is a wealth of material for every possible grade in the school. NEW EDUCATIONAL IDEALS Gradation in the Sunday school is simply the application of the educational principles and ideals to that school. It is the evidence and ex- pression of a great movement which has been go- ing on all through the educational world, a move- ment which has two distinct characteristics ; first, the recognition of education as the development of a life toward what we must ultimately recog- nize as spiritual ends; second, the acceptance of the genetic basis for the process of education. We are living in an era accepting entirely dif- ferent educational ideals from those to which our fathers were accustomed. To them education meant one of two things, either the acquisition of familiarity with the three R's and perhaps with a few other useful items of knowledge in order to fit a boy for the business of earning a living, or as the opportunity to acquire a super- ficial familiarity with those things which it was supposed an educated person ought to know and the possession of which gave one a reputation for 50 SIGNIFICANCE OF GRADED SCHOOL culture. To-day education is satisfied with neither the utilitarian nor this superficial ^* cultural" aim. Education is the leading of a life through the dis- covery of self and the universe by the develop- ment of its own powers into harmony with the universe, into the possession of the fullness of its heritage, into efficiency in the service it should render in the world. It is to-day perhaps best of all expressed in terms of social efficiency. In a word, we see education as a life process with a life aim. THE NEW EDUCATION IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL The new ideals in education work down into the Sunday school and produce certain results there. We can no longer be satisfied with the Sunday school, either from the utilitarian stand- point as by hook or crook it hangs on to chil- dren until they can be counted in the church, nor with the informational test as it gives to them some veneer familiarity with Scriptural subjects, dexterity in quoting text or giving Biblical gene- alogical tables. The Sunday school under the pressure of modern educational ideals has uncon- sciously accepted the two great principles, which, at root, are one, that education deals with a life for the fullness of that life, and therefore follows the laws of that life. The Sunday school accepting as its immediate aim the Christlike life and serv- ice, the development of the growing life reli- giously and spiritually into efficiency, adapts its 51 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL methods and materials to meet the demands of such an ideal. Therefore, the Sunday school is graded; that is, it falls into levels and divisions which correspond to the levels and development in the life of the child. It uses graded material which is progressively adapted to the stages of de- velopment in the life of the child; and it selects this material, not on the ground of being able to take a student on a seven-year circular tour through the Bible, but on the basis of the effect- iveness of the material for the character aims at each stage in the development. Gradation results from applying efficiency tests to the school's methods and determining those methods by the laws under which lives grow, by appropri- ate food and exercise, selected according to the developing needs of each life. As soon as the school adopted the modem educational ideals it became impossible for it to use the prescribed circular tour tickets of Biblical travel, in which the infants were taken to de- cipher the Eosetta stones, and the adults were compelled to tarry and draw spiritual lessons from the fables and wonder stories. The gradation of the Sunday school has not been a revolt from constituted authority; it has been a return to the authority of principles and ideals of education in the school. The movement for graded Sunday schools has its permanent sig- nificance in that it is a recognition of the Sunday school as an educational agency. It becomes a 52 SIGNIFICANCE OF GRADED SCHOOL serious part of our whole educational machinery. In the measure that the Sunday schools are loyal to the educational ideals and will reasonably and thoroughly apply educational method, they will win the co-operation and endorsement of the reg- ular educational agencies and will hasten the co- ordination of all such agencies so that all may work together in harmony for the development of the full life and for the fullness of social living. The day is not far distant when all those who know what education means will speak just as seriously of the Sunday school as they now do of the public school ; when, because it has be- come educational in aim and method, the school will escape from the oblivion of inefficiency and the limelight of ridicule. It is a matter of no mean significance that, for example, in the Re- ligious Education Association the foremost educa- tional experts in the country, who catch most clearly the spiritual ideal of education, are giv- ing themselves to the serious study of the Sunday school because they regard this institution as not unworthy of their most careful thought and ex- pert planning. It will be no little comfort to teachers and officers when they can feel that the Sunday school ID which they are working is part of a great general educational system. It will mean a tre- mendous advance when, by conformity to edu- cational ideals and methods, the Sunday school entitles itself to recognition by the State and 53 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL other authorities in education and when all those powers and forces which account for the public schools, secondary schools, normal schools, col- leges, the universities, and the technical schools in our civilization, lend themselves to give to the Sunday school that degree of competency and efficiency which its high mission demands it should have. And this is the promise of the graded movement. NEW EFFICIENCY STANDARDS What are the outstanding results of the move- ment for gradation f What are the new efficiency standards 1 The first result is the setting up of new stand- ards in the Sunday school organization. Certain authorities, self -constituted, set up tests of front- rank Sunday schools, such as having home de- partments, cradle rolls, written work, training classes, banner classes, decision days, etc. Do these constitute criteria for efficiency in view of the educational aim? There are three general standards in the schools. First, the statistical, measuring the school by its size, its offerings, its ability to enable the pastor to come up with a report that will show up well in the tables of statistics. Second, the so-called evangelistic, seeking only to bring every pupil to a decision day, and counting its duty wholly done as soon as he is enrolled in church membership. Third, the educational, measuring the organization by 54 SIGNIFICANCE OF GEADED SCHOOL the standard of its power to develop a life, to lead it to its spiritual heritage and to its social service. T?ie educational aim does not invalidate the evangelistic aim. It serves that aim. It com- pletes it. There is all the difference in the world between education as a method in evangelism and education as the sole evangel. The educational aim sets up new standards of success. It does not endorse the boasting of the large school, which may be no more than a periodic assemblage of a mob, nor does it feel the necessity of apolo- gizing for the small school, which elects to do seriously and thoroughly with a few that which could not be done effectively with many. The Teachers' Advantages In the graded school we find teachers who are able not only to stay in some one grade for years and so to make themselves exceptionally proficient in its methods, but who also teach in that same grade practically the same subject year after year and who are, therefore, seeking wider prepara- tion in that subject continually. Suppose Mr. A. is teaching a grade of boys of about twelve years of age, leading them to the study of the life of Jesus. The school expects of him that he will specialize on two things, namely, boys of twelve and the life of Jesus for boys of twelve. Now, that kind of special training is the need felt by teachers all through such schools. Of course, there is no hope of specializing on any subject 55 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL if the subjects change every month or year; but the ^^quick-change'* artist is needed no longer in the Sunday school. It demands practice and observation work for teachers. Public school teachers who are trained spend no little time in practice and observation work. Sunday school teachers are usually thrown into their tasks without opportunity to observe good teachers at work. See how eagerly they flock to the school or institute where observation is possible. They get no practice until they begin to work on their classes. Perhaps the idea of small classes for laboratory work under the eye of a competent pedagogue would seem like pro- fanity to some people, since it would appear so much more pious to permit the untrained teacher to practice blindly for years on a real class. Nor- mal school students do not waste affection on their official critics during their course, but they do bless them in after years. We need to tackle this problem of observation and practice under wise direction and criticism for our Sunday school teachers before classes are formally com- mitted to them. Unconsciously to itself, the modem clamour for teacher-training is both the acceptance of the educational ideal and the acknowledgment of a serious indictment against the old course of study in the school. The teachers who are to be trained have been commonly in the Sunday school for ten or a dozen years, and yet before they can teach 56 SIGNIFICANCE OF GRADED SCHOOL the Bible, the Book they are supposed to have been studying for all these years, they must take a course of special study therein. What have they been studying these years if at the end they need work as elementary as the average teacher- training work in the Bible! MAKING THE MOST OF THE MOVEMENT In what way may the Sunday school get the largest benefit from the present movement for religious education? First, by seeing that its workers are thoroughly informed on the princi- ples of this movement, on what it is doing, its practice and its results. Nothing will help a teacher or officer more than to get into the closest touch with the dynamic of this new movement. Let this familiarity be acquired by reading, by attendance upon gatherings where the ideals of this movement are enunciated, by liberal pro- visions for familiarity with its literature, by familiar identification with its agencies. Second, that the school make, through its officers and teachers, its contribution to the promotion of the educational ideals and practice in schools. I mean not so much its money gifts, welcome as they will be, as I do mean the application to specific problems in organizing and, still more, in the preparation of suitable material for graded schools. If you are working at these problems in your own school, learn to regard yourself as debtor to this whole movement and determine that 57 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL whatever you may discover for yourself shall become the possession of all. Last in time, but first in importance, the essential thing, that which embraces all others, is the committal of oneself and, as far as one may, of one's school to the educational principle. To say this school shall not be a plaything, but shall be a seriously planned organization to accomplish definite pur- poses, and to do this by following recognized laws and methods, that we will be loyal to that which we know to be truth regardless of pressure or ridicule or fear of failure or hope of success in any other way. Our schools are what they are to-day because men yesterday did not fear to forsake the path of the past. They refused to mark time on the highway of the present. They pushed into the future guided by the light they had. Ours is the larger light. Ours the oppor- tunity to move into the larger day. 58 CHAPTEE VII WHY SOME GKADED SCHOOLS FAIL Why do some graded schools fail while other un- graded schools find no small measure of success? That question does not mean, why are some graded schools numerically small while certain ungraded schools may be quite large? Failure and success are not quantitative here. It does not mean, why do some ungraded schools run with an easy Hip-Hoorah! while other graded schools demand much serious labour? The school that runs on its own momentum is usually accelerat- ing itself by gravity, going down. But there are occasionally schools, boasting of being thoroughly graded, which are failing to do the work of a Sunday school, and there are schools which ignore gradation and yet achieve success in certain im- portant directions. The cases are not common, but they present to the casual observer a problem that may lead to a superficial judgment against gradation. An examination of a few instances of this kind brings out certain contrasts in these schools, par- ticularly as to the points of emphasis in their work. The contrasts form a diagnosis^ they may 59 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL suggest the treatment for graded scliools that ap- pear sickly and even near to death. Bear in mind that, on one side, this is a brief pathological study; it deals with a few deranged, sickly ^'graded schools." It is not a discussion of healthy schools; it is not an indictment of gradation. THE II^TELLECTUAL VS, THE PERSONAL First, these particular ailing ^'graded*' schools emphasize the intellectual aim, while the apparently healthy ungraded school emphasizes the personal aim. The former thinks only of stu- dents. It hopes to accomplish its purpose solely by lessons. It plans a careful series of studies. It boasts of its text-books. Sometimes they are selected by a wise committee of adults who have forgotten all about youthful interests. The more these books look like severe texts in higher edu- cation, the better pleased are they. The school impresses on teachers the glory of academic standards; it is proud of the really abnormal child who would rather read than run. It in- sists on periodic examinations. It measures re- sults by purely intellectual attainments. Getting these results but meagrely, it withers away on the cold stalk of intellectual pride. Fortunately such schools are rare; happily they die young. The contrasting school lays its emphasis on people as persons. It has some men and women who love youth. They seek pupils because they 60 WHY SOME GRADED SCHOOLS FAIL like them. To them the greatest joy in life is to gather young lives about them. Going into that school, your intellectual conscience may even be offended in many ways, but you know you are with friendly folk, there is a feeling of comrade- ship, of human sympathy and happiness. All our learning is a mocking void without that love. There have been some mighty good mothers who never heard of psychology. True, we need more than feelings of affection; we need the love that loves enough to take pains to learn how to love and lead young lives into fullness of living. Youth must have warmth as well as light. LITERATURE VS. LIFE Second, these particular ailing *^ graded" schools emphasize the aim of systematic Bible study, while the apparently healthy ungraded school emphasizes that of the Christian life. This symptom does not differ greatly from the first; analysis helps us to detect it, however. This sickly school exists to give all its students a modified theological curriculum. Its people are under the twin delusions that scientific, historical Bible study is possible and normal to all young people and that such study is the sole business of this school. Its curriculum is determined by the literature studied, not by the interest and life- development of the students. It exists to teach a literature, and it gauges its product by scholar- ship. The other school is manned by people who 61 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL desire pre-eminently that youth should come into religious fullness. They may err as to the methods, but they are in earnest as to the great aim. Its teachers are thinking all the time of the potential Christian man in the boy. They seek a life rather than a literary interest. Youth answers to the search for life. He would rather be led by wrong methods on a living way than by the rules on the way of dead interest. We do not discount the values of Biblical literature ; we do insist that it is a means and not an end. ORGANIZATION VS, SOCIAL LIFE Third, some, yes, many of these ailing graded s(;hools lay their emphasis on formal organization, while the healthy ungraded school lays stress on social grouping and life. Frequently the former has adopted gradation as a fetish. They heard of its fundamental values; they adopted it as a sure cure for ancient ills and a short cut to modem success. In their hands it is a specific ; it is used as a trick and device. They have worked out most carefully the scheme of gradation; it looks very pretty on paper; perhaps it is put into print — very impressive! Its sponsors seem to think that children are only so many things to be mechanically classified and slipped into the appropriate pigeon-holes of their system. Such a school is not graded at all; it is divided. Gra- dation is, first of all, the recognition of existing grades in the natures and attainments of the 62 WHY SOME GRADED SCHOOLS FAIL young. Failure is bound to follow whenever you depend wholly on any system. No plan works itself. Plan your work, and then work your plan. But the great weakness of this school comes out in contrast with the other one. In this latter every effort is made to group youth up into their existing social *^ gangs." You will find that, though lessons may be ungraded, there is a life, spontaneity, and attractiveness about the classes, and it is due to the fact that every class is pretty nearly a normal social group. It consists chiefly of the young people who belong together in every- day life. They are approximately the same age, stage, and development and class. They have been graded in the social sifting process. Still more do we see the value of social emphasis in the steady .effort of this school to develop a normal life of recreation, pleasure, and self -cul- ture in its youth through the week. The truth is its people think of these young folks in per- sonal terms; they are not things to be put into mechanical filing cases; they are boys and girls with a life of social impulses and ideals to be ministered to. The graded Sunday school must be saved from the dead hand of academic mechan- ization. If gradation means anything at all it means the recognition of the fact that we are dealing with living factors; it must mean the selection and adaptation, not alone of the material for lessons, but of all the methods of work and all the ministries to the life of youth. A beauti- 63 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL fully arranged, chrystallized curriculum can be- come the death of a school if it is the object of worship and the end for which the school exists. Any curriculum is only a scheme of selecting and adapting lesson material to the needs of living, growing, developing persons. It must be part of the whole of the curricula of life. That school only is fully graded which provides, not only selected lesson material, but selected and adapted activities, social interests, and emotional stimuli for the religious life of youth. Looking over the cases in general, one may say that when graded schools have failed, it has been for three reasons : they have not understood the full application of the principle of gradation ; they have relied too exclusively on the plan as a scheme or device, and they have sought the aim of scholarly attainment rather than that of per- sonal life development; they have been dealing with Sunday school pupils as with learning mechanisms rather than as living, growing young folks. 64 CHAPTER VIII IS IT A BIBLE SCHOOL? Until ten years ago the Protestant chnrches, generally speaking, had but one text-book for re- ligious education. It was the Bible. To-day the air is full of discussions of many text-books, many of them in part, some altogether, inde- pendent of Bible study. Indeed, there are some who question as to whether the Bible has any real values for the religious education of the child. What are the causes of changes so great! Our changing conceptions of education have brought about a complete shifting of the place of it might have been said that the child existed for the public school or for the curriculum, so it might certainly have been truthfully said that in re- ligious education the student, particularly the child, and also the school and the curriculum, ex- isted for the sake of the Bible. The greatest con- cern of parents, of pastors, and of Sunday school teachers was this. How may the Bible be mag- nified and glorified through the memory and mind of the child? Beyond the text and the letter we scarcely seemed to see at all. We were quite satisfied if the very little ones knew these verses, the Bible in religious education. Just as, once, 65 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL if those next could recite the names of the divi- sions of this book, and if those further on were familiar with its narratives and teachings. Cate- chisms were arranged that certain texts might be learned as proving this doctrine or the other; lesson schemes were planned so that all students might in a prescribed time travel through the Bible— such schemes of ^ Agoing through the Scrip- tures'' produced usually effects on the travelers such as would come from a Cook's tour taken by force in a sleeping car and by night. The glorification of the Scriptures as the reason for tbe existence of this institution found expression in the agitation to call the Sunday school *Hhe Bible School.'' THE INFOKMATIONAL. IDEAL Well, the Sunday school people were not par- ticularly to blame for all that. It was part of the common educational thought of the last cen- tury. We did the same thing in our public schools, and even — breathe it softly — in our col- leges and universities. Students were of second- ary consideration to studies. Here was a certain body of truth, a certain science, literature, sub- ject; the school existed to teach that, not to teach men and women. All that is changed now. The student is cen- tral, fundamental, determinative. The man is the end of education. Texts, studies, sciences are all but means, agencies, tools. We follow in this way 66 IS IT A BIBLE SCHOOL? also in the Sunday school and the home in the use of the Bible and other material for religious education. The first question is, Whom have we to educate? The second, What are the aims of this education? We shall proceed along safe lines and be sure of our ground if we accept, first of all, this as fundamental, that in the religious education of any person or persons, the basic, determining principles will be discovered in the laws of the life to be educated, that in religious education the object is not the magnifying of this literature or the establishment of that doctrine, but the single, great object is that those who are taught may be set upon a certain highway of life. THE DOMINANT PURPOSE Everything depends on this — the purpose of your school or whatever your educational agency may be. If its purpose is to turn out so many students annually who know the names of the books of the Bible, and who can repeat a pre- scribed set of Scriptural passages, who can re- count the deeds of Goliath and Gideon, and who know the topography of the old and the new Jerusalem, your course of procedure is settled for you; you have nothing to do but to drill these students in the literature containing this material. The only questions remaining are those that pertain to the ages when children will best and most readily memorize this material and the 67 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL means by which that process may be made as easy as possible. But supposing we have a larger, higher aim in the Sunday school? Supposing we are agreed, as men are to-day fairly well, that the school, together with all other agencies of specific re- ligious instruction, exists for this purpose, if it is a Christian school, to stimulate lives to the Christian ideal, to develop lives to their fullness, to lead them into the enjoyment of their spiritual heritage, to train them to the fullness and effi- ciency of their powers under the inspiration of the Christian ideal, for the sake of the Christian aim and motive in life, that the kingdom might come, that men might live as brothers and do the will of the Father of us all. TEACHING PEOPLE The business of the Sunday school is not to teach literature or histoiy, but to teach boys and girls, men and women, and to teach them so that they may be Bible men and women, avoiding life's failures and finding life 's fullness as both are pow- erfully pictured in the Bible. Life is the aim of the Sunday school; a literature is one of the means so far as instruction goes. Never let the Bible get between you and the boy, for to do so is to make the means greater than the end and to dishonour the Scriptures by robbing them of the very service they may render of stimulating and leading lives out into divine fullness. 68 IS IT A BIBLE SCHOOL! Does some one say, all tliis means dishonour- ing the good old Book! The way to dishonour that Book is to misuse it. The farmer who puts bis good plough on a pedestal and bids his family -worship it is dishonouring the plough; it is hon- oured when it serves, when its share is bright through friction with the soil. One of the gravest dangers to-day is that we shall worship the Bible and not let it do its work; that our bibliolatry shall put it on a pedestal and prevent it from being a power of life to men. This Word is a tool, a means to an end; the end, so far as the Sunday school is concerned, is the development of Christian character and kingdom efficiency in youth. The school must turn out *^ living epistles," not men who have learned the Epistles alone. The school must fit for the life of to-day. Literature is but a means to that life. That literature which we call the Bible is the finest, noblest, and most complete and perfect inspiration to the life of to- day. No life can be fitted for modem living un- less it be furnished and inspired by the light which has led our fathers, unless it know famil- iarly the sources of our inherited aspirations; none can be ready for the civilization of to-day who are ignorant of the literature that underlies and has largely determined it all. But the teach- ing of the youth of to-day must be determined, not by the literary forms of yesterday, but by the life needs of to-day. It must be determined by 69 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL the life this young man or this young woman will have to live. That accounts for the introduction in the modern Sunday school of what are called ** extra-biblical courses," that is, courses of les- sons which deal with history and literature since the times of the Bible. This is only a simple recognition of the divine in all ages, an expres- sion of the faith that God has not left this world without a witness. It is the attempt to give to youth, for furnishing and light and cheer for the way of life, all the rich heritage of the centuries past in Christian heroism and Christly thought and act. EELIGION IN OUR DAY One of the weaknesses of the average Sunday school curriculum is that it leaves us, as children, with the impression that all the reality of religion ceased with John on Patmos, and all the important things about religion belong to the dim past. Every boy ought to have clear, straightforward teaching on his own personal problems, the mat- ters of home duties, school honour and fidelity, personal purity of thought, word, and act, neigh- bourly relations, social duties, and good citizen- ship. He needs to be taught all these things in terms of his own day, by instances from his own days and from the days when these matters have been real to youth. He needs, too, specific in- struction in the history, the organization, and meaning of his own church. All this means much 70 IS IT A BIBLE SCHOOL? extra-biblical instruction; the one concern must be that it is not foreign to the reality of the religious life. This school tests all its teaching by the needs of the Christian life. It is a school which uses the Bible; but it is not a Bible school; it is the school of the church for the religious life of youth. 71 CHAPTER IX APPLYING SOME EFFICIENCY TESTS When in a factory a certain degree of heat is desired for certain permanent operations, the modem manager will spend mnch time in testing different kinds of fuel. Costs, wastes, time ele- ments, and results will all be carefully marked. After exhaustive tests a type of fuel will be selected solely on the basis of its ability at a given cost of energy and money to produce certain re- sults. They would not use rich, bituminous coal, even though it does give a splendid quality of gas, if they desired permanent heat; they would not use any kind of coal, even though their fathers had always used coal, if, under efficiency tests, electricity proved to be more reliable and eco- nomical. In a word, both materials and methods are determined by their ability to produce desired results in the most economic and efficient manner. This should be a parable for the Sunday school. The Sunday school desires to produce the re- sults of character motived by religion and trained to live the social life of the kingdom. It seeks to develop the fulhiess of the person as a social, 72 APPLYING SOME EFFICIENCY TESTS spiritual being in a spiritual universe of persons. The materials which it will use in this process must be determined wholly by that aim. We have been studying for some decades methods of operation, the application of means to this desired end. We have been elaborating the machinery by which the fuel is brought to the boilers, but have paid scarcely any attention to the greater question of the selection of the fuel. Here we have followed custom and tradi- tion. It has been generally assumed that there is but one kind of material which can be used in the Sunday school for the purpose of develop- ing the religious life, and so we have had the slogan, **the Bible the text-book of the Sunday school.'^ Moreover, we have assumed that we must use the whole of the Bible. TOOLS vs. PKODUCT It is time to ask ourselves whether a Sunday school exists for its tools or for its product, for the sake of the material it uses or for the sake of the manhood it would produce; it is time to test our material. If we are afraid to test the Bible as to its power and value in the production of Christian character, there is, then, all the greater reason why we should test it. Are we afraid that it will not stand the test? Only let us be sure that our tests are the right ones. We owe it to our high responsibility to ask, *^Are we using just the material, only the material, and all the ma- 73 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL terial which will most economically and efficiently produce the best results ! ' ' EVALUATING OUB LITEKATUKE Take a few simple tests. (1) Are all parts of the Bible of equal value in the development of Christian character for life in our day? It will not need a very far-searching examination to de- termine that some parts are more valuable than others. No one will question but that it is more important for a child to know the Sermon on the Mount than to know the fifteenth chapter of Joshua, or the seventh chapter of Numbers, or even the greater part of Ezekiel. (2) Are all parts of the Bible of value in the development of Christian character for life in our day? (a) There are parts with no relation to personal character to-day, as for example, the pas- sages quoted above, and, more particularly, the Old Testament genealogies, details of ceremonies, buildings, and some prophecies, (b) There are many parts without value to character for child- hood and for youth, as for example, the doctrinal discussions of Paul, many parts of the Gospel of John, the Song of Solomon, many of the Psalms, because they relate to mature experience, and most of the Levitical material, (c) There are parts with possibilities of positive damage to char- acter for youth, as for instance, immoral exam- ples, apparent commendation of deception, lying, cheating, and especially of national brutality in 74 APPLYING SOME EFFICIENCY TESTS military conflicts and in tribal wars. Also tliere is not infrequently in the Old Testament the ap- parent endorsement of moral ideals which have been entirely outgrown. The demands on char- acter to-day are far in advance of those which seemed to be ideal to the Jew, as for instance, we recognize that we need a type of social right- eousness which is certainly not the predominant type in the Bible. If it be answered that right- eousness undergoes development in the Bible and that the youth must be shown that the earlier examples are not for our imitation, but to lead us on to the more perfect examples later, the answer lies in the next difficulty, (d) Many parts of the Bible of positive high value are so im- bedded in ancient, Oriental civilization as to be wholly hidden from almost all students to-day, while to this is to be added the great difficulty that comes from dealing with translations from the dead languages. Much Biblical lore is open only by carefully sustained scientific research in history, archaeology, philology, and literature. So that to get real values out of the Bible, to re- ceive its inspirational value and stimulus, often demands an exhaustive preparation and a time- and-energy investment beyond the powers, the will, and opportunity of the average person. We do well to plead that in order to give reality to the material in the Bible it must be approached by the historical avenues, but we do not realize that the feet of the average man or the average 75 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL boy or girl have never trodden these avenues. They lie in an unknown land to them, apparently infested with enemies and crowded with difficulty, while at the end, from their point of view, there seems to be only a problematic reward. The events in the Bible lack reality because the student is conscious of their remoteness to the life of to- day and has not the power to carry himself into the life of that day. THE MATERIAL VS, THE LESSON" "When the labour of scientific and historical in- vestigation is undertaken, we are by no means certain of securing the lessons we desire, for the danger is that then attention shall be concen- trated on the scholarly method, on the minutiaB of the material itself, rather than being permitted to feel and see the permanent spiritual values. The investigator cannot feel the life of the Bible because he is so easily choked with the dust of the grave-clothes of archaeology. All this means that there are parts of the Bible tvhich involve large wastes intellectually, morally, volitionally, when they are used for inspiration for Christian character. All this does not make less valuable much other material in the Bible. There are persons in its history who are seen as clearly as a man on our own street. Some great principles are stated so that they shine out as beacons. Other great principles beam forth like the stars of the night, seen and felt by the child 76 APPLYING SOME EFFICIENCY TESTS as well as by the astronomer. One does not have to be an archsBologist nor an expert philolo- gist to see Jesus of Nazareth, nor has all the labour of investigation succeeded in hiding Him from men as the Ideal of all men. Neither have our discoveries in literary criticism taken away our sense of the uniqueness of Israel amongst the peoples of the world and of the place of religion in their lives. Historical study by the trained student has helped us to a new appreciation of the Bible. The layman has gained new values in religion and in inspiration to living by the new reality which has come to these old times and scenes. THE BIBLE AND CHAEACTEB Keeping in mind our efficiency test, we will turn to the Bible first and ask of each section as to its power to contribute to Christian char- acter and as to the power which it might have in the hands of a skilled interpreter. It is our duty to evaluate all the Biblical material according, first, to the general aim of religious education and, second, according to the special needs of the par- ticular life which we may be seeking to develop. We might very well, for the sake of illustration only, stop and ask a simple question, *^Have we any expert testimony on the use of this Biblical material r^ Can we look to the record of the method of any master teacher, religious educator? Surely we would be willing to take the testimony of the method of Jesus. 77 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL JESUS AS A TEACHER As a Teacher, Jesus made few references to Jewish literature and history; that is, His refer- ences as recorded were few as compared to His use of current material. Bear in mind that He was talking to a people to whom such historical material ought to have been as familiar as house- hold words, neither foreign nor ancient, properly speaking. When He did use materials from their history and literature. He used only that which was most familiar, most simple and easily under- stood. He used none of this material in address- ing those who were not familiar with it. When He talked with the Samaritan woman He talked about the things with which the Samaritans were familiar. But Jesus did use largely and freely the material closest at hand — wayside weeds, workmen, the farmer, the fisher, the merchant, the beggar. His addresses and His teaching must often have sounded like a personified edition of ^^ current events'^ made glorious with a spiritual purpose. Above all, when Jesus used historical and lit- erary allusions from the Hebrew Scriptures, He had always a definite purpose, not to make men acquainted with those Scriptures, but to use them as means to the development of spiritual ideals. He did not teach Hebrew literature; He taught people. Experience will furnish to every one many in- stances of the efficiency value of much material 78 APPLYING SOME EFFICIENCY TESTS outside the Bible. Some of the great moral crises in our lives have been met by light from home, or street, or every day, by the power of a friend ^s life, or the illuminating standard of a Livingstone, a Gordon, a Florence Nightingale. God did not pass out of His world with the close of Scrip- tural history. The test of the value of material is not whether it is bound in leathern covers and divided into chapters and verses ; it is not whether it was written before 70 A. D., or after; it is not whether it is in English, or in Hebrew, but it is whether it is a word of life to our lives, whether it joins the great cloud of witnesses urging us to run with patience the race that is set before us. We dare not take this or that material because it is handed to us by some organization or be- cause it was used by our forefathers. We must *'test all things'' to discover that which will do the most good. For if engineers are bound to take much time to discover the fuel that is best for the production of heat, how much more time must we spend to seek to develop religious lives ! 79 CHAPTER X FIRST THINGS FIRST There was a man once of wliom it was said that because he loved a certain nation he built for them a church; when will it come that we who profess to love the children so much will build for them a church, a suitable aid to their religious lives! If we really mean all that we are saying to-day of the importance of the early youth period in religious development, if we stand by our esti- mates of the relative values of gaining the children and gaining adults, why do we leave the children without adequate provision for their religious well-being? If you think of the millions going into splendid church edifices, designed for weekly worship by adults, and the pittances wrung out for the buildings for children, does it not seem as though the church belied her words about the children, as though she determined to spare no pains to care for the nurture of the adult while leaving the children to take care of themselves? She often seems to say, ** Strong meat for men and any crumbs and scraps for babes." 80 FIRST THINGS FIEST Testing Church Efficiency by Sunday School Buildings We will never seem to be really in earnest in our anxiety for the religious life of youth until we give evidence of our endeavours in concrete ways. If it is worth more to save a child than to redeem an adult, why not spend more at it? If we do believe that the kingdom would come if we might have and hold all the children, why not make that our first business ? Yet where will you find a church that spends anywhere near as much on the child as on the adult? Where will you find a church that really does make its first business that of keeping the children for the king- dom? Compare the cost even of the cushions in the church building with the whole equipment for the Sunday school ! Compare the cost of the choir with the expenditure for teaching the young ! Lay alongside the money spent for the religious en- joyment, often the purely aesthetic recreation of the adult, that which the church spends for the great purpose of training children into Christian living. Will not our church budgets rise up and condemn the churches of this generation? Shall we not stand convicted of the saddest form of selfishness, spiritual greed, when our niggardly appropriations for the Sunday school are com- pared with our free spending on ourselves? Every time a thoughtful person stands before a splendid new church building he must surely ask. What plant is provided here for the religious « 81 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL life of childhood and youth? How pitiable, nay shameful, is the usual answer! Frequently it runs like this, *^ Well, we needed so much room for the church auditorium that we had to put the Sunday school rooms down stairs.'' If a church was fully loyal to its avowed faith in the im- portance of childhood, it would make the child central and determinative ; it would build the plant for the child-life first, and allow adult life to adjust itself to that. Imagine a church thus logical in its building plans. Men would laugh at first; preachers who live only for oratorical fame would scoff, but soon the world would recog- nize that here was an institution setting about its business seriously. It would recognize that the church, knowing it had to grow character, de- termined to do its best work, to use to the full its best resources right in the growing period. If you would grow Christian men and women you must grow them in the growing period. The growing part of our plant we crowd off in a corner, and we are likely to put the patching, repair shop out in the front. Now, what would happen, in the long course of the years, to any church that set its service to youth first in expenditure, in equip- ment, and in personal investment? Would it not so succeed in growing the right life that it would not only have as adherents all those who came up into adult life, but also it would have them trained and ready for its service? The Sunday school and all the agencies for the life of childhood would 82 FIEST THINGS FIEST not only develop Christian character, but, what is an essential part thereof, they would train and grow the church of the future, holding to itself in familiar gratitude all the services of its chil- dren. The church that saves the children gains the world. Testing Efficiency by Physical Equipment It is true that one must keep the body under, but that does not mean that you can succeed in eliminating it. Talking of 'Hhis vile body" and singing of ^4he soul" will not change the fact that this body and the whole range of physical condi- tions have a great deal more to do with our spir- itual development than we are ready to recognize. It is a good thing to begin at the beginning. The finest superstructure must after all put its feet into dirt. The best Sunday school teaching begins in rightly determining and organizing physical conditions. Many a teacher has come to the school with a well-prepared lesson, with earnest desire to ac- complish good, and buoyed up by a sense of the great possibilities in her work, only afterwards to leave the schoolroom utterly discouraged and disheartened, and this not because there was any unusual degree of depravity in her scholars or defect in her general pedagogical method, but on account of the neglect of certain factors which are never negligible. I believe that at least as many good lessons have been robbed of their best fruit- 83 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL age by over-heating and under-lighting, by jani- tors and church building committees, as can be laid to the charge of incompetent and indolent teachers. The physical condition is an educa- tional condition and contributes to the sum of pedagogical factors and forces. "Where the chil- dren come to school hungry it is hard to get them to think of the Bread of Life, or where, as is very often the case, they come surfeited, it is exceed- ingly difficult to get them to think of anything at all. The purpose of your teaching in the school is to secure the reaction of the whole life of the pupil to certain stimuli. The stimulus of your verbal appeal is relatively insignificant beside that of the things felt, seen, smelt, tasted, heard in class- room or schoolroom. The din of other classes, the confused noise made by volatile and voluble officials, the lugubrious texts in clamourous col- ours on the walls, the odours of bad oxygen are all importunate at the doors of the pupiPs senses. To them your voice is only one physical appeal. If you are wise you will not seek to compete with other claims to admission, but since these claims are in the power of your direction you will secure their co-operation with you. It is possible, as many a bright, sunny, cheerful, harmonious Sun- day school room or class room to-day testifies, to make every physical factor a servant of the spiritual end. It is not enough to prepare your lesson at 84 FIEST THINGS FIEST your desk at home. The wise teacher will also prepare the plaee for its learning. Go to the schoolroom outside of the school hours. Ask yourself how its surroundings would have im- pressed you as a child. Get your helpers together and rest not until that schoolroom or classroom is saying every day, louder than you can speak and in a manner more lasting than your message can be : ^' God is love, life is full of opportunity, religion is a part of the very best that we know or feel or think. ^' Physical Prepakation There is a side of this, too, that applies per- sonally to the teacher. Often your Sunday morn- ing vexation may be traced to your Saturday night's relaxation. Spiritual consecration cannot make up for the lack of attention to physical conditions. While some sickly saints have helped the world to get well, and some of the most helpful have suffered most in health, they have done that work under a tremendous handicap, and no one is excusable for taking unnecessary handi- caps. Take your whole self to the school and class and your whole self at its very best, for what- ever is lacking in johysical vigor will be lacking in mental alertness and in spiritual deficiency. We have forever left the time when we can think of man as consisting of three separate de- partments : body, mind, and spirit. He is a unity, a psycho-physical being, his whole life goes to- 85 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL gether, the body with the soul; one aspect is neglected at the expense of all others. Teaching, education, has to do, not with minds as separate entities, not with spirits, yet there are Sunday schools and churches crowded with people who are *Hhere in spirit alone.'' It has to do with the whole being; its success depends on obedience to the laws of the whole being in the measure in which every factor of body and mind contribute and co-operate to the desired end. It is a good thing to secure the harmonious co-operation of those basic factors which we call physical. This suggests also the wisdom of training the physical life of the pupil in the school. If the Sunday school is to train and develop into full- ness and beauty of religious character and into efficiency in religious service, it has to train those who are bodies, physical beings as well as spir- itual beings. It has to train in the morality of good health, and it is training, too, those who are in the period of life when the physical is the most evident and is the point of immediate in- terest and contact. If you are preparing your lesson with a group of dear little souls in your mind, there will be a serious hiatus between your presentation and your preparation when you come to give that lesson to a bunch of dynamic physical phenomena. We teachers must learn to think of our people as playing, muscle-developing creatures. The righteousness they need is that which can find 86 FIRST THINGS FIRST physical expression. A boy's theories on the waving of palms and the striking of harps will take care of themselves if he can get the practice of righteousness in the running of a race, the striking of a ball, the doing of the chores, and all the expressional activities of his normal living, if these can be inspired and filled with motives that are eternal and divine. Testing Efficiency by the Pictuke Appeal Blank walls do not leave blank mental im- pressions. Their very barrenness, bleakness, often their dingy dirtiness, makes a decidedly un- desirable impression. It takes very little sug- gestion to bring back to my mind vividly the blotchy, apparently mouldy, calcimined walls of the bam-like Sunday school room where I sat as a small boy. Those walls, desolate save for hid- eous placards of Scripture texts, were tremen- dously active instructors to that little chap. It was hard to tell which did most harm, the melan- choly empty spaces, which seemed to say that piety must savour of death and desolation, or those texts done in hideous antagonisms of green and blue and violet, which asserted that God never let me get out of His sight. If you have ever seen children looking with hungry eyes at billboards, and if you have watched them before some fine picture in a store window or an art gallery; if you have seen their eyes as they looked at a fine window in the 87 EFFICIENCY EST THE SUNDAY SCHOOL cliiircli, yon will know that the blank spaces on the walls of church or Sunday school room or class room simply ought to spell opportunity to teacherSc We already recognize and use freely the power- ful aid of the picture in teaching. We see how through eye-gate the life is reached when we take the small lesson pictures into the class; but we have not yet grasped the possibilities in one or several large pictures which would be so rich in meaning, so inspiring in ideal elements, that they could be set for long periods before large groups of students. No one ever tires of a really good picture. One goes back time after time through years to sit down before the masterpieces, before the Holy Family, before a Turner, a Corot, a Con- stable, or a Murillo. You come away enriched, strengthened, lifted up. You need no explanation, no story about the picture; a lecturer in the gal- lery would be an impertinence. So with some fine paintings in churches and some fine windows. Fortunately, excellent reproductions of the great paintings are available to remote communi- ties and to people of very limited means by the aid of reproductions and photographs. It is not necessary to go to London to see the Holy Family ; very fair colour reproductions come at a relatively small cost. You do not need many such pictures ; you can afford to leave large spaces, margins, about them; they are the kind of pictures that 88 FIEST THINGS FIRST flow over into margins and make the blank spaces about them eloquent and beautiful. One thinks first of all of Biblical pictures for such uses; large ones for the walls of the larger rooms, and smaller ones for the class rooms. But the range of selection may well be very much wider. A Sunday school room ought to have in it, not only imaginary presentations of Peter and Paul and John; it ought to have the portraits of men who have made Christian history, the heroes and ideals of modern times, such as Livingstone, Lincoln, Chinese Gordon, Phillips Brooks, and others who have served their fellows. Depend upon it, you can often get the highest religious teaching through what a child will think and what he will ask as he looks on such faces. Then, 1 would use also some subjects from daily life — those that show deeds of kindness, devotion ; those that touch deeply the higher motives; those that show home and daily life in the light of religion. Even some natural scenes have religious power to help. These are all mentioned, not to disparage the Scriptural pictures, for we cannot get along without them, but to suggest how large is the material we may use. Now, it is not necessary that the use of our walls in such a helpful way shall involve large expense. We need especially to beware of the temptation to get expensive frames and mounts; the frame should never attract from the picture. 89 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL Often the best pictures may be placed on walls without any frame, with nothing beyond a strip or narrow border of some material, as wood or even paper. But be sure that your pictures are worth looking at many times; that they really make one feel their spiritual worth and meaning, and you have then turned your walls into re- ligious teachers, into allies in your work. 90 CHAPTER XI ACHIEVING THE EELIGIOUS PUEPOSE OF THE SUNDAY SCHOOL The question often arises, especially with those who have become accustomed to thinking of edu- cation in the modem way, whether the adoption of the educational idea in the Sunday school will not defeat the religious purpose of the school. There can be no doubt but that the school has a religious purpose. We must go farther and say that its purpose is wholly a religious one. But when we ask precisely what is the religious pur- pose of the Sunday school, the necessary answer becomes illuminating. We have to say that the religious purpose of the school, as indeed of the whole church, is just the purpose that the Master stated as the end of His coming: ''I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. ' ' The religious purpose of the Sunday school is a whole life, a life in its spiritual completeness and fullness, for the pupil. The Sunday school, as the specific agency of the church for the religious education of the people, if we borrow current-educational terminology we say, it exists that they may be trained ; that their lives may be developed to spiritual fullness, to 91 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL perfect adjustment to their whole environment in its infinitude; that they may receive their whole heritage, the spiritual wealth of all ages ; that they may be brought into fullness of living, and to the giving of a full life for others. The Sunday school is an educational institu- tion with an evangelistic aim ; it seeks the steady, systematic development of the life of the child into the consciousness and fullness of Christian char- acter and the training of all its people into effi- ciency and joy in Christian service. We are all agreed to-day that its method is educational; we are all agreed that its aim is evangelistic, that is to say, that it seeks to lead to the way of living and thinking, the habits of life and thought that see life as a good thing because it is God's, this world as good because it is His, and the future as bright with promise because it has the possibility of bringing His will to be done and making His love more manifest. THE EVANGELISTIC AIM Yet in seeking the evangelistic end with the educational means, we are in danger between a barren intellectualism on one hand and a sterile emotionalism on the other. We so easily fall into thinking of all things religious as having to do with the emotions, the *' heart" alone. There are schools calling themselves educa- tional institutions, with much dignity in the declaration^ which are simply cold, lifeless pieces 92 ACHIEVING THE RELIGIOUS PURPOSE of mechanism for retailing quantities of informa- tion. They are as far from being educational as a penny-in-the-slot milk-vending machine is from being maternal. There are schools that imagine they are ardently evangelistic because at stated periods they become roaring volcanoes of emotional excitement; usually they get about as near to evangelism as a steam calliope can get to a symphony. Education is leading life into fullness; evan- gelism is revealing the good news of the glory of the life that is ours as the children of God. Edu- cation without that vision of the higher, fuller, divine life is a stub road with a terminus that leaves you in the bitter desert of unfulfilled de- sires. Evangelism without the firm, clear track of educational development from grace to grace is an invitation to reach the glory of the stars by spasmodic leaps into the air. Both have to do with life ; one has its promise, its prophecy; the other has its process and indi- cates its progress. Keeping both close to life, to the lives of the people with whom you deal, saves both from futility, co-ordinates and unifies. When teacher and every other worker in the school is seeking steadily, solely to aid each life toward the fullness of the ideal life, to the realiza- tion of the measure of the fullness of the stature of Christ, then all will be saved from the fatuous notion that packing a head with congealed veraci- ties will cool the hot passions of youth and from 93 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL the fatal mistake of supposing tliat a heart over- flowing with feeling will keep the feet in the ways of trnth and love. He only is an educator who has the evangel- istic vision of the fullness of life; he only is an evangelist who broods over the life to bring it into that fullness by the steady processes that we call education. The one thing we are doing in the Sunday school is to aid and inspire, lead and stim- ulate lives into their spiritual heritage and full- ness. We do well to insist on accurate training in religious knowledge, but only as knowledge sanctified by love builds up for life. We do well to steadily seek to improve the methods and en- large and adjust the curricula of our schools, but only as all shall serve as means and agencies to open the eyes to the vision and lead the feet in the way of the glorious life. A SUFFICIENT AIM No wonder many teachers find their work a dreary round; no wonder they are unable to en- dure the ebullitions of youthful vitality. They come to school with a nice, bulky package of facts which they wish to install in each of the more or less commodious intellectual warehouses which constitute the class. The teacher thinks of them as depositories for information. She finds the warehouses persist in wiggling, contrary to all known laws for warehouses. She is discour- aged because they are alive ; they are so far from 94 ACHIEVING THE EELIGIOUS PUEPOSE being dead that she is persuaded they are de- praved. She can only wait patiently until the bell rings and she can carry away her freight of facts. The life aim in the school makes ns rejoice in life, keeps us close to these living, wiggling be- ings, and teaches ns to be patient with life and learn of it, leading it out into the devotion of its powers to divine ends. Work in a school becomes worth while, high, grand, holy, when you see that facts, ideas, machinery, methods, lessons, exer- cises, all are but means to an end and not ends in themselves, and the end is this, that these lives may become like His life, their living together His kingdom, and all their working the doing of His will, that you are educating slowly, gradually, by leading, nurture, inspiration, aiding these lives into that glad and glorious fullness of the life divine. The Sunday school has as its religious pur- pose what is really the fully orbed purpose of any complete education, a full life — the full life of man as the child of God. Now, if the Sunday school would accomplish this religious purpose, there is no question as to whether the educational method is the best one; it is the only possible one. Since the purpose is the development of a life, the only method you can use is the vital, the genetic, the educational method. The indictment resting against the old type of Sunday school is that it did not accomplish its religious purpose; it did 95 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL not develop lives to tlieir spiritual fullness and their religious social efficiency ; it did not give full lives and capable servants to the church and the wprld. We to-day adopt the educational method because it is life's way of leading to fullness of life. It is God's law. Having before us, then, this clear purpose, this religious aim — to develop the lives of the pupils in the Sunday school, under religious inspirations and dynamics, to spiritual fullness — just how shall this be done ? How shall we achieve the religious purposes of the Sunday school? Eemember we are dealing with lives, not with lay figures. We must give up the old figures of speech of children as wax, as clay. They are neither to be moulded nor chiseled; they are lives to be lived out. ATMOSPHERE The first determinative factor in any life is atmosphere and environment. Many a school is attempting a spiritual work in an atmosphere calculated to produce spiritual disease and death, with an environment thoroughly nonspiritual. The concrete in environment impresses the child most deeply, and the concrete must be made rich with spiritual meaning. The only way children get spiritual meanings is through the things seen, heard, and physically felt. Good work has been done in bad surroundings, but the good work has been handicapped thereby, when it might have been helped by attention to the surroundings. 96 ACHIEVING THE KELIGIOUS PURPOSE Mildewed walls, broken windows, lurid, hideous placard texts, basement class rooms where chil- dren keep company with cobwebs, are as fit for developing lives as a dark, damp cellar for ma- turing roses and poppies. If God is light, and religion is love and beauty, then let the life de- veloping in religion have goodly sights, lovely surroundings, light, beauty, and cheer. These things children see remain when the things we say have long been forgotten. Second, and more important than ever the edi- fice, is the environment of personality. What sort of people is your school placing around young, susceptible lives? Are they healthy-spirited peo- ple! Do they live so that youth can take them as safe examples, as trustworthy living evangels! Are they efficient in really living the religious life? Then, what of the environment of the school life and order? Is the school as an organization morally efficient? Is it absolutely honest in its dealings with all its students, in its business re- lations, as in paying bills, and is it honest in trying to do its work in the best ways possible? This is the environment that makes Christian character. Does the church form a social or- ganization about them? If they are His children, they should be in His family circle. Somehow we should more and more cultivate in the Sunday school the sense of all its people belonging to the Church, to the family of God. 7 97 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL FOOD FOR LIFE Next, the developing life needs — needs, of course, parallel in time to those already mentioned —suitable nurture, food. It needs the satisfying of mind and imagination with ideals, with visions, with heroes, and expressions of great hopes; it needs that which is food for the thinking life, the understanding of life's relations and mean- ings. This food must be suited to the life period — the meat for the men, the milk for the babes. All may eat at the same table, but not all will eat the same kind of food unless we desire to produce spiritual dyspepsia in the young and dis- gust in the old. If you would have this life grow as His life grew, as all things in the divine order grow — in beauty day by day — then you will be most careful to know the characteristics of the child 's religion ; you will not expect a man's experience from a child's heart, and you will not say to the little children, as we have been doing, *^ Except ye be- come as old people, you cannot enter the king- dom." You will ask, in selecting the material, the food for this developing life, *^What are the appetites, needs, spontaneous interests of this life at this or that time?" LIFE CRISES Next, arrange all material and work looking toward the great developmental periods of the life. Without going into detailed discussions of the 98 ACHIEVING THE RELIGIOUS PURPOSE great periods of the developing life, we are all agreed in recognizing the primary importance of that which ushers in the years of adolescence. At this time, somewhat near the age of thirteen, marked changes take place in the whole life. The greatest of these changes may well and properly be the setting of the whole life definitely toward goodness and truth, toward God and His way of life and the relating and co-ordinating of the life to the definite activities and organizations of re- ligion. Perhaps it is not best, however, to speak or to think of this so much as a great change, but rather as a definite step forward in a course already adopted — as coming to one's self-realiza- tion as the child of God. In whatever way we may think of this period's changes, whatever our philosophy may be, we ought to see to it that at this time, when the life is consciously relating itself to its whole world, it ought to rightly re- late itself to all that is of the higher life. Therefore, build the curriculum and arrange the activities of the school with these years espe- cially in mind, so that the life is fitted and fur- nished for this epoch, so that the youth becomes as easily and naturally — one might almost say in- evitably — identified with his church as he steps out into the social life at this time. ACTION- The last need in a course of study designed to carry out the full educational purpose of the 99 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL school is the provision of adequate, suitable ex- pressional activities, the motorization of the ma- terial of instruction. Consider no lesson taught until you have provided for the reaction of the life toward it, until it is somehow lived. No truth is possessed until in some way or another it is practiced. No lesson is learned until it is lived. This necessity of the reaction of the life toward that which is being learned affords one of the keenest tests of our teaching. It makes evident at once the folly of teaching that which cannot be somehow put into life; it eliminates much of our teaching of abstractions and of the experiences of full life to little children. Besides this, it demands that the school shall be so or- ganized as to furnish ample opportunities for doing things. The social life of the school, its services, worship, its order, arrangement, disci- plines — all its life should be regarded as part of its educational service, as giving its people op- portunity to live out that which they learn. Each teacher must be ever seeking means of expression for his students. The lesson that prompts to helping our fellow-men must lead into some help- ful act for another. This will involve the ex- tension of the lesson into the life of the weak; it will mean that the teacher is not satisfied when you can repeat the golden text, but will seek the answer, the activities of the whole life manifest in doing the things studied. The religious purpose of the school will be 100 ACHIEVING THE RELIGIOUS PURPOSE achieved in the measure that it sees its purpose as the development of a life, under the laws that uniformly prevail in all life processes, into the fullness and beauty of the Christ ideal, into Chris- tian character, and into efficiency in Christian service. 101 CHAPTEE Xn ORDER AND DISCIPLINE A SOMEWHAT extended observation leads me to be- lieve that the following general statement is fairly accurate : The larger the school, the less the prob- lem of discipline. Of course there are notable and regrettable exceptions to this, particularly where the enthusiasm of organizers for great num- bers has carried them far beyond the considera- tion of the real purpose of the school. But in such instances, where the Sunday school is simply a great aggregation of boys and girls, where its ideal is expressed solely in numbers, one might properly question whether it is a school in any true sense at all. There is another rather striking consideration as to order and discipline, and that is that in this age, when none would claim that children are becoming more reverent, we nevertheless hear much less of the problem of Sunday school dis- cipline. All those who have been in Sunday school work at any time will remember that at institutes and conferences this used to be the most inter- esting question offered for discussion. But we remember also that the discussion seemed to re- volve around methods of dealing with disorderly 102 OEDER AND DISCIPLINE characters, such as how best to carry out a kick- ing boy with one hand and maintain your dignity with the other, or whether chronic disturbers of Sunday school peace should be thrown out of the window, politely persuaded to leave by the door, or made the subject of prayer on the part of the teacher. This change has come about because we have passed from the study of the symptoms to the disease, and from dealing with individual out- breaks to the improvement of the conditions which gave rise to them. Once we thought it was the bad boy who made the disorderly school ; now we are coming to understand that it is the disorderly school that makes the bad boy. We are learning that this is not a matter of rods or rules and regulations ; it is not a matter of persuading so many little sufferers to sit in silence in the Sunday school, and least of all is it a matter of expertly handling obstreperous individuals by physical exertion. Indeed, discipline and order in the Sunday school is not so much a matter of individuals as a problem of organization and of dealing with a social group. Discipline is a mat- ter of discipl-ing. Discipline means the harmonious adjustment of the grades, classes, individuals, and officers of the Sunday school into such unity and common purpose that confusion is avoided, noise is re- duced to the minimum, and all the factors made to perform their proper functions, thus produc- 103 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL ing the desired result in tlie school. Discipline is in activity, and not in silence. It is a matter, not of repression, but of guided expression. The discipline of the graveyard is not the kind desired in the Sunday school. Boys and girls never will learn to sit as still as dumb stones; and those to whom such a condition seems to be normal or desirable need the attention of a physician. Doubtless you all have heard the superintend- ent request the school should be so quiet as to hear a pin drop. This is the orderliness of death. The school seeking the development of the child's natural life and moral and religious character will seek the harmony of vitality. WHY DISCIPLINE Sunday School Discipline Has a Directly Edu- cational Purpose. — The purpose of such discipline is, first, the training a body of pupils to meet, worship, and work together in a co-operative way, and to acquire habits of study ; and, second, help- ing each to attain to such a point of reverence, orderliness, gentleness, and general good be- haviour as that the highest and best interests of all are subserved. Efficiency is impossible under conditions of disorder. These are, first, physical: bad ventila- tion, poor light, insufficient air, ill-arranged quar- ters, and uncomfortable furniture. The life will make no harmonious response to inharmonious environment. "Whatever disturbs the physical life 104 ORDER AND DISCIPLINE will act as a disturbing factor on the life of the whole school. You cannot expect that children will sit still or will work into the life and activity of the school when compelled to remain in fetid, exhausted atmosphere, in darkness or gloom, or when seated on benches built only for penitential purposes. Second, conditions of disorder are in the man- agement of the school, when there is failure to provide for and adhere to a definite scheme, pro- gramme, or schedule for its work, and where there is also the habit of tardiness in beginning and consequent breach of implied contract as to the time of closing. Often the superintendent contributes to disorder by trying to make his bell compete with the clamour of visiting groups of teachers and officers. If you suddenly admit a flock of children into a room where the seats are not arranged, officers are not in their places, books are not distributed, it will take a good deal more than an hour to bring cosmos out of that chaos. The officer, the secretary for instance, who causes disturbing noises, who rushes about the schoolroom, or in and out of the class rooms, should be either disciplined or discharged. Third, another group of causes of disorder are in the habits of the pupils and teachers, habits usually which are simply breaches of ordinary good manners, as coming late, gossiping in the aisles, whisperings from teacher to teacher — in a word, all those little actions in which the indi- 105 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL vidual fails to fit himself into the working of a social organism. RAISING STANDARDS Conditions of Good Order. — The first condi- tions of good order are in the realm of ideals. What a school will be is determined by what its promoters have as their ideals. The need of any school is that subtle spirit, that esprit de corps, that makes a hundred or more one body, all the members of which work in harmony one with an- other. But that spirit comes only when there are at least a small number of men and women animated by some lofty vision, some noble ideal of the purpose of the school, some high sense of its dignity, its worthiness of their sacrifice and service. When the church gets to thinking of this school as a great institution, with broad, far- reaching possibilities, the school answers to that expectation. People are as we expect them to be. Talk about your school. Think of it in its mag- nificent sweep of possibilities. Don't be ashamed of being a Sunday school man. (We may find a better name for the institution some day; but the name is of no importance in the light of the possibilities of the institution.) Educate your church until it shall accept and adhere to the educational ideal of the Sunday school. Then catch the ideal of the educational and religious value of the discipline of the school. Eemember that the school that permits confusion becomes 106 ORDER AND DISCIPLINE simply a mighty agency educating its people to contempt of authority, to habits of irreverence, to lawlessness. It is a great thing to teach a boy the order of the books of the Bible; but it is a greater thing by far to teach him his place in society and to train him to right habits in the art of living with other people. All your teach- ing of the facts of the Bible will fall on abso- lutely barren ground under conditions of irrev- erence and confusion. The second condition of good order is physical. If your school meets in a bam or basement, boys will behave about as they would in a bam or basement. If your school looks like an old junk shop, and you come to it feeling as though yon belonged to a scrap heap, the chances are very great that the net results of all its endeavours will be a waste of material. There is something wrong with the church that puts ^ve thousand dollars a year into its choir and several thousand into renovating its cushions, but leaves its Sun- day school in the cobwebby basement, companion to the heating plant at one end and cold blasts at the other ; with ragged hymn-books, bare, noise- inviting floors, hard benches, and walls adorned with hideous placards rendering sacred words in giddy combinations of purple, green, and orange. We cannot have everywhere special Sunday school rooms immediately; but we can have them ultimately, for we will keep working for them; and whatever kind of rooms we may have, we 107 EFFICIENCY EST THE SUNDAY SCHOOL may usually secure two things to begin with: pure air and plenty of it, and good, natural light. No one ought to hope for an orderly school who has not endeavoured to provide that which contributes to that end. No amount of preaching about order or of praying for quiet will avail unless the arrangements and activities of the school not only make orderliness and harmony possible, but really tacitly insist upon these. When all the exercises move with definiteness, snap, and precision, when no one is in doubt as to what is to be done and who is to do it, the student finds himself in an environment of order and discipline to which he must adapt himself. An orderly school always means an orderly scholar ; and the orderly school is not an accident ; it is the result of, first, clear vision as to what the school should be and should do; and, second, the careful outlining and adoption of those meth- ods and the employment of those instrumentalities and persons by which this ideal is to be realized in fact. ADAPTATION" How often it happens that the restlessness of the older saints in the Sunday school is responsible for the restlessness of the younger ones! To provide against the restlessness of the older ones the superintendent selects hymns and passages of Scripture suitable for ripe experience, and often preaches sermons on the trials and tri- umphs of which the young lives know nothing. 108 ORDER AND DISCIPLINE But while the dear souls in the Bible class comer are singing themselves away to everlasting bliss, it is not strange that the young souls all through the rest of the school are taking possession of the bliss of the dramatic and imitative activity which pleases them just then. The secret of curing restlessness is by secur- ing the co-operation of that restless energy in your purposes. Do not expect order through re- pression; it can come only through directed ex- pression. Order is simply organized activity. Too many officers are seeking to secure uniform inactivity; there is only one way to this: chloro- form the whole school; usually persistent efforts in this direction have the effect of spiritual anaes- thesia. The simple truth is that you can secure the order, the harmonious working together of all the parts of this composite mass called a school only as you follow the laws of the lives of the parts of this whole. You are dealing with active, restless, energetic material. Live Material,— Your business is the training of this material to the fullness of living. You cannot do this except as you understand the nature and habits of the material. You need to study the child as carefully as the servant of a great busi- ness corporation, for instance, would study the raw material which must be handled in his fac- tory. This involves, of course, thorough acquaint- ance with child psychology. But it involves more. It involves knowing the boy and the girl at first 109 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL hand. It involves such a thorough knowledge of their temperamental potentialities as will enable you to direct their energies and organize their very restlessness so that it will promote the dis- cipline of the whole school. In conclusion, discipline means directed activ- ity. Order means harmonious, organized energy. The orderliness of the school or class as a whole is one of its most potent educational forces. This orderliness depends on an environment physically orderly, harmonious ideals wliich permeate the whole school mass, habits inculcated through or- derly exercises, inspirations of examples of order on the part of officers and teachers, and the direc- tion of the energy of all into common purposes. 110 CHAPTEE XIII MUSIC AND WORSHIP Education may be defined as training in the fine art of living with other folks. It is the develop- ment of the life for social living, the securing of the full life of each for the sake of the full life for all. One test, then, of the eflSciency of any educational institution would be the extent to which it actually leads its people into right social relationships. Any true school will have as many things as possible which its people do together; it will train in social living by con- certed social action. There is one thing which the Sunday school trains its people to do together, in social groups, which has an importance, religiously and socially, very little recognized. When the superintendent or the principal of a division announces a hymn he calls all the members of that division to do one thing together and to do it under conditions which always prevail in ideal social living; that is, by mutual sacrifice, co-operation, and endeavour. Sunday school music is something vastly more important than a matter of entertainment or of filling up chinks in a programme. Ill EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL Singing, especially chorus singing, has more to do with making character, is of larger educa- tional value than we commonly realize. We are likely to think that any hymn will do, that any manner of singing it will do so long as we seem to be producing a noticeable volume of sound. As a matter of fact, ** lifting the roof'^ may be letting down any religion, dropping it out of sight. The hymn is a splendid chance for the school or the division to come to a sense of its unity, to feel that all these many are one, and to then and thereby learn the art of fitting yourself as one into such a social unit. Once get bodies of people singing together the things that they really feel and you can get them to doing those things. The ^'Battle Hymn of the Eepublic" had a place as important as the bayonets of the men who sang it. The history of great peoples might be written around their songs. What kind of song heritages are we giving the youth through the Sunday school 1 Do you imagine that a crowd of boys are going to be moulded together for deeds of Chris- tian heroism by singing in tlie school, *^I 'm a modest pansy, " or by the vocal tricks involved in singing even good, stirring sentiments when set to a tune with no more majesty than a reel or a jig? Wliat becomes of the idealization, the heaven-soaring aspirations of youth when together they stand and are led in singing the drivel and inanity of the average Sunday school song-book? 112 MUSIC AND WORSHIP SONG TREASURES The question of Sunday school singing is not a negligible one. Who of adult years cannot re- member the songs of youth, who does not find often those old songs coming back unbidden, who lias not found himself repeating some of their words in an hour of trial or temptation? The things we sing together become part of our very souls. How poor is he who comes to life's days of desert and loneliness without the riches of re- ligious hymnody in his heart, who has stored in memory only the doggerels and cheap imitations of popular theatrical trash which many a modern hymn-book affords. Who would care to be com- forted in sorrow or sustained in declining years with the moonshine and drivel that sells at thirty dollars a hundred, and makes a big profit at that? We are in these evil straits because we have allowed ourselves to fall into the hands of ene- mies disguised as friends. The peripatetic singer and evangelist leaves behind him a trail of song- books often so baneful as evidently to belong to the order of the trails of the serpent. The songs in the books are mostly the professional singer's, at any rate the royalties are always his; the re- sults are the schooPs. Why should the Sunday schools be exploited by the song-book sharks ? The truth is, we do not need three per cent of the songs that are written. We need, not more songs, but more singing of the good ones. Few schools need new books ; they need the old ones. 113 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL No congregation habitually sings much over fifty hymns ; no Sunday school needs a book con- taining more than one hundred songs or hymns. Practically all the hymns the school needs are in standard books already existing. Some people tell us that the young of our day will not sing the old songs; they say that so- called ** classic'' music is beyond them. These objectors are measuring the aptitudes of the young by their own abilities. It would be easy to men- tion many schools in which some of the very finest music is regularly sung and, mind you, the pupils like it and insist on nothing else. Three nights ago the writer heard forty children sing Stainer 's * ' Crucifixion. ' ' Some folks think that to be classic a piece of music must look like a coal yard after an earth- quake or an explosion. Dignified, worthy music, either classic, or to become classic, is that which harmoniously moves upon our feelings, answers to the deeps of our own souls, brings all its parts and its participants into noble unity of feeling and action, and incarnates itself in our living- That is not a musician's test; it is a test of music for purposes of the higher life. EDUCATION IN WOKSHIP It were better not to sing at all than to sing as they do in some schools. It were best to give this matter of the training of character through music, and especially through concerted song, the 114 MUSIC AND WORSHIP attention it deserves and to put the mnsic of the school into the Iiands of some competent and sym- pathetic person. A good preacher long ago emphatically ob- jected to the phrase ^^preliminary exercises'' as applied to the worship before the sermon in the church. Of course he was right; it is all wrong to regard singing hymns, reading the Word, and uniting in prayer as merely introductory to the all-imi3ortant event of the sermon. But if there are sinners in this respect in the church services, how much more common and perhaps more griev- ous in our offence in regard to worship in the Sunday school ! We call the worship the ' ' opening exercises," as though its principal purpose was to serve as a preface to the lesson period. We often treat these exercises as though they were useful only as a cover for the confusion caused by late-comers or to give teachers and pupils a chance to complete all necessary gossip before settling down to class work. Now, the worship in the school must be neither an incident nor an accident. It is not an incident, for it is fully as important as anj^thing else we can do. The act of singing together teaches as much and as effectively as all the class-work. Think of the hymns! There are some we will remember as long as we live. We cannot forget the words that have been associated with captivat- ing tunes, with swinging rhythm, and with the ex- hilaration of a social exercise. There are many 115 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL who have long ago forgotten any phrase uttered by their teachers, and many who have forgotten almost all their golden texts, but for whom one strain of a song will call to mind in a moment the crowded school room, the array of children's faces, and the feeling of nplift as some of the fitting hymns of childhood were sung. Memory is rich with precious thoughts fittingly framed in poetic form which, would have been forgotten but for the aid of singing. Music not only has charms to soothe the savage breast; it has a strange power to influence the civilized emotions. The words of hymns become ours through the power of music. To prove this, try singing other lines, of the same meter, to a familiar hymn and soon those lines will sing them- selves over again to you. The great pity is that so many driveling strings of words are associated with captivating tunes. Separate some of the most popular of the revival songs now in vogue from their tunes and you will be astounded, if you have any sense of literary fitness or logical significance, that ever you were beguiled into sing- ing such meaningless phrases. Yet, after hearing those songs a few times you cannot help singing them to yourself, or you find yourself humming or whistling them over. Would it not be worth while for the director of the exercises in the Sunday school to see that the child and youth have some thoughts, some worthy sentiments, and some helpful, clear truths to sing over with those tunes ? 116 MUSIC AND WORSHIP Is it not a wrong to any child to bind to his memory by the chains of song either foolish jingles of words or misleading and often uneth- ical statements of religion? If the one item of the song has so much in- fluence, teaches so effectively, it is evident that we dare not allow these exercises to be an acci- dent. Yet is not that precisely what many a superintendent is permitting? How often does he know what hymn will be sung before he gets to his desk? Does he not frequently let the leaves of the book slip through his fingers until he hap- pens to hit on one that strikes him? What would happen in a school where the lesson, often a less important factor so far as teaching value is con- cerned, was left to the chance of the moment with each teacher? Why not do at least these two things : examine carefully the hymns you choose beforehand, and allow the pupils to sing no senti- ment you would not wish them to remember as long as they live. 117 CHAPTER XIV EFFICIENCY IN THE CRITICAL YEAES The critical period of life constitutes the critical period for the Sunday school, for it is precisely that period in which the school is most likely to lose the boy and the girl, the period from thirteen to eighteen years of age. The efficiency of the school for its purposes of religious education will be tested by its ability so to meet the needs of youth during these years that their reUgious development is steadily car- ried forward. We tend to blame youth for its fickleness, for its love of the outside of the school rather than the inside. Nothing will be accomplished by railing at these boys and girls, asserting that they ought to love the school, that they ought to enjoy its ministrations, that only their natural depravity accounts for their failure to appreciate the *^ means of grace.'' Blaming the patient will not make the doctor efficient. The school must adapt itself to the child; the child cannot be changed to the school, for the aversion of youth to the organizations of his earlier experience is a fact which no amount of scolding can in any- wise affect. 118 EFFICIENCY IN THE CRITICAL YEAES The question, What is the school to do with the boy? is really more important than, How can we get the boy ? If you have the right answer to the first, the second will be already answered. For many decades the churches seemed to be spend- ing themselves on devices for catching boys; we thought so much on this that we gave no atten- tion to provision for the boy when he was caught. Apparently we were all engrossed in devising baits, traps, allurements, and schemes to catch the boy and count him with us. Sunday school enrollment and later church membership was the goal, and, at least commonly, that meant only ecclesiastical enrollment. We were more anxious to recruit him than to train, discipline, develop, and use him. Our devices were many and cun- ning; books and periodicals were filled with them. They were clever but not sagacious, for they were not far-seeing. They saw in youth only something static, often only statistical, seldom dynamic. They regarded him as passive, seldom as poten- tial. He was a ship to be hauled to harbour, a jewel to be rescued from the mire, instead of a life to be developed. What wonder, despite their smartness, intricacy and abundance, all these plans failed ; they stopped at getting and thought nothing of his becoming! WHY WE LOSE THE BOYS The schools lose youth because they are not for youth ; that is to say, the school which the boy 119 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL or girl has known up to this time is not the school which he should know from this on. He leaves the school because he is leaving all old things behind ; he is entering a new life which absolutely demands that all things shall be new, a life which necessitates new organizations, new forms of ac- tivity, new social groupings, new interests and foods. The boy of fourteen is sure of one thing, that he is no longer a child, and he insists on leaving all childish things behind. Often the at- tempt of a school to hold a boy is no more than an attempt to keep him a child. Our failures with youth are due to our ig- norance. We are more anxious to describe what they ought to be than to know what they are. We can never minister to material which we do not understand. We cannot educate unknown quantities. The school must know this youth, must understand and appreciate the changes tak- ing place in him. The study of adolescence is not a fad invented by a few people in order to find opportunity for exercising themselves on strange terminology. It is a serious attempt to understand the nature of the growing youth, the processes taking place in his life, to know the laws of that life and to work out plans in con- formity with those laws. Our efficiency depends on our willingness to get our feet on the facts before we attempt to go forward. What do we really know about boys and girls? How the un- known youth must scoff, in his secret self, at our 120 EFFICIENCY IN THE CRITICAL YEAES foolish pride of familiarity with his life! How his rudimentary sense of humour must be stimu- lated by our complacent assumption of an open door into his life because we can glibly repeat baseball dialect or hail him as one of the * 'fel- lows ! ' ' Let no one deceive himself into thinking there is any such facile entrance into this strange life of youth. Did ever man find his way into your confidence by that route when you were a lad? An understanding of the life of youth in this critical period means knowledge based on careful study, study of many instances which have been scientifically collected, instances the facts of which have been ordered and classified. It means study over a wider range of cases than can pos- sibly come under personal observation. It means the same sort of patient investigation, based on the seriousness of the issues, that is given to the study of diseases and physiological phenomena. Of course it must all be made alive by personal observation ; there must be the knowledge of boys as well as the study of ''the boy.'' Nothing could be more sadly impotent than an attempt to lead the life of youth based only on theoretical in- vestigation and laboratory classification of data. Of course we must have love, for we deal with lives ; but it must be the love of youth that is deep enough, lasting enough, strong enough to pay the price of patient study in order to know and help them. There cannot be in the school a great many 121 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL who will be able to take the time for exhaustive study of the facts of the life of youth ; there ought not to be in the school any without time and willingness to gain enough knowledge for a sym- pathetic appreciation of the vastness of the prob- lem. Let every school, by means of the books introductory to this subject, aid all its workers thus far. But only a few can be specialists. A few must have every possible aid and encourage- ment to continue their studies and to become the experts of the school in the needs of youth. Every school should encourage at least one person to a careful, painstaking study of the religious char- acteristics of adolescence. As we have suggested under ^^ making experts at Home," let the one with an interest in this subject be aided in continuing his studies until he is able to counsel the workers with authority. THE DEMANDS OF YOUTH The school that seeks to minister to youth will determine its ministry by the needs of youth. What are those needs I First, a special environment. These young people need their own social environment. They gravitate together. They separate themselves from their childhood groups. Perhaps they speak contemptuously of ' ^ the kids ; ' ' they will get over that, if you can lead them on to youth's service for others. They must, in the school, be grouped with their own kind. The youth period must have its 122 EFFICIENCY IN THE CRITICAL YEAES own department in the school. Within that de- partment there will be opportunity for the natural working out of the social grouping and activities of the grades and stages of this period. This department will have teachers who specialize in its work for youth. It will find its work most effective when greater emphasis is given to social groupings than even to logically arranged ma- terial of instruction. Youth must have its appropriate physical en- vironment. The separate department for youth involves separate class rooms and assembly room. It is better to have these young people go directly to their classes and, if necessary, miss any gen- eral assembly, than to try to group them every Sunday with ^Hhe little ones.'' They are so keenly conscious that they are not little ones that you cannot group the two great divisions together for any purposes. The separate physical provi- sion for the youth period gives opportunity for appropriate furniture, equipment, and ornaments, as pictures, trophies, souvenirs, diagrams, maps. When they come to this clubbing age, the period of gregariousness, they are keenly desirous of opportunity of getting together. They flock to a ** club-room, " to the rendezvous of their *^ so- ciety.'' Wliy should not the Sunday school class room, belonging to them, designed for them, sacred to their group, fill this need? Make your rooms for youth the social centers of their lives. Let these social integrations be in the place and name of religion. 123 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL YOUTH DEPARTMENTS Second, yonth needs special instruction. We recognize this in the graded lessons. Of the im- perative need for graded instruction we are to-day all convinced. Are we sufficiently considering three special needs under this graded instruction : the needs for this instruction as directly applied to life, i. e., as meeting their own moral and ethical needs; the need for separate instruction of boys and girls; and the need for freedom in suggestion, presentation, and discussion of imme- diate life problems? Life is the all-important, big, pressing reality to youth. The boy has just found out that he is alive, that he is a living being; he is just awaken- ing to the fact that he is a part of the whole of life. For him everything has reality as it can be applied to living. Do we test out teaching in the school by its efficiency in meeting his needs in the business of living? Do we appoint teachers as those who are able to help this boy to live, who can really make practical the religious material they present? Is the school thinking of him as meeting every-day temptations? Does it plan to help him live the every-day religious life? SEPARATING BOYS AND GIRLS Boys and girls need separate instruction. There is, during these early years, a sense of antipathy. But the reason for separate instruc- 124 EFFICIENCY IN THE CRITICAL YEAES tion lies much deeper than that; their needs are different. The boy needs most of all a strong man, a man of powers of leadership, of clean, impressive, stimulating masculine personality. Equally the girl needs a woman who will be the interpretation of and inspiration toward the ideal life of womanhood. Both boy and girl need their own kind; they need the influence and stimulus of these simply as persons. They each also need the friendship of one of their own sex ; they need one to whom they can go in freedom, candour and confidence. They need one who can talk with them privately and, occasionally, teach them ex- plicitly, and without other than wise pedagogical reservations, lead them to know and revere the laws of their own lives. This can only be done with a man for the boys and a woman for the girls. These young people need opportunity to freely express their practical problems; they need the chance to let loose some of the surgings within; they need a chance to tell a leader their fears, difficulties, and needs. Sunday school instruction for them must always be permitted the freedom of discussion, the opportunity for practical deal- ing with life problems. They will find helpful in the direction of such discussion the courses on ** Christian Life and Conduct" and the round- table discussions of ''Life Problems'' now avail- able. Most of all, youth needs the opportunity for directed, purposeful action. It is the period of 125 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL life-development and co-ordination through mus- cular activity. The school that teaches the youth as a passive being cannot teach him at all. He cannot be simply passive. He needs a physician if passivity contents him. If he lives and is grow- ing as he should now, he must act. The big prob- lem of the school is to work out a satisfactory graded scheme of directed activities for this life. They must be much more than mere simple stunts to keep him out of mischief ; they must be designed for his education. Some possibilities in this direc- tion are suggested in Chapter XVII. The church must discover the forms of activity, that is the modes of life-expression and self-ex- pression, which will be normal for youth in the church and for the development of his life as a religious person. These will be activities for youth, not on youth nor before youth, but by youth. Keeping in mind the axiom that the character of such activities will depend on the characteristics of youth, we will anticipate in him and provide opportunity for just the kind of acts and services in the name and spirit of religion that we find to be common to the youth in the whole of his life. YOUTH CHARACTEKISTICS There are throe outstanding characteristics of youth during this period. They are stated with some alliteration that may help to ^ them in our minds. He is Going after the Good; he is Getting into Ms Group; he is Getting into the 126 EFFICIENCY IN THE CRITICAL YEARS Game. In other words, he is idealistic, altruistic to a certain degree, and is becoming creative. He seeks to know and realize the best; life for him means sharing life, living with others, and he longs to set his hand to a share in the world's work. Religious education deals with this idealistic, altruistic, creative youth, not simply as one who is to receive a correct category of ideals, crys- tallized into verbal forms, nor as one who is to memorize, like an old-time Chinese student, the rules of social relations, nor as one who is set to study from a text-book the methods of life's work. For purposes of religious education he must always be regarded as primarily a behaving person, feeling, discerning, willing, doing. Wliat he is to be will depend on what he is led to do, what he does with the whole of his self, emo- tionally, intelligently, volitionally, actively. This boy is going after the Good. Plato's dis- cussions he does not know ; probably even Ruskin would bore him. He seeks the good, the answer to the hope and longing in him, with his muscles, Avith feet and hands and eyes. To him the good is realizable. For it he will work passionately. How can the church meet this need in the boy 's nature? It must, first of all, show him the good realized in men, give him good men to know, men who positively impress him with strength and furnish him with concrete ideals. Then the church must direct this boy to serve the good. Hold before him the living, actual picture of ideal phys- 127 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL ical equipment and conditions for the cliurch. Show him how to help realize these ideals. Get boys to be responsible for the lawn, the street, for parts of the decorations and equipment. ^Hien a boy puts his muscles into realizing an ideal, especially one connected with formal religion, he takes a step toward the good in the name of religion. Boys have done good service on church committees on Building and Grounds. Boys have made excellent gardeners for church lawns. They have zealously guarded the vicinity from stray papers. They can be led to serve the good in the wider community. A boy's club ought to be something more than the place in which things are done for boys; it should be the mechanism and the tools through which boys do things for themselves and for others. One must not be blindly ^optimistic about self- government for boys; it has too many serious drawbacks ; but a boys' club building for which the boys have no responsibility may do them more harm than good. The most untidy room in a house was the boys' room so long as parents and maids laboured to keep it straight; it became al- most a model after the sole responsibility for it had been thrown altogether on the boys. MUSCLES AND MOEALS The tattered hymn-books in the Sunday school can be a means of grace to the boys who make 128 EFFICIENCY IN THE CRITICAL YEARS new buildings for them. Parenthetically, most of the tattered hymn-books, because their contents are so ragged, would be a greater means of grace in the furnace. Under the right leader, boys will gladly do almost anything in the way of real work for things that are better. They find it fun to lay out tennis courts and ball-diamonds, to build swings and bars for the church playing grounds and athletic field. They believe in the good of the community. They will serve toward a better vil- lage or a better city. They will help in the cam- paign for publicity on the series of sermons which the pastor is about to preach on Civic Betterment, provided it be clear to them that in so doing they are not peddling bills for the glory either of the church or the preacher, but that they are making a real contribution toward civic betterment. Many of our plans to enlist boys fail because we try to get them to work for the church in- stead of leading them to serve their ideals tJirough work for the church or for the community. What- ever the church does, as a realization of the good, let the boy have a part in it, whether it be in committees, offices, actual labour, and service. In some things let the boy have the whole responsi- bility, being answerable to one who has had ex- perience in that which the boy now undertakes. In the Sunday school boys make excellent li- brarians; they are capable secretaries and treas- urers. Much of the detail labour now grudgingly monopolized by adults could be shared among a 9 129 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL larger nnmber of yonng people. Appoint new officers, distributing to them old duties in smaller portions ; let a boy have sole charge of all black- boards and chalk in a department ; let another boy serve as librarian of a department, having noth- ing to do with the general library, save to secure, distribute, and care for text-books and literary supplies of that department. A boy will discharge well and faithfully responsibility for the seating arrangement of a department. Another will guard the doors, another the cloak room. In a phrase, *^Men, sit down and give the boys a chance to become men by serving ideal ends." The important thing is that the youth shall see that the opportunity to realize the good is just exactly what the church and Sunday school mean to him, that in these organizations he has greater freedom and the finest chance to do things that are worth while, to bring into fact and being the good for which he longs. "When a boy, then, puts his muscles into a better lawn for the church he is putting himself into the realization of a good, into making this one thing, this one condition the best that it can be. That work becomes worship, self-expression toward the best, the ideal. But to him more important than the realiza- tion of some ideal in things and conditions is the determination of the ultimate good for him- self and his life. The sifting out of values, that 130 EFFICIENCY IN THE CRITICAL YEARS determination and choice of the greatest good, of the things and ways that are most of all worth while is taking place in this boy in every act of service. The character of the choice is determined by the character and aim to the service. To ac- custom a youth, as the church must, to give his thought and energies to the service of ideal ends, in work that brings no immediate, concrete profit, in labour that cannot be measured by the rule of thumb, is to give him the best of all lessons and training in the choice of eternal values; it is to make the final good for him the life of love and service for splendid and spiritual ends. If the church rightly opens to him her many doors of work, she becomes to him the instrument through which the good is found and served. PEACTICAL PLANS Practically, how shall the Sunday school secure the religious education of youth through directed service activities ? In the smaller schools the pastor will be able to plan most of these opportunities. For the sake of the teachers he will seek their co-operation. He may prepare a list of the different things that boys might do; he may, with the aid of others, prepare a like list for girls' activities. Then let him call the teachers and officers together, submit the lists to them, and work out a plan for secur- ing the working co-operation of youth. The plan will call for leaders, adults capable of training and 131 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL directing youth in this kind of service. A simple plan for a small church would be to provide three pairs of leaders, a man and a woman in each of these divisions: (1) "Work in the Church; (2) Work in the Sunday School; (3) Work in the Community. The leaders should be recognized as officers of the Sunday school. Their plans should be pre- pared and carried out in co-operation with any workers in the Boys' Scout Brigade and similar organizations. Any planning for the youth in the critical period ought to be so careful and compre- hensive as to embrace all the opportunities and organizations in the school and the church. It ought to avoid duplications either of time demands on youth, of methods, of opportunities, or of ma- terial of study. It ought to provide within the life of the church for all his interests. It ought to afford opportunity for all who will lead boys and girls.^ Let the school workers and pastors get to- gether and, under the three heads of work sug- gested above, make out a schedule showing the present opportunities already existing for activity. Such a schedule should be cross-sectioned accord- ing to the principal needs of youth. It would often result in a form something like this : For lists of organizations and activities see the author's "Ei^ient Layman* 132 EFFICIENCY IN THE CEITICAL YEARS TYPICAL YOUTH ACTIVITIES Fields : Work in Work in Work in the Church Sun'y School Com'ity Interests Church Services (5) 1. Social Young Peo- Classes (Usually Groupings ple's Societies (6, 7, 8, 9, ample but King's 10, 11) unrelated Daughters to Church Junior or school.) Brother- hoods (30, 31) 2. Play or (1, 2, 3, 4) Basket-ball (Unrelated Recreation Base-ball (12,13,14,15) to Church). 3. Work or Care of Care of class Sick "Service" property rooms Needy (seldom de- adornment families veloped) Library work Hospitals Chorus Choir Offices Settle- (5) Orchestra ments Ushers (25-30) "Messen- gers" (16-24) 133 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL The numerals refer to possibilities which are seldom developed. The list of suggestions given below includes some suitable only to those over sixteen years of age, but for purposes of a sur- vey of possibilities, the list is kept complete. It should be remembered that the list seeks to in- clude only activities, and does not attempt to cover the ground of studies. 1. The church, or the community playground. 2. The church, or the community athletic field. 3. Calisthenics and gymnastic dancing. 4. Dramatics. 5. Flowers for church services. 6, 7. Clubs for social purposes, nearly always already organized amongst the youth. 7. Debating clubs. 8. Young citizens organizations to study civics and political questions. 9. Clubs about such special interests as stamp- collecting, coins, cards. 10. Singing club. 11. Saving clubs. 11. Tennis. 12. Indoor-ball, volley-ball. 13. Walking clubs. 14. Excursions under direction of adult leader. 15. Swimming club. 16. Preparation of "manual work" material for lower grades. 17. Assisting officers in clerical work. 18. Care of blackboards, exhibit, and museum fur- niture. 19. Collecting museum material. 134 EFFICIENCY IN THE CEITICAL YEAES 20. Preparing exhibits of the school's work. 21. Shop work — mechanics, photography, printing, electricity. 22. Handling biograph, moving pictures, stereopti- con. 23. Dorcas club. 24. Care of song books, repairing, etc. 25. Gardens — flower and vegetable — on vacant lots. 26. Clean city service, by picking up stray papers, etc. 27. Co-operative service with "Parent-Teachers" association in the public school. 28. Village improvement work. 29. Social center work. SO. Evening school teaching of immigrant children. 32. Evening classes for employed boys and girls. 33. Drinking fountains for dogs and horses. 34. Ambulance corps (especially in mining towns). The School and Boy Life One of the principles of efficient management is : Determine your processes by (a) the material to be handled and (b) the purpose to be achieved. A mill does not trim steel with a wood-planer simply because it happens to have such a machine already installed; to attempt to do so ruins the machine in addition to wasting the material. The steel-working room is separate from and differ- ently equipped from the wood-working room. Does anyone object to this parable on the ground that the work of the Sunday school is spiritual and not subject to the laws of material things? Such laws, however, are in this case 135 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL only lifted to a higher plane; the law does not cease to apply; it demands a finer application. If we cannot afford to risk metal in the wrong machine, can we afford to risk the lives of youth in the Sunday school? We attempt to carry on the same processes, to put this delicate material of life through the same organization machine regaidless of any changes that may have taken place in it. We expect boys and girls to adapt themselves to our organization instead of seeking a form of organization determined by their na- tures. The school must recognize that since a boy— that is a male person over twelve— is different en- tirely from a child, a child's institution will not even hold him, still less mould and make him. The attempt to force him to remain in an institution for children will do one of three things : mar him most seriously, drive him out entirely, or smash the machine. That is precisely the situation to- day, with the odds on driving him out. What, then, shall we do for the boys when they get to be boys, when they come into their new life and begin to be entirely other creatures than the children? A boys' department. There must be in every efficient Sunday school a special department, separately organized, with methods and forms of organization specially suited to boys and boy-life. We have kindergartens and 136 EFFICIENCY IN THE CRITICAL YEARS primary departments because the life of the little child demands this separate, specialized treatment. The special needs of boy-life are not less distinct than those of early childhood. The school needs a Boys' Department (a) because the hoy's life is different. It is different from that of the child. He is keenly conscious of growing up. He leaves old things behind and thinks only of reaching forth to the man things before. He often rather foolishly seeks to antici- pate manhood's experiences, and if encouraged to do so robs them of their bloom and himself of their later full appreciation. But no power on earth can make him cease to leave the things, the ways and customs and associations, of child- hood. He simply will not associate himself with the little folks. He feels foolish if he sings their songs, joins in their exercises, or is grouped with them. He is different from the girl. This is the special reason for a Boys' Department as distinct from the Intermediate Department, in which boys and girls are grouped together. At twelve he is just on the dawn of sex life ; its consciousness will come before very long. The period of sex aver- sion begins now. A normal boy does not, at thirteen to sixteen, care for the society of girls; they are strangers, mentally foreign creatures. Just as the girl thinks boys *'are perfectly hor- rid,'' so the boy thinks girls are creatures to be avoided. The sex aversion is so strong as to 137 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL demand not only separate classes, but separate departments under distinct direction. Then, too, the sex needs are different. We need not only separate teachers, but separate courses for at least part of this period if we are to meet the real need of both boys and girls. The difference is so great that boj^s and girls must go in sep- arate crowds or ' ' gangs. ' ' Happy are they if the school furnishes them the chance to have their own crowd-life with its life and organization. The boy 's religion is different. This has already been suggested. It means that since there is a boy's religion for a boy, the boy must have a chance to express his religion in a normal way. His songs must be different. His prayers will be for the things of his own life and the lives of his fellows, for his boy aspirations. His point of view in life \dll be his own; he cannot have any other, and he can only go on to the wider viewpoint through the steps of his own mile of the way. (b) The boy needs the chance to organize Ms group. One act of self-organization has value such as no elaborate imposed plans can possibly have. This is his period of crowd organization. Think of all the meaning of boys ' clubs and think whether the Boys' Department might not be in your school the club for all your boys. Why should we have a multitude of boys' clubs, gymnasium clubs, and Junior Brotherhoods in a church when all the boys belong to the school, the school is their normal organization-relation to the church and they 138 EFFICIENCY IN THE CRITICAL YEARS might find in this department their one big club? Within this department the boys will have ample opportunity to work out their organization plans in the form of special activities, as teams for recreation, gjmanasium, sport, hobbies, and social diversions. But make this department the means of uniting all the boys and co-ordinating all their activities. (c) The boy must express his religious life in his own way. This will be in the language of his kind, in the environment of his kind, and in the activities of his kind. He must be free from the restraint of those who do not understand his ways. He is a bashful creature; this is the most bashful period of his life. It is not a shamefaced bashfulness, but it is the strangeness and timidity of a newly discovered life. To let his faith and hope and love come forth and find itself, there must be the freedom of his own environment. A Boys' Department will allow him freedom of expression in word and deed. It will surround him with the warmth of sjTupathy. Moreover, it will permit of a type of organization and of schedules of work in which, unliampered by the restrictions of an organization designed for others, these boys may be able freely, under wise direction, to do those things which contribute most directly to their religious development. In a word, it means the determination of the processes — that is, this organization and its works — by the material being handled. 139 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL The special activities for the life of youth, suggested elsewhere, can be carried out in this department. It can be adapted to make them possible. More, a special department, meeting separately, permits the boys to talk over such activities, to discuss them, to make them the free voluntary expressions of their own aspirations. This is the important thing: that such activities shall be not a schedule imposed on youth by wise adults, but a plan of life and work freely adopted because it is right and desirable, beautiful, good and worthy, in their own eyes. It is the boys' choice of values. WHAT, THEN, IS A BOYS' DEPAKTMEN'T? A special division of the school, separately organized, just as the primary or the adult de- partment is or ought to be. It will be under the control of the general officers of the school. It will have its own principal, director or superin- tendent, with a few assistants, who really know boys, preferably younger men. It will have its corps of teachers. It will have its special cur- riculum, the same as that in the girls' department, except that special courses will be given on sex subjects. It will have its own officers, elected from the classes, forming a cabinet or directing body composed of boys. It will have the direc- tion of all the boy life and activities of the church. It will control athletics for boys. It will deter- mine the social life and its regulations so far as EFFICIENCY IN THE CRITICAL YEARS the welfare of the school is concerned. It will probably have meetings at stated periods in ad- dition to those on Sundays, at which all questions of the work of the boys will be discussed. It will have its own opening exercises, and will either teach until time to adjourn or go in a body to the closing exercises with the girls' department. Wherever possible it will have, of course, sep- arate rooms, with their special equipment. In a word, the boys' department means the boys organized as a whole and as boys into the life of the church. THE GIRLS Almost every word that has been said for a boys' department applies with equal force to a girls' department. We will wake up before long to realize how we have been neglecting our girls. They belong together; they need their own re- ligious life; they need the special direction and care of those who will study their needs and de- velop plans suitable to them. As a working expedient, the way to have a girls' department is to organize a boys' depart- ment and then give the girls remaining every ad- vantage which we give to the boys, making special provision in organization, ofificers, courses, activi- ties and equipment for them. 141 CHAPTER XV CHUKCH AND SUNDAY SCHOOL — ^A GLANCE INTO THE FUTURE A NEW and most insistent demand is being voiced not alone by Sunday school workers, but by many others who realize the child ^s need of religious training. It is truly said that the present pro- vision of time in the Sunday school is wholly in- sufficient for the formal religious instruction of the young. Some suggest that while the child weekly spends twenty-eight hours in the public school, eighty hours in recreation and leisure, he usually has only forty minutes for religious in- struction. It has been proposed that two or three hours should be taken from the public school and given to the church or the Sunday school. Many European schools close at noon on Wednesdays, and some churches use this opportunity for formal religious instruction. This proposal has been se- riously considered, and, although many valid ob- jections have been offered, the interest it awakens indicates how widespread is the sense of this need. Parallel to this proposal comes the recognition of another need; that since, in some way or an- 142 CHURCH AND SUNDAY SCHOOL other, it lias come to pass that our children and younger young people fail to find and maintain vital, normal, continuous connections or relations to the church, we must endeavour to give to every child a perfectly natural sense of unity with the church. Once all the family came to- gether to the family pew. Now the family pew and the family worship are no more. Whatever our theories may be, we face the fact that children do not go to church except under compulsion. Some pastors say, ** Compel the child to at- tend the church service with his parents; he will thus acquire the habit of church attendance.'' But did ever we acquire under compulsion a habit of doing that which was distasteful and seemed to be unnatural? If habit is the organization of experience, the experience in this instance would be that of pain, resulting in inhibition through in- creased determination to abstain from an exer- cise which is tedious and largely meaningless. It sounds harsh to call a church service *^ te- dious and tasteless,'' but the fact remains that you cannot possibly have a service really adapted to the life needs of adults and to those of chil- dren, too. A man blinds himself to every principle of pedagogy who insists otherwise ; he is perhaps deluded by the hope of statistical increment to his services. Make a few honest inquiries as to the reaction of the boy of eleven or twelve to the sermon in the church, and your answer may not be satisfactory; but it ought to be convincing. 143 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL THE CHILDEEN's HOUB Certain developments whicli have fairly forced themselves on the Sunday school quite recently indicate a possible answer to the questions of method involved in both the problems just men- tioned. Many schools have for years maintained Sun- day kindergartens, conducted through both the periods of the Sunday school and the church. At first occasionally, and later regularly, older sis- ters and brothers were permitted to enter the kindergarten after the adjournment of the regu- lar school and during the hour of church service. Some of these would assist in the work of the kindergarten, but, as the number increased, it would be necessary to group these older ones by themselves. Classes naturally followed, but they often would be unlike the classes in the Sunday school ; they would grow out of the practise of the kindergarten just as the child had grown up in its life. They would be conversation groups, work and play (here synonymous) groups. Now, as older ones come in, and the younger ones grow up — to eight and ten and over twelve — they are found to be more and more attached to this ex- tension of the Sunday school. Groups of older pupils voluntarily gather to sing their favourite hymns, join in well-chosen prayers and readings, and listen to very brief addresses, often illus- trated, on the kinds of things that children are interested in. There are as many of these things 144 CHUECH AND SUNDAY SCHOOL in the religious life as in the things we think of as outside ; but be sure to keep in mind the differ- ence between the things children are interested in and those we think they ought to be interested in. The exercises described take place at the same time as the church service for adults. They are designed for children just as the church service is designed for adults. Now, cannot we conceive of a church in which — as in the early Christian churches, at least — the children are ministered to by means especially suited to them at the same time that the adults are served with food meet for them? Would it not be wiser to serv^e the real needs of the chil- dren than to attempt to make them serve the needs of the church? If we accept the principle of the graded school and the graded lesson (simply the adaptation of methods and materials to the normal life and needs of the child), must we not also apply this principle to all that the church seeks to do with the child! We must fairly face the question, in this mat- ter of the child at church services. Is the church for the child or the child for the church? Are we anxious most for the augmentation of a con- gregation or for the development of ideal charac- ter in the young? We need to examine the really dynamic motives that lead us to urge child attend- ance at church service. Cannot we agree that ^° 145 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL the child must be during these hours of oppor- tunity in that place and under those influences by which the largest lasting good may become his 1 The decisive question is, Will religious char- acter in the young be most efficiently developed in a school designed for him or in a service planned to please adults? Imagine an arrangement such as this : Sunday school opens at, say, 9.30 A. M. with all the grades and divisions now in use. The classes begin class work for all those above the kindergarten ages with very brief opening exercises. These exer- cises will be held in the separate classes in the upper grades. Class work continues until shortly before the hour for church — thus affording usually from fifty to eighty minutes for such work. That would mean the possibility of each pupil attending two classes, taking two studies in that time. Then all in the grades over four- teen or fifteen would go into the church service, and this service would become the inspirational part of their school, taking the place of the usual school ** exercises. '^ Those below these grades would have their ** services, ' ' ^'exercises" and class work appropriate to them in the school, in the class and division rooms, remaining there until the time for church dismissal. It might be found helpful to bring all, from the least to the largest, into the church occasion- ally for the first or the last ten minutes of the service, there to sing or listen to the pastor's 146 CHURCH AND SUNDAY SCHOOL brief message, and so receive an impression of the miity of the church. UNITING SCHOOL AND CHURCH It would also be helpful if appropriate exer- cises were designed and especial emphasis laid on the step from the Sunday school to the church service for the boy and girl of fourteen, so that they would look forward to graduating into the higher division of their church life at that time. This would work back also in creating the sense of really belonging to the church while in the school, of being members of the school depart- ment of the church. It might also be made to signify that, on beginning church attendance, one also began church service, taking up the duties for which the school life had prepared and should prepare still further. Such a plan of work would be no more than a definite step toward the acceptance of the edu- cational function of the Christian ministry. The pastor of the church would become the chief or head of a staif of educators. He would be not an entertainer, from whom an audience would ex- pect an hour of pleasure twice on every Sunday, nor any longer merely a financial agent to a re- ligious organization ; he would be the chief teacher in a large corps of teachers. While the larger body of teachers are working with the groups of younger people, he would be teaching the larger group of those who are older. It is conceivable 147 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL that one person should teach, definitely, with a large measure of adaptation to the needs of pu- pils, a class composed of many persons whose ages lie all the way above sixteen or eighteen. But such teaching or any kind of teaching is quite inconceivable if to such a group you add twenty- five to thirty per cent of pupils who are, say, eight or ten or twelve years of age. We simply must adjust our methods in teach- ing to those who are to be taught. As soon as any church accepts an educational function it must follow this definite educational principle, not only in the Sunday school, but also in every department of church activity. We have no right to go on attempting to force children into a serv- ice not at all adapted to them and deny them that which they crave. We must not allow ourselves to think that there is anything peculiarly sacred about the church service as it has been conducted in our youth. The only thing that is sacred is the child and the purpose of developing the Christ char- acter in that child, and therefore we must attempt obedience to the laws of the life of the child, and not deal with him according to the likings of adults. 148 CHAPTER XVI THE EXTENSION WOKK OP THE SUNDAY SCHOOL We have been urging that the Sunday school is the specific agency of the church for religious education. With the missionary obligation of the church in mind, we cannot think of that school as being satisfied with its service until it is reach- ing every person in its field. At present the school is serving only a fraction of those whom the church ought to reach. Perhaps a much more serious consideration than this, however, is the fact that, too often, the school affects only a very small fraction of the time and the life-interests of those whom it does reach. There are two aims worth adopting by every school: to extend its life to all and to make itself felt through all the life of each one. We turn to the first considera- tion. How can the Sunday school extend itself to all its people? This is not a prescription for getting a big school by sweeping all the community into it. Commonly we give altogether too much attention to this end, the wrong end, of our problem. You will get all the people in your school that your school is entitled to ; all that it is worthy of train- ing. The great thing is not so much to compel 149 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL people to come in by tricks in advertising and by attractive stunts in special programs; the great thing is first to set your table, prepare your ban- quet, and then you can go out and invite them in. A great many schools are using up a lot of energy urging every one to come to nothing. But the point just here has to do with the outreach of the school rather than with its intake. How can the school mean more to all? SERVING ALL YOUR PEOPLE The extension department or work of the Sunday school is concerned with two matters: (1) reaching those who cannot get to its regular gatherings, and (2) ministering to that part of the lives of all neglected by its regular sessions. I. Beaching More People. There are persons, as mothers and servants, kept at home by necessary duties ; employees who must labour on Sundays, as street-car men, rail- road men, and many others; travellers, church members away from home, sodiers and sailors, the sick, the shut-ins, and all those whom irreme- diable circumstances shut out of the school. In order to embrace them all we need to give this work a broader name than that of * ' Home Depart- ment" or, at any rate, to be sure that it has a broader significance. Surely we do not need to urge that this is no fad, that the school has a real and deep responsibility for those who cannot come to its sessions. 150 THE EXTENSION WORK The school should extend itself through its organization. First, it should set up similar or- ganizations in fields or communities wherever there are sufficiently large numbers of persons not now attending school. Nothing helps a school and its workers more than active missionary service of this kind, searching out destitute fields, and there setting up other schools. If these new schools meet at another hour than that for the parent school, you have in them splendid training opportunities for older pupils and younger teach- ers. You will find that such branch schools will take care of many who by distance were kept from your own school. You will find, too, that such schools, so far from detracting from your own, will augment its strength. Then the school may reach smaller groups, as in remote settlements where only a single class may meet in some home. Other groups will be found in institutions, *' Homes," prisons, hospi- tals. It is possible to have rather informal classes in factories, where groups of men compelled to work on Sunday welcome the opportunity for the noon-hour class. Then there are the ''dining- hall" classes, for boarding houses. We sadly need group-agencies of our home schools at the summer resorts and at camps. What a fine thing it would be to know that you had a branch of your school up in some mountain mining camp or in some logging camp. It could be arranged without difficulty if you know any person in such place. 151 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL Then your summer resort I Do you work for a school there for your children and the perma- nent residents in the summer? Why not do this and more; why not make the school permanent all the year round, sending them supplies while you are absent? A live school, seeking to do such things, to have nerve centers wherever rei- ligious education is needed, will set up a depart- ment in the school to which will be assigned the special duty of conducting this work. This de- partment will be called **The Missionary Depart- ment'' and will enroll as workers persons capable of studying conditions, selecting the right places for branches or ** group classes" and keeping these in vital touch with the school. Few things will educate children in the spirit of the Kingdom better than the constant conception of their school as a centre from which light and life radiate in every direction. CORRESPONDENCE STUDY So much has been written on the Home Depart- ment and its methods that we need consider only some special phases of the school's duty of reach- ing and helping individuals shut out from its sessions. Organize the study work with such in- dividuals on the plan of a correspondence study department ; encourage students to enroll in the extension work of the school, as correspondence students. Set up courses of correspondence study, simple and within the reach of all, in broad 152 THE EXTENSION WOEK grade divisions. It would be a splendid thing if such courses could be thoroughly unified with the courses usually outlined for the Young People ^s societies by the denomination. The advance courses might well be in recognized text-books on great religious subjects or could be, in many instances, the courses offered by recognized cor- respondence schools connected with the denomi- nation's colleges and universities. Besides the study activities we ought to plan to extend the social life of the school to those who are shut out, by remembering the sick with flowers, by frequent calling on individuals, by oc- casional home social gatherings and by seeing that all these correspondence members are kept fully informed, through the mails or otherwise, of just what the school is doing, of all its gather- ings and accomplishments. II. Reaching More of Each Person. There are certain phases of the extension work of the school which apply not only to the shut- outs and the shut-ins, but also to every one in the school, seeking to extend the school into the life of the pupils. We need to extend the school over a greater portion of the pupil's time. We all recognize how insufficient, even for the purpose of gaining a fair knowledge of the Bible and of religious truth, is the one hour per week at pres- ent provided; still more, how insufficient is this little time for the whole purpose of the school, the training of a life to its spiritual fulness. 153 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL WEEK-DAY INSTRUCTION Many experiments have been tried in recent years, and some of them offer valuable sugges- tions. One pastor tried the plan of inviting his pupils to the church for class-work and exercises at 3 o 'clock on Friday. The church was near the public school buildings, and this plan caught many scholars after the early week-end dismissal; it gave an extra hour, doubling the time for specific religious instruction for nearly half this school. The plan of the afternoon school for religious in- struction accompanied by the dismissal of the public school for that afternoon, has been advo- cated.^ The whole question of week-day religious instruction has been discussed in the publica- tions of The Eeligious Education Association. A practical experiment has been conducted in sev- eral schools meeting daily for religious education, by Eev. H. R. Vaughn, Madison, Wisconsin.^ If we make up our minds that something must be done, we can find a way to do something. What- ever we do ought to be done by the Sunday school ; it would have the efPect both of strengthening that school and of making it more fully the spe- cific agency of the church for the religious educa- tion of the people. Try the plan of evening schools in the Bible, with classes in the great *" Religious Education and Public Schools," George U. Wenner (Bonnell, Silver & Co.). 2 See also "Week Day Religious Instruction," a pamphlet by Eufus W. Miller, Philadelphia. 154 THE EXTENSION WOEK problems of religion and ethics. Do not be dis- couraged if you get only a few. We might, in many places, do much more if we had two schools on Sunday, one in the afternoon and the other in the morning, after the English plan, but not expecting always all the same pupils at both. THE PRINTED MESSENGER For the extension of its influence the Sunday school should use the great vehicle of literature. Every Sunday school paper that is carried to the home is the influence of the school going into that home. Notice how those papers are read, and then ask, Might not much more good be done if the papers were better and if we used more care in their selection and distribution? The library ought to be regarded not as the means of amusing a few book-loving boys and girls — from that point of view most of the Sunday school libraries are not colossal successes — but from that of using good, invigorating books as means of carr^dng the life of the school into the home and through the week. Keep the Sunday school close to the literary life of your people. If you have given up your school library so that all might use the public lihYRTj, be sure that that public library has food for the spiritual life. Many schools are now setting up stations of the public library at their school rooms and there caring for the read- ing of their pupils. Looking at public library shelves and following up the books selected, I 155 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL am sure we have to do one of two things, either set up again the Sunday school library, with good, clean, bracing books of high literary worth and spiritual dynamic, or compel the public library to provide such books ; usually this latter is easier than we think until we try to do it. In any case every school needs a workers' library, carefully chosen books to aid its teachers and officers, and so to extend their usefulness and increase their efficiency. WIDENING KESPONSIBILITY There are many ways in which the school may serve the life of youth. A keen sense of personal responsibility will force us to revise that state- ment and to say the school must serve the life of youth. We cannot allow any other educational institution to surpass the Sunday school in re- sponsiveness to spiritual and moral responsibili- ties. Yet the public schools are setting us a re- markable example to-day; they now hold them- selves responsible for much beyond the teaching of lessons ; they care for the physical welfare, by medical inspections and by actual provision, in many instances, of the food for hungry pupils, not to mention in detail all the care for physical provision in buildings and equipment ; they super- vise the play-life not on the grounds alone, but in parks and outside playgrounds; they even en- quire into the conditions of home living; they enquire into the stores around the school, into 156 THE EXTENSION WOEK the moving picture shows; they are become the moral guardians of the life of youth. The least any Sunday school can do is to know what the public schools are doing and where work such as the above is being carried on, to seek to cooperate with them. In any case some of these things lie properly within the work of the Sunday school and cannot be neglected if the school would do its duty. We work in vain to guide the life of youth if we, with all emphasis on our single contact with him on Sunday, neglect the more fre- quent, longer and more vivid contacts of daily life, particularly of his play and ideal life, of amusements and recreations. SOCIAL HELPFULNESS These things many schools might well and readily do: Publish a Sunday school bulletin every week, for every scholar, which would show not only the services and social life of the church and school, but also all the opportunities of the neighbourhood which would help the youth-life. This should include not only those forms of amuse- ment or recreation which we adults would enjoy, but those which the children are already enjoy- ing, and in general specifying the particular ones we can endorse. To be explicit, such a bulletin might well list : good, natural books in the public library, concerts, entertainments, exhibits as at art galleries, play and sport occasions of a healthy character, moving picture shows that are worth 157 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL while. The last illustrates the main point. The moving picture show is here; practically all chil- dren at some time attend them. Many of them are well conducted — save usually as to hygienic conditions — and the pictures are clean, and often somewhat elevating. Probably they are more val- uable to the average city child than we are able to realize, because they begin with his point of view ; they are real, meaningful and unconsciously pedagogical in their method with him. They naturally are much more potent as pictures and as pictures of action than any mere spoken words could possibly be. Now, it happens at times that these shows include pictures and narratives really highly beneficial. Why should not the school en- courage these and direct the pupils to them? It is simply a matter of our helping him to select the best or leaving him to drift, it may be, to the worst. At any rate a weekly bulletin of op- portunities for the higher life of youth, for help- ful play and recreation and instruction would make the Sunday school reach out in a guiding capacity through all the days between Sundays. It will make all the difference to our schools whether we think of them as little circles to be fed, ministered to, polished and perfected for their own sakes, or as centres from which life and life-giving power must radiate into all lives and into all places. The centrifugal school lives more and more, the centripetal dies daily. 158 CHAPTER XVII NEGLECTED ASPECTS OF MANUAL WORK Manual work in the Sunday school easily may degenerate into a meaningless fad. The teacher who persistently plods along in the old ruts is better off than the one who is unceasingly striking out into new paths but never knowing why these paths are taken and the old are forsaken. A while ago so much was being said about manual work that schools everywhere were taking it up and many class rooms began to look like the co- alescence of a brickyard with a milliner's shop; children came home from Sunday school with patches of clay and crepe paper sticking to them externally, much as the golden texts used to stick. Some teachers saw a great advantage in this manual activity ; it kept the little hands busy, and so beat Satan at his own business. If you could get a child to building a model of the temple, his mind would not wander off to baseball or to the blue-bottle buzzing in the window pane. Surely somewhere there must have been some little heart-searching as to the real religious ends of these occupations ; it must sometimes have oc- curred to teachers that it was hard to trace a spiritual connection between plaster casts of 159 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL Noah's ark and the growth of Christian character in the child. Such a shortsighted acceptance and application of manual methods was due to an old misconception of the purpose of the Sunday school; the method was measured by the success which followed in managing children, in repress- ing or engrossing their activities and so securing the ideal school, one in which you could '^hear a pin drop." Now, you cannot measure any school by whether you can hear things dropping there or not; you can measure it only by whether life is developing there. The character aim in reli- gious education must be the simple and final test of all our methods. CHARACTER VALUES There is a character aim in manual methods. Those wise pedagogical leaders who have been in- sisting on the values in these methods have had that character aim in mind; the teachers without pedagogical insight have missed it. The aim of the Sunday school is the active, efficient Christian character, the whole life responding fully to the religious stimuli. Manual methods are concerned with, and valuable to, this development of char- acter. Eight here is the simple reason : you can- not secure the response of any life to external stimuli unless you secure the cooperation of its voluntary activities. Throwing a boy through the door of a church inwards has no positive ef- fect on Ms character churchwards. If we would 160 NEGLECTED ASPECTS OF MANUAL WORK lead lives Christward we must secure their will- ing to go that way and their actual walking in that way. The true spirit of manual methods in the Sunday school is not in finding something to keep busy fingers out of mischief, but in afford- ing opportunities for lives to give active, natural expression to their response to lessons taught, impressions made and inspiration given, to react in their own volitional activities to the stimuli of the school. Buying a pot of paste, a bundle of tissue pa- per and a box of clay or wax, will not set up effi- cient manual methods. Even with these the en- deavour should be to see that whatever a child does is the natural expression, the working out of some impression, or, on the other hand, the learn- ing of a lesson through a definite, concrete experi- ence. But the underlying principle of manual methods, the learning through doing and the do- ing because tve are learning, must go all through the school nor rest in the primary or kindergarten alone. Men and boys need these expressional activities almost as much as infants and chil- dren do. NOEMAL EXPRESSIONAL ACTIVITIES The most difficult problem before the Sunday school to-day lies right here; how can we find suitable, expressional things for our people to do? In fact the problem goes all through the life of the church and the whole work of religious edu- 161 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL cation. We are coming into a fairly clear place as to the lesson material for religious education; we are still in the dark as to what is really of greater importance, the opportunities for service, for activities which are the means by which we learn and through which we express, and so make permanent that which is learned. When the pastor gets the boys to care for the church lawn, to plant flowers or shrubs thereon; when the girls are enlisted in securing flowers for the pulpit or in taking them to the sick, they are being led into manual work as truly as though they sat down in classes with shears and paste. The likelihood is that, inasmuch as the ways first mentioned are more natural ways of carrying out lessons on love, kindness and service, so also are they more pedagogically correct as manual methods. Boys and girls, men and women are fairly spoiling in the churches for lack of something to do. I know some pastor will say, '*I can't find them. ' ' It may be the reason is you haven 't asked them to do something; you have only asked them to say something or to give something or to sit on something, as a seat or a committee. Try finding things for all your people to do ; sick to call on, poor to minister to, wrongs to be ex- posed and righted, some service for the Kingdom that will permit them to put your sermons into practice instead of suffering spiritual surfeit from undigested heavenly securities. 162 NEGLECTED ASPECTS OF MANUAL WORK THE SCHOOL A LABORATORY Most of all ought we to be looking for things for the people in our Sunday schools to be do- ing; the school must become a laboratory; virtues must be learned through their practice. We do need graded lessons, but, verily, we need still more what might be called ''going'' lessons, so practical that pupils are impelled to practice them while the school is compelled to direct the practice and open up the opportunities for it. True re- ligious education will here be of such a character that he who reads will run and, running, will the better read. It is worth while to get firmly fixed the funda- mental law which accounts for all our manual methods and which ought to compel every pastor and worker for the religious life of both youth and mature life to be constantly asking, What is there for these people to do? That law is the simple principle that there is no education with- out activity. You can express it in many ways ; you may say. There is no learning without life; there is no impression without expression; there is no permanency or reality in a religious experi- ence that does not produce action, some effect in the life of the one experiencing it. Not the vir- tues you admire, but those for which you per- spire, are yours. It is so easy to delude our- selves here and think that the defining of a duty is the doing of it, that learning a law is the same thing as living it. This principle of the manual 163 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL method means that we must call into action the will and the muscles to weave any experience into the whole of our lives. SPIEITUAL SUFFOCATIOIT Just as we must know that many saints are suffering from undigested sermons because they have been drinking them in for decades and scarcely spent a minute doing any of them, so we need in the Sunday school especially to watch lest the spiritual life of the young be early suffo- cated with emotions unexpressed in action, feel- ings that have never wrought out through the muscles, ideals that have remained unexpressed. If you keep on stimulating the emotions without giving them a chance to work out in action, they soon become hardened, indifferent, calloused. The boy who is lamentably indifferent to reli- gious appeals is not the one who has been hard- ened by sinful contacts so often as the one who has been calloused by constant repetitions of re- ligious emotions for which no nerve and voli- tional reaction was provided. He has been often *^ stirred up,'* and then allowed to settle again, each time without doing anything about it that made the stirring up experience a normal part of his life. When you think how readily children convert eyery kind of suggestion into action in every other relation of life, you will begin to see how abnormal the religious relations must seem to them. Every- 164 NEGLECTED ASPECTS OF MANUAL WOEK where else they do what they are told; they act out their duties and play their parts. Here, in the institution that spells religion to them, they hear without doing; they are even made to feel like doing, but no chance for deeds follows. They learn the words, **If ye knew these things, happy are ye if ye do them,'' and **Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, but he that doeth the will" — but they have become so habituated to hearing without doing that these things have no special call to action in them. The result is that they are habituated to take religion in terms of hearing without doing, just what it means to so many professors of piety, mere cumberers of the ground. So do we easily train youth to courses of unconscious hypocrisy by our failure to furnish opportunities and direction of action following religious impression. 165 CHAPTER XVin MAKING THE LESSON REAL We are all agreed that tlie purpose of teaching is to train the life rather than merely to store the memory. We all agree that the end sought is ability to live the religious life. Every teacher surely sees that every lesson ought to have a direct, practical meaning to every life, and that no lesson can be said to be taught until it has been translated in some way into action. But the difficulty comes when we seek ways of making every lesson directly practicable to every student. At first it seems an easy matter; apparently all you have to do is to say, ^'Now, this means that you ought always to tell the truth," or **This means that you ought always to be kind to one another." But, generally speaking, you might just about as well say those words backwards as forwards so far as their effect is concerned. Children always turn deaf ears to moralizing. The reason is not that they object to good morals, but that to them such phrases are only empty forms of words ; they are literary symbols which they do not know or will not make the effort to interpret. Then, is the right way to make the suggestion more direct? Ought we to say, ^^This 166 MAKING THE LESSON EEAL lesson means that you, "William Blake, ought to be kind to that little fellow you tried to push down on your way to school,'' or, again, ^'You, Henry Brown, ought to tell the truth about the incident you just now gave in great exaggera- tion?'' Well, we can see that that would not work. We would have a debate on hand at once. At any rate, while it might work on rare occa- sions, it is a method to be applied in private, teacher to pupil alone, and in friendship. In the class it would lead to crimination and re- crimination. If we would make the practical, life signifi- cance of a lesson real, practicable, usable and de- sirable to use to every student, then we must stir are the ideal actions taught and also just how they may come into his own experience. The up every student to find out for himself just what first is not diiBficult ; it is easy to get boys and girls discussing the conduct of a character in the Bible, or, even, when virtues are presented in abstract, to lead them to discuss concrete illustrations. Here is a suggestion of a simple plan for enlist- ing the child's activities and making ideals con- crete to him: GOLDEIT DEED BOOKS When the lesson has been taught, ask the pupils to give any instances of conduct similar to that exemplified in the lesson, any instances they have seen or have read. After these have 167 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL been discussed, give each pupil a blank book, of the usual copy-book or composition-book size, and tell them that you and they together are going to jnake a set of ^'Golden Deed books." The lesson next Sunday is on, we will say, Kindness to the Needy; now, during the week they are to watch for instances of kindness of that kind. They can either write out an account of what they read or see, or they can clip it out of paper or magazine. The clippings and stories are to be brought into the class with the blank books, and the class will, after the lesson period, decide whether each one is worthy to go in the book of the pupil who brought it. The best instance, the one adjudged by the class to best illustrate the virtue, will be distin- guished by a star pasted over the page on which it is inserted in the pupil's book. After this the subject for the following Sunday is announced and the pupils are encouraged to look out for good illustrative examples. It is well to suggest that the illustrations chosen should be as nearly like in spirit to the lesson story as possible. You may be sure there will be no failure, under these circumstances, to read the lesson before next Sunday. You will also find the children discussing among themselves not only the events and the illustrations, but the lesson itself and the moral and religious sig- nificances of the lesson. You will not need, either, to hunt through encyclopaedias of illustration to find the right anecdotes or stories ; the pupils will 168 MAKING THE LESSON REAL fumisli the stories, and they will be their own; they will be real and vital to them. The *^ Golden Deed Book" becomes a record of thought, observation and activity turned week after week on practical duties of the right life. The lessons learned this way are not easily for- gotten, for they are impressed with the heat of a stimulated imagination and the vigour of a spon- taneous interest. INTEREST THAT FLOWS OVER One result, quite likely to follow in every in- stance, is that the children will be found anxious to talk with the teacher over the illustrations and the examples they have found. They will not wait until Sunday. They will come over to see you or call you up, it may be. It is a good sign when class interest flows over into the week. But the main point is that such a method re- lates the religious teaching to the child's real world. It takes religion out of remote regions, out of the realm of the unreal which is to be found in books alone, and it gives it meaning for the things which the child knows as his world. It should help a child to realize that God is in His world to-day, that He walks with men as truly as He walked with ancient patriarchs, that He moves us to good and would withhold us from evil, that He is supremely interested in our everyday af- fairs, in little kindnesses and thoughtfulness. This plan need not crowd the lesson-hour un- 169 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL duly; for that matter, it would do no liarm so long as it crowded it with that which was perti- nent to the lesson and accomplished the purpose of the school, the development of the child as a religious person. But the pasting and trimming and fitting into the books should all be done at home, the class only selecting those records which were worthy, and perhaps planning the proper placing of the different examples. No rewards would be given for these books ; they would carry with them their own. But a plan could easily be worked out by which the books in each class hav- ing the highest number of stars should be pre- served in the library of the school. 170 CHAPTER XIX ADVANTAGES INVENTORIED We have been saying a good deal for a long time about the shortcomings, disadvantages and difficulties in Sunday school work; might it not be worth while to consider whether we do not have also many encouraging advantages in this work? Some people without a sense of propor- tion have fallen into the habit of rather gleefully drawing comparisons between the work done in the public schools and that in the Sunday schools, until the teachers in the latter institutions have almost lost heart, realizing their serious handi- caps in any competition with the former. A DEFINITE PUEPOSE If, however, we are considering the real pur- poses of any educational activity, if we mean by education the leading of a life out into its full development, into fulness of life, powers and service, then, for such purposes we are likely to discover that the Sunday school not only has no monopoly of handicaps, but, on the contrary, is at a striking advantage over every other educa- tional agency. No matter how earnestly we may desire the character product from the agencies of 171 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL general education, we have to acknowledge that, at present at any rate, this is likely to be re- garded as only a by-product. The schools are engrossed with ** studies'^ so largely as to almost lose sight of the student. Most public-school teachers are deeply concerned for the moral wel- fare of their charges, but they are so bound down by the requirements of a curriculum that they must give their almost undivided attention to arithmetic, history, literature and this and the other required subject. But in the Sunday school no purpose other than that of character develop- ment can be before the teacher. This school exists for the leading of lives into their fulness, into spiritual self-realization and development. The teacher has no other work there ; the courses are, or should be, designed with no other aim; the exercises should be conducted with this as the sole purpose. It means more than we are ready to reckon that here is an institution explicitly, specifically, definitely for the sole purpose of re- ligious education. Pupils come into this school with this clearly understood. The truth is that Sunday school pupils go away from the school disappointed or disgusted, not because too much religion is taught there, but because religion is not clearly and definitely taught ; because teachers have lost sight of the real ends of all their work, they have substituted means for ends and have made the teaching of Biblical history, archaeology and literature the objective in the school instead 172 ADVANTAGES INVENTOEIED of using these simply as means of securing or bringing about the spiritual development of the pupil. When I go to a Sunday school, either as teacher or as a pupil, I go there for religious edu- cation as clearly as I look for a meal when I go to a restaurant. It appears to me as no small advantage that this school exists for this clearly avowed purpose. LAEGER LIFE INFLUENCE We have often thought of the advantage of the public school in having the pupil for so many more hours every week. No one would fail to wish that the Sunday school might have more periods or longer ones every week; in fact, I believe this is not impossible. But does not this school have an advantage in the fact that it can often watch and further the spiritual develop- ment of a life continuously through many years? Though this may not be properly done directly by any one teacher, it means much that the whole school has this long touch with lives. THE GREAT TEXT The public schools are in a ferment which is nearly continuous over text-books ; whatever other text-books the Sunday school may use — and there certainly will have to be some — it still has as the principal source of its materials of study that book which has been the source of ideals, the f oun- 173 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL tain of inspiration, the secret of strength for countless generations, that about which our most hallowed memories and some of our richest his- toric traditions cluster, the great reservoir of the richest religious heritage of all the centuries of the old era and the source of the spiritual hope of the new. The Bible has been excluded from the public schools — many of us believe fortu- nately, under existing circumstances — ^but this leaves the Sunday school with the by no means small advantage of having the greatest religious literary treasury as its principal subject of study. This does not mean that the school exists to teach the Bible ; it is not in any sense a miniature the- ological seminary, but that it exists to lead lives into their spiritual fulness and has the finest source of spiritual inspiration and information at its disposal in doing this. THE BACKING OF TEADITIONS The traditions of the Sunday school are to our advantage. One may well be proud to serve in any way an institution with such a noble past of self-sacrifice, of painstaking devotion. Much of our just criticism halts on our lips when we think of the price that has been paid for the Sunday school, of the blood and tears that have gone into its making, of the men and women who, Sunday after Sunday, in ignorance and weakness, despite ridicule and opposition — often as bitter within the church as without^ — paid the price for 174 ADVANTAGES INVENTORIED the religious education of the young. Let no one say a word against the devotion of the public- school teacher; many of them are serving and sac- rificing from the holiest motives; but we must not lose sight of the fact that the Sunday school has its bede roll of heroes and martyrs, names unknown to general fame, humble folk in hidden villages, who have made it possible. So, too, the new day for the Sunday school comes in because some saw its vision and were willing to labour for its dawn; they, too, met ridicule and scorn, but they looked beyond all with eyes of faith, and with a devotion and at a cost that may never be told they pressed on; and we are entering into their labours. What could not one tell of the advantages of the modern Sunday school, the rich heritage of scientific studies coming to us, the fruitage of all the labours of the past, the services of educa- tional leaders everywhere made available to the humblest teachers, the wealth of religious litera- ture, the wider recognition of the importance of the school, the according to it of its rightful place in the church? Is not this a day the Lord has made in which we may rejoice and may serve with new hope and vigour? 175 CHAPTEE XX THE PARENTS AT SCHOOL There can be no donbt abont it, some day we will have the compulsory education of parents. Not all the states have laws for the compulsory edu- cation of children. They had better step lively, or some will have the laws compelling all parents to be properly educated before they get into the old line. Surely, if we have a right to insist that chil- dren shall be educated for youth and manhood, have we not at least an equal right to insist that parents shall be trained for their duties as par- ents? We come more and more to see with defi- niteness that the problems of society are personal problems and that most potent agency for per- sonal training still is the home. The parents are the child's first educators; they teach him for longer periods daily and over a longer period of years and with the aid of more forces and of more natural forces than do any other teachers. THE SCHOOL TRAINING PARENTS What has this to do with the Sunday school? This at least, that no parent is fitted for home duties unless he has learned to take the home in 176 THE PAEENTS AT SCHOOL terms of religious opportunity, unless he has trained to be the spiritual guide of his child. The Sunday school is the church engaged in the re- ligious education of her people; has she not a responsibility for the preparation of those of her people who are the direct religious educators of the young, the parents? The special reason for parents being taught in the school of the church is not that this school wants to have the statistical satisfaction of count- ing everj^body on its roll, but that these people have unusual responsibilities, for which the church ought to prepare them. Parents have a right to look to the church to aid them in dis- charging their duties as the religious educators of their children. The Sunday school is the proper agency in the church to undertake this task. It makes no real difference whether in some church the classes for the parents shall meet in the week or at night, so long as the church says to these parents, Here is the opportunity, the one that suits you best, to meet and study and discuss the duties and problems that are yours; we will furnish you wise leadership and instruc- tion. The first ten years of home-making in any nor- mal family are bound to be trying years. Not only have we the adjustment of two lives, one to another, but soon we have the coordinated over- sight which these two must exercise over other lives. The young mother and the conscientious 177 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL father are botii oppressed witii the problems of infant training, of discipline and of home edu- cation. They seek help on every hand. They are quite likely to meet the tried warrior of the home who says, *^0h, you will learn by experi- ence.'^ No doubt they will, but that is certainly hard on the child, who must be experimented on. We cannot afford to learn by experience if we are handling even less precious material than children's lives. How foolish to waste the tears of bitterness in experience, to lose the years and to mar the fabric in which we work when there is the accumulated experience of other lives avail- able for us! If Mothers' Clubs, Parent-Teacher Associa- tions, Child- Welfare Leagues and other like or- ganizations feel it their duty to train parents in the physical welfare of the children, how much more it is the duty of the church to gather the parents of her children and see that they are trained to the right discharge of their religious privileges to the children! PARENT-TEACHER ASSOCIATIONS Parents ought also to meet frequently with the Sunday school officers, to understand together the work of the school. We need parent- teachers ' associations in the church as well as for the pub- lic schools. They should have the aim of pro- moting mutual understanding and cooperation in all efforts for the religious education of children. 178 THE PARENTS AT SCHOOL Parents need the opportunity to present and discuss their problems in the training of their children. Not long ago a young mother came to see me almost heartbroken with the problem of her five-year-old, who, as she saw it, was becom- ing addicted to the grossest forms of lying. On asking a few questions it was easily seen that the child had been simply exercising a normal and vivid imagination. She had narrated a meeting with three bears of different hues: green, blue and black. The adventure was a blood-curdling one. But the mother thought the child was giving evidence of total depravity, when she was really showing signs of literary creative powers. Now, this is but a small instance of parents' problems. Some one trained in child study, one in sympathy with the actualities of the home and parenthood, and one seeking the religious aim could wonder- fully help parents to efficiency and to peace of mind in the religious development of their chil- dren. Parents need a chance to work out together the difficult problem of family worship, of specific forms of religion in the home. We do a lot of loose talking about this. We insist on its ne- cessity. When have we taken time to study the real facts as they are to-day, or to attempt a so- lution of their difficulties! In many communities parents need explicit instructions in the physical wellheing of the home, and particularly in the care of their children in 179 EFFICIENCY EST THE SUNDAY SCHOOL health. They are still in the bonds of ignorance on child hygiene. The health, the nourishing of a child has so much to do with his character re- sources that the church cannot afford to neglect it. Parents' classes would for their leadership call to the school many persons who now have no opportunity to serve, those who would be in- terested in this work, while feeling themselves not adapted to any other kind of instruction. "Why not begin with a few parents, have a wise, trained leader, and watch this department of use- fulness grow. Courses of study for parents in the Sunday school are now available and in use; see notably the excellent course prepared by Prof. Edward P. St. John (published by the Pilgrim Press, Boston. Parents should read ^^Eeligious Education in the Home," by Prof. Clyde W. Votaw (published by The Eeligious Education Association — 25 cents — Chicago). Also see the author's **Home as a School for Social Living" (American Baptist Publication Society, 20 cents). 180 CHAPTER XXI THE ADULT DEPAKTMENT AND THE HOME Nothing ever comes nearer to any of us than our homes; nothing does more to make us what we are. This is almost as true of the influence of the home over the adult who serves it as of the child to whom it ministers. No educational, no moral program will ever find success, and no re- ligious activity find fruitage in life unless it is in cooperation with the home. As society is to-day organized, no matter what we do, nor what our measure of success in mar- ket, factory, school or church, if we fail in our homes we fail in all else. This is not a matter of sentiment; it is a matter of practical concern in the business of character development, for the home is the most direct and effective force in this work of personal religious education. The purpose of religion is not the conserva- tion of institutions, nor the elaboration of a phi- losophy, nor the maintenance of ritual, nor even the repetition of emotional experiences; these are justified and have a place only so far as they minister to the business of saving people, bring- 181 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL ing people to fulness of life; that is tlie reason the church has such a tremendous stake in the home. Sometimes it seems as though we were more concerned with making our children feel at home in the church than in getting them to feel the church in the home, the beauty, sanctity and value of the home; that here is the place, above all others, where altar fires burn, where the deeper, lasting values of life are discovered, and where life reaches its best. APOSTLES vs. CHILDKEN Not long ago a lady in an Eastern city said to the writer: '*I'm greatly puzzled over my class of young women. You know they're nearly all young mothers; many of them work in the fac- tories, and when I try to talk to them about the Acts of the Apostles they simply will not listen. They want to spend all the time talking about their babies at home." Surely the answer was easy to render : * ^ Your dilemma is your opportunity. These young mothers need the very matters which you object to; the subject of their children much more than they need the Acts of the Apostles. Let the apos- tles rest for a while; you will find them there when you want them again ; but you will not find the babies there. They will have become big boys and girls in a few years. What sort of boys and girls they will be may depend very much on the 182 ADULT DEPARTMENT AND THE HOME teaching of their mothers in the school of the church. ' ' What a splendid opportunity that woman had with her group of young mothers, every one eager to bring up the problems of her home and her children; every one hungry for explicit teaching on her religious duty as a mother, and on how to perform that duty in the training of her child I Is it possible to conceive of a higher, holier task than that, to inspire and guide parents to a re- ligious sense of their duties and opportunities in the home! Sometimes one is tempted to think that the Sunday school is more interested in tell- ing about a home in heaven than in teaching people how to make their homes heavenly now. HELPING PAKE NTS But, to think a little further in the problem presented by the teacher and her class of young mothers : Specifically what could she do for them? Perhaps, though this may not necessarily be the case, the best thing she could do would be to watch keenly for just the right woman, the mother of experience and good, broad, thorough training, who could teach those young women how to be good mothers and how to make their homes what they might be. However, such a person ought to be more than a mother of home experience; she ought to be a student of the child, one who has learned the laws of child life not only in the tedious school of experience, but also, at least to 183 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL some extent, in that of scientific study and ob- servation. We too easily assume that a good mother of long experience will make a valuable teacher of young and inexperienced mothers. She may not know how to make her experience avail- able to them; and, too, that experience may not have taught her half as much about children as some younger woman has learned by patient study. Be sure, however, the teacher of such a class knows children and child-nature. Be sure, also, that she has the conception of the home as a religious institution, existing primarily for the religious purpose of training lives for right living. COURSES ON THE HOME Given such a teacher, what could she teach? Would she not begin with a study of the home? That might very well be introduced by the ex- amples of beautiful home life found in the Bible, home life under the spreading tent, in Jerusalem, in Bethany and Nazareth. She would seek to show that homes come in our civilization, in the working out of the divine will amongst men, for definite purposes. They exist not to furnish cheap hotels, not to be warehouses of cumbersome bric-a- brac, not as instruments for social aggrandize- ment; rather they are little social organizations for the great and sacred purpose of furnishing to developing lives the very best, constant, nur- tural, environmental, educational influences for the steady growth and perfection of high, godly 184 ADULT DEPARTMENT AND THE HOME character. It would be worth all beside just to make it axiomatic to those young mothers that, no matter how their homes might succeed materi- ally, socially, aBsthetically, unless they succeeded in training boys and girls to honour, truth, human love and divine likeness, they failed most miser- ably. Then such a teacher might very well take some one of the many recent good books on the train- ing of children and, reading its sections one at a time, use it as a guide for discussions. Miss Har- rison 's **A Study of Child Nature*' would be ex- cellent for this purpose. Later the class would discuss Patterson DuBois's *^ Culture of Jus- tice, '* or E. A. Abbott's *' Training of Parents, *' or Dean Hodge's ** Training of Children in Eeli- gion." Such books suggest specific problems in the care and discipline of children, and they keep steadily before the mind the ideal of the parent as the religious educator of the child. THE WEIGHTIEST MATTEKS Young mothers, such as the class who consti- tuted the problem described, are not the only ones who need this instruction. It is a strange fact, a sad fact, that we seem to leave the most impor- tant affairs of life to hazard while we give our energies to organizing the lesser ones. We all know that the home is the most important insti- tution in our modem life, yet, while we train children to be directors of factories, lawyers, doc- 185 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL tors and teachers, who ever heard of serious at- tempts to train them to he parents^ Some three years ago the writer gave three lectures in a course to young men on the following subjects: *^A Man's Eolations with His Woman Friends,'* '^The Ethics of Courtship,'' *^The Ethics of Home Life." Those who listened afterward ex- pressed their surprise at the subjects and their uniform experience that neither in public school, Sunday school nor college had they received ex- plicit instruction in these subjects. No, we en- gage the most highly trained experts to teach the record found in fossils, but training in the affairs that directly make human character we leave to chance. Professors to teach the dead past, but the living present of the home and the child's character-development we leave to the would-be wits of the alleged funny columns of the daily papers, to cheap jokes about mothers-in-law, do- mestic infelicities and youthful escapades, or in the hideous, often soul-blasting revelations of di- vorce scandals. For the least child in the school and on to the mother and father there should be religious instruction in the life of the home. Doubtless one of the first results of a public announcement that there would be classes in study on Home-making for the Young Women's classes would be a giggle. The giddy folks who think on the surface of things would picture such a class studying **How to Catch a Husband" for the first lesson and '*How to Keep Him Happy" 186 ADULT DEPARTMENT AND THE HOME for the second. Yet the young women and the young men are the very ones who most of all need such studies. 'V\Tiy should it seem a foolish thing, either immodest or ridiculous, to so train those who are soon to be home-makers that they may not make shipwreck of the home! Which is bet- ter to teach them, the laws of social and religious living in the home or to let them pass through the heart-racking experience of learning domestic ad- justments just as though they were the first couple in the world's story? Education is the acquisi- tion of the organized experience of the race ; why should not our organized experience on the home be imparted to those young people before they found their own homes? A SACKED SUBJECT Does some one say such studies are secular rather than sacred? Does some one object, the Sunday school exists to teach the Bible? How simple is the answer! Whatever helps directly or indirectly to make life more sacred, to stimu- late men to be more like God and to make this life holier and more heavenly is surely sacred in the very best sense. Nothing could be more truly, basely secular than such a study of even God or heaven as made one only more selfish. Of Sun- day school studies we may say. By their fruits ye shall know them. This school exists to teach the Bible only as the Bible is a means to Chris- tian character and service. If the Bible cannot 187 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL be taugM so as to make us better home-makers, better religious educators of our children, better fathers and mothers and children, we must find some book that can. Certainly we all believe that the Bible can be so taught and that it does have that fruitage. The point for which we would con- tend just now is that we should definitely aim at that result. We should seek to use the Bible and every other means of Christian culture for this high and holy purpose, to make the home of every student in the school a really religious institution. Every department of the school ought definitely to plan to train its students to the efficient ex- pression of their religious life in and by means of their homes. You will often hear the lament that family worship is declining. Might it not be that if, in our religious institutions, especially in the Sun- day school, we had been definitely trained to think of the home as a religious institution, this lament would not have been so prevalent? When the church neglects the home, the home quickly neg- lects religion. If you would have the family altar as a vital, spiritual necessity in the home, you must train these young men and women to understand their homes, to know how to organize and direct a home as a religious institution. Nothing would do more to keep alive the fire of dying love on the family altar, making it the very light of the home, than to be able in our Sunday school groups to discuss our religious 188 ADULT DEPAETMENT AND THE HOME character problems of the home. That would set up the habitual inference that homes are sacred places. PAEENTS' COUNCILS We would soon find that such studies would extend far beyond the hour for the regular school. Parents' councils would be organized, consisting principally of the younger parents. Why should not younger women meet under a competent in- structor, a woman physician, to learn that of which many are so sadly ignorant, the physical laws of family life, reproduction, the principles of physical holiness? If the church does not teach these things, who will! Who can more fittingly carry on the elementary work of the public school in this respect than the church? If we really believe that the physical life of the child has so much to do with its character development, why should we leave fathers and mothers to pick up the laws of its physical well-being by chance? Why not teach eugenics in the church? Why not so teach parents the laws of boy-nature that they may know how to direct it to do something more profitable than breaking windows and stealing dogs? FINDING TEACHEKS But, you say, having so many additional sub- jects involves additional teachers, and we haven't enough as it is. No, it is hard to get teachers for ancient history, literature and philosophy. But such specific subjects as these outlined on the 189 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL home have teachers waiting for them. Have you no doctors, public-school people; are there none who have specialized in these very subjects in your community? Just ask that lawyer to teach a class of young men or women a short course on marriage laws in different times and countries, or on the development of the ideal of the Chris- tian home, or that young doctor to teach a course on physical foundations of character, and see what will happen. Specialized work finds work- ers. The whole matter is in a nutshell : if we would have a religious people we must have religious homes ; if we would have religious homes we must train religious home-makers; the church as the religious agency in our life must train people to the religious duty of right home-making. The Sunday school is the specific agency in the church for this training. 190 CHAPTER XXII THE KUEAL SUNDAY SCHOOL By far the greater number of Sunday schools in the United States are rural schools. Statistics show that the average number of scholars in the Sunday schools of this country is about eighty. And since there are a very large number of schools running up into the thousands in member- ship, it is evident that we have many more small schools than large ones. Complaint is common that nearly all that is written on the Sunday school is written for the benefit and help of those who are working in the city schools. From the viewpoint of one who has been pastor of some truly rural churches and who has met the prob- lems of the country school at first hand, this criti- cism seems to have justification in fact. It is true that the principles that apply to the city school usually apply also to the country school ; but the application of those principles is not always the same, and it is impossible for one whose experi- ence has been entirely urban to know just what are the peculiar problems applying to those schools in remote communities, where the little white church stands in the pine grove and the 191 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL long lines of hitching rails constitute the bounda- ries of its lot. KURAL ADVANTAGES First, the rural Sunday school has some dis- tinct advantages. It has ordinarily and normally a better educational environment than the city schools. Its pupils find better educational oppor- tunities. The country boy who has the chores to do, who must drive the team and care for them, develops resources and is constantly under the stimuli of situations that produce in him powers of initiative, self-dependence and observation which the city lad often lacks. He may not have art galleries, but he has nature and quickening environment. Much of the Bible is an out-door book, intelligible only to those who are accus- tomed to think only in terms of out-doors. Then, in the country community the lives of all in the school are bound closer together than is the case in the city. One knows one 's neighbours who live over the hill much better than one can get to know one's neighbour who lives in the next apart- ment. Country folks prize all social occasions. The Sunday school offers relief from the monotony of the life on the farm. It becomes a social oc- casion. It is built on social life. The country Sunday school competes with fewer distractions than does the city school. It is less likely to suffer deterioration from Sunday night dissipation. It is less likely to hear excuses of so many social 192 THE RUEAL SUNDAY SCHOOL engagements. There are even advantages in the very smallness of the school in that this offers op- portunities for individual treatment of scholars. The large school is liable to become institutional. The small school may still know all its pupils by name and watch them carefully and lead them personally into the larger life. THE RUKAL SITUATION The condition in the rural districts is due to a number of causes; immigration to the country has broken up racial integrity. Many a com- munity has half a dozen nationalities owning or renting its farms, none of whom have been in the melting pot long enough to get fused. The in- creasing social compactness of the city intensifies the feeling of separateness in the country; the proximity of growing villages has broken links of rural unity such as neighbourly exchange, serv- ice, and opportunities for acquaintance at store and postoffice. The trolley has often disinte- grated a community by taking away our mutual dependence. The country lags behind the city in its thinking on social affairs; it is still individ- ualistic; if a case of diphtheria breaks out on Smith's farm, folks think, not of contagion of the community, but of aches and pains and distresses in the Smith household. The country church, very much like the city church, lags far behind the procession in its thinking on social philos- ophy; consequently it has no message on social 193 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL subjects. They are often tabooed as unspiritual, too worldly, while the emphasis is on individual salvation, and the hope held before the people is of an egoistic entrance into a paradise where all the seats are in the dress circle. RUKAL PROBLEMS But there are peculiar problems facing the country school. First, those of physical condi- tions. The school usually meets either in a small church or a single room or in a tiny public school building, which likewise has but one room. The truth is, there is no reason why that little single- room church building should not be built with very commodious Sunday school rooms. We are not yet so far from the simple homes of the past that it is impossible to say to men of the farms. Come to; let us draw the stones and lumber and take to ourselves the great joy of building with our own hands a room or rooms added to this church in which our children can learn the way of life. Where this is impossible it is often feasible to take two or three of the classes into a neigh- bouring house. The schoolhouse or the church is usually situated near to some cluster of homes, though this is not always the case. In summer time and in favourable regions the class may be taken out under the trees into the grove or an arbour, and there are many schools where classes could meet in such temporary but delightful quar- ters through the whole year. 194 THE EURAL SUNDAY SCHOOL Another class of physical difficulties has to do with distances and weather. Of course, we all know of families that hesitate not at all to drive a dozen miles in the worst kind of weather if a circus is at the other end, who dare not drive to Sunday school if the newspaper promises a storm a week later. The plan in operation in some rural public school districts has been tried for the Sunday school with success. That is, that a bus or carry-all shall go the rounds of the district, picking up children and taking them to school. But this is seldom necessary for the Sunday school. Usually some farmer or person owning a wagon can be found on each of the main routes who will take turn with others in calling for the children along the road. This, however, should be necessary only in the case of scholars who do not have conveyances, and every school should work toward the ideal of a community habit of all the families always going. So many of our rural districts are now cov- ered by the telephone that the superintendent can very well spend an hour on Saturday night re- minding the families of the school for the next day. The babies constitute the real problem in the country school, especially where you succeed in securing the attendance of the whole family. The best plan is to put them all together in a nearby house in charge of a good mother and a young woman with the instincts for child care. Many a 195 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL mother would be likely to come to Sunday school if she knew that she might lose sight of her baby while it was in good hands for an hour. There never yet was a country church or school that did not have a problem in the snoring contingency. Men and boys who have been work- ing hard in the fields all week cannot possibly keep awake while sitting still in church or school, espe- cially if they must listen to the dull droning of some monotonous voice. The only way to keep these people awake and so to have some control of the musical part of the school programme is to give them something to do. Pick out your habitual sleepers for your most active positions, such as librarian, assistant, secretary or treas- urer. I think I would also have some official ap- pointed whose business it would be to keep an eye on the teams in the shed or at the rail. MENTAL CONDITIONS Now, as to the mental conditions which consti- tute the problems in the country Sunday school. The very neighbourliness which is an advantage becomes also a serious disadvantage. Sometimes you get to know everybody just a little too well, and so the lesson seems to have a direct and in- tentionally personal application. The folks get to wearing their social nerves on the outside. So- cial conversation, which ought to encourage and enlighten, drifts into petty gossip and trivialities. The subjects of talk are liable to be confined to 196 THE RURAL SUNDAY SCHOOL Jim Blake's sorrow or Nancy Brown's dress, or Mrs. Smith's cake recipe, or how she felt when she heard what Mrs. Jones said about her peonies. Why do they not discuss the lesson? Sometimes they do, and often the result is more unfortunate than if they had discussed crops and kittens, for they fall into arguments on dogma which eng'en- ders strife. This is especially a source of diffi- culty in schools that meet in the schoolhouse and which are practically union schools. Is not the reason that the mind goes at once to personal trivialities or theological dogma the fact that the teaching of the lesson and the application made by the teacher have no immediate contact with the lives and interests of those who are taught in the country Sunday school? So many of the lesson helps seem to be pre- pared in the brick-and-mortar environment, so few breathe the country air, and seldom, if ever, one finds a direct allusion to the problems and needs and interests of the boys and girls, men and women who pass their lives in the fields and on the farms. So long as teaching is only his- torical or theological, dealing ony with Jews who have been dead a thousand years or more, or with problems that none of us will settle in the next thousand years, the people in the Sunday school classes are going to shut the doors of their minds on such subjects, if indeed they are ever open to them, the moment the bell rings for class study to cease. 197 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL KUEAL LIFE LESSONS We onglit to lielp tlie teachers in the country Sunday schools to interpret their lessons in terms of the lives of those whom they are teaching, find the point of contact and immediate interests be- tween the lesson and the learner in the country and to make religious truths so real and vital that a man shall think about his lesson as it relates itself to the milking of the cows, the harvesting of his crops, the cutting of his timber or what- ever the daily toil may be, and in all his relations with his fellow-men so that the mind of the pupils shall not be able to shake off that lesson or to think about other things at the school. Those who prepare lesson helps have a duty toward the country school. And the little assembly of a dozen or forty people ought to be in the mind of the editor as constantly as the great city school. As to the theological cranks in the country Sunday school, one seems to find them more fre- quently there than elsewhere. "Why not put them all together in any school, even though there are only two or three of them, and organize what to yourself quietly you know as the cranks' class? You may be sure that it will have interesting gatherings. SOCIALIZING THE SCHOOL Third, Some suggestions for the country Sun- day school. Extend your work back at least into Saturday 198 THE EUEAL SUNDAY SCHOOL night. Great good has been done by opening the church or schoolhouse every Saturday night for some sort of community gathering under the auspices of the Sunday school. In any case strengthen constantly the social life of the school. In the rural community the church still has the opportunity of holding the dominant position so- cially, of becoming the most potent social force, the very center of the lives of its people, for upon it the people depend for their lectures, entertain- ments, suppers. The country Sunday school needs picnics as much as the city school, but of the opposite kind ; as for instance, when the coun- try school goes as a whole to the city, in the win- ter, to see some celebrated lecturer or to attend some fitting entertainment or to visit the museum or some institution. In instances where teachers are widely scattered it is not impossible to main- tain a training class by means of telephonic con- nection, the leader calling up each of the mem- bers and reminding them of the lesson, asking them if they are on that evening studying their lesson, receiving their inquiries and questions re- garding the difficulties or problems and also ask- ing them questions and testing their understand- ing of the lesson. "Whenever I hear of the inertia and dead condition of the country school I nearly always find that it is in a community where there has been no stimulating influence for a long while, where no institutes or conferences have been held, while the live, progressive schools in the country 199 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL are those which have had such opportunities and have sent their teachers to such gatherings and other places. If you have a dead school in the country, plan an institute or conference and get some live wires mixed in with the people, and to keep the good work going, if you cannot induce the school to do so, you will find it worth while yourself to buy one or two of the best and bright- est books on teaching and Sunday school organi- zation, and get your teachers to read and talk about them. I do not see why the rural schools of the country, say, should not do in that county what is being done in the Eeligious Education Associa- tion for the whole country. Why should not the schools of a county, in cooperation with those of the city, as its center, secure a place in the city as Sunday school headquarters, where the teach- ers and officers, when they happen to drive into town, could go and be sure of finding a place quiet and restful in which they might study and read, and where they would have at hand the best ref- erence books on their lessons, and books and papers calculated to help them in their work? I can see yet those country Sunday schools, a dozen to twenty children and about as many adults; eager, alert faces turned up to teachers; men and women, of hands horny with toil, and hearts ready for sacrifice, if only these lives may be helped. You can do little in grading such a school; you must suffer many educational make- 200 THE RURAL SUNDAY SCHOOL shifts; but you cannot lose sight of the fact that here is the place where the life may come closest to lives; and here is the place, too, where the greater number of our people, whether to-day in city or country, receive the most lasting religious impressions. 201 CHAPTER XXIII THE RURAL SCHOOL AND ITS COMMUNITY The school in the country is a part of the life of the church in the country. It must fail if we think of it only as a weekly meeting for class instruc- tion. It must fit itself into the whole programme of the church and find itself in service for all the community. Its officers and teachers must become acquainted with the new study of and the new programme for rural and country life. The country church, made familiar to us by some of the best in English literature, was so human an institution because it was so intensely interested in the welfare of the persons in its community. The American village church always has been a ministering institution. A large meas- ure of its activities have been directed to the care of the sick, provision for the needy, and relief of the distressed. Goldsmith's parson, *' passing rich on forty pounds a year, ' ' never turning a beggar from the door; Trollope's parson's wife, who spends her days in piecing out flannel petticoats for villages, and the Ladies' Aid Society of the American church, with its quiltings and its buzzing sewing machines, all belong to the same great 202 EUEAL SCHOOL AND ITS COMMUNITY dynamic of human regard for the welfare of others. They are united in love though divided in time and creeds. But, somehow, in these later days the Aid Society has passed out of existence, the parson's wife no longer wins awesome obei- sance as the potential petticoat distributor, and the church is by no means the sole agency for the relief of distress. It is no longer the dominant factor in the determination of community welfare. "Welfare work is organized ; it becomes a science, and demands more than a programme of flannel petticoats and a course in parochial soup. The churches do not realize this yet and so they have lost their job just there. In the cities boards of charity, relief, and philanthropy, together with purely civic organizations, carry on this work. In the rural districts it is almost, wholly neglected for the church, the simple and often sole general social unit in the country, has not realized a responsibility for social well-being. "While the churches have generally been losing their sense of social responsibility, the rural communities have been undergoing social disintegration. The rural church is, in many parts of the coimtry, not nearly the closely unified social force which once it was. COMMUNITY MISSION Yet the church even in the country can no more escape undertaking a community mission than it can escape the spiritual imperative for community betterment. This is so, first, because 203 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL every church is a coramnnity organization. Ee^ gardless of ecclesiastical theories, the fact re- mains that every church is the communal group- ing of kindred spirits seeking common aims, bound by common ideals and sympathies. So soon as the spirit of this age, which thinks of welfare, not in terms of individualism, but in terms of society, penetrates the church and is accepted by its leaders this organization will throw its united social force into the realization of community betterment. The country church will come to realize its social responsibility, to see that it has a primary task of securing right physical and moral conditions in the rural dis- tricts, and that it has a deeper concern in hygiene, sanitation, and recreation than it has in platting prospective subdivisions in another world. The church is responsible for community wel- fare also because the community, in all its aspects, is the soil in which its great product must grow. The business of the church is to grow men and women, to develop lives according to certain ideals, to stimulate, direct, and determine human character. This is its fruitage. But character grows in the soil of human conditions. What we are depends not on what people pray we may be, but on what we are set into, on our physical, social, moral environment. Just as men do not grow grapes on thorns so neither do they grow water lilies on asphalt nor corn in a swamp. The soil as well as the seed determines the product. 204 RUEAL SCHOOL AND ITS COMMUNITY If the church is honestly interested in the product of human character, her first concern will be for the soil in which it is set. ^Vhen a church turns her attention to clean streets, to healthy homes, to recreation centres, to means of social accretion and integration, she is not forsaking her divine mission ; she is cultivat- ing heavenly character by appropriate means. BURAIi WORK FOR COMMUNITY WELFARE What can a rural church do for community welfare? Such a church can, first, come to an intelli- gent understanding of community conditions, needs, and possibilities. A chart of a rural com- munity, showing the homes, churches, schools, places of communal gathering, locations of agen- cies for good and for ill, would prove as striking as such charts have been for city wards. The church may set its young men to gather the facts and prepare such a chart. Next, it has often the plant with which to begin social-centre operations. The great need of our present rural life is better fusing. The lines of racial differences and the preoccupations of intensified business have put an end to social visiting. We do not know one another. The church service should be strengthened again at the point of opportunity for social acquaintance. Then, the church building should be used for such attractions as will bring the community together 205 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL for recreation and for self -improvement. A rural community needs band concerts, lectures, concerts, a library, and suitable recreation just as truly as a city community. Wliy should not the local church undertake these things? They have been carried on successfully in many instances. They afford an opportunity not only for the church to minister, but for all the people to find opportuni- ties for service, for each to find his own ministry to all. Many a youth who would otherwise go to the dogs will find himself at his best when he has a chance to work at a playground or at the library activities in the church. We can easily revive certain now obsolete activities for the rural church, obsolete only because they failed to make necessary readjustments. They are: philan- thropic service, once accomplished by the parson, now to be accomplished by systematic, directed study of community needs by groups of capable persons ; library work, once by the sad old Sunday school library, now by co-operation with library centres for the distribution of all good literature through the week; the reading room, once at- tempted as a bait to church affiliation, now to be- come the social centre for the community, the place where men worship God by getting to know one another better, as one said long ago, by lov- ing one another; the playing ground, once found in many church-yards, the place where the old sat under the trees, looked over the graves of the dead and gossiped over the living, while the chil- 206 KUEAL SCHOOL AND ITS COMMUNITY dren played on the green, now easily possible to many a country chnrch with its adjacent acres of field and farm. Why should not the ball-ground be next the church ? The problem of Sunday ball would then solve itself. The church has lost con- trol, moral control, of many things because she has heedlessly and often selfishly divorced her- self from them. Where there are several rural churches co- operation becomes imperative. The Young Men^s Christian Association forms an efficient and ready agency through which the local churches may carry on their physical welfare work and their social service for young men. But we need a like agency for girls and young women. Their lives are sadly barren of helpful interests. The churches must get together for their good. KUEAL RELIGIOUS TRAINING Last, the prograrome of the church must be more effective in seeking to inspire and educate men to do things for the community; she has an educational mission. Her business is rather to cause things to be done than to do things. She must set before her the ideal of a community life favourable to the development of aggressive, competent, righteous character, and she must teach, train, inspire her people to the building of such a community. The mission and opportunity of preaching in shaping ideals and determining action is clear ; the need is that the preacher shall 207 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL be quite clear as to community ideals and their importance. The greater need, however, is that of specific, organized instruction of the people through classes and courses of study.. We need courses of study in home-making, parenthood and domestic welfare as concerning the institution in which character is most determined; courses in civics, in social religion, studies of community ex- periences and services to acquaint people with progress in other places; courses, in a word, to teach character development through the ma- chinery and forces of the community. The Sun- day school is one great opportunity for this. There ought to come a time in the life of youth when the literary study of the Bible can turn to practical application in this direction, when he ought to give ancient heroes and saints a rest and fix his eyes on the place and conditions in which he and others must work out heroism and sane sanctity. But the Sunday school must be and may be advantageously supplemented, espe- cially in the rural church, by study groups and by class meeting in week evenings. Brotherhoods, young people's societies, clubs, and like organiza- tions will follow well-arranged programmes of study provided they are sufficiently elementary, evidently practical, and led by persons willing to learn. Such courses are already prepared; churches are using them, and the chances are that before long the country dweller will understand his life and deal with it more scientifically than 208 RURAL SCHOOL AND ITS COMMUNITY will any other. He will deal with it effectively when he takes it as a means and opportunity for the development of fullness of personality and competency of character. A NEW POLICY What changes are needed in the rural church to meet community needs in view of the aim of the church? 1. Acknowledge the justice of the social de- mand that the church shall justify the investment made in her institutions by an adequate personal and social product. 2. Understand her community by ascertaining, tabulating, and exhibiting the facts. 3. Know what is being done in other places. 4. Provide especially trained leaders fitted for rural activities. 5. Use their existing plants to full capacity, every day, both buildings and grounds. 6. Lead in meeting the recreation needs of all, children, youth, and age. Play is the spirit in free activity. 7. Train and lead her own people in the privi- lege of service in the comrnunity. 8. Federate all the spiritual forces, as schools and other ideal agencies and use such clearing- house and nucleating agencies as the county Y. M. C. A. 9. Be sufficiently loyal to our professions to sink sectarian differences for the sake of reli- ^* 209 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL gion, eliminate superfluous religious organiza- tions and establish in many communities ^ town- ship churches," making one strong and efficient in place of many weak, quarreling and helpless. THE GOAL The most important relation of the rural church to community welfare will be an educa- tional one. Our interest and activity in doing things must never be allowed to eclipse the greater duty of the church as an inspirational agency. It is a good thing to organize the men of the church into a road-scraping brigade, but it is a greater thing by far to carry out a programme of so systematically inspiring those men with the ideals of the rightly adjusted community, and training them in the method of its life, that they will never be contented with anything less than the realization of the ideal. The direct service of a church in community welfare justifies itself only as an essential part of the educational pro- gramme of that church. Primarily and ultimately, the ideal community depends upon ideal char- acter, and ideal character comes about through inspiration, leadership, nurture, and service under conditions that foster personal growth. In all our thinking about community welfare we must often look beyond mechanism to the product, and be- yond the physical conditions which determine life to life itself. Nor must we make the fatal error of confounding means with end, of urging people 210 EURAL SCHOOL AND ITS COMMUNITY for clean streets, for libraries, playgrounds, and aesthetic pleasures. But the church must take her place of leadership in developing all these agen- cies to their highest efficiency and applying them- selves with the greatest economy to the product of the better, saner, and finer life. 211 CHAPTER XXIV THE CITY SCHOOL AND THE EURAL SCHOOL In all the discussions of the rural life problem in the past few years one simple suggestion seems to be missing. It is a suggestion based, however, on a fundamental law of religion and of daily affairs. Men tell how we must enrich the country life by making it more attractive, how we must have closer unity amongst country churches and schools. Many of those who come with this sage advice are from city churches and schools. That does not disqualify them to speak, however, for they have back of their words the memories and experiences of earlier life in the rural district. But the attitude of the city to country is a strange one, at least it is strange if it is taken on an avowedly religious basis. It really seems to be an attitude of saying, ^^Well, you people of the country, when it comes to Sunday school work, have n't very much to work with ; but such as it is, you must make the best of it ; here are some sug- gestions on how to make your present equipment go farther and how to use your present working forces to greater advantage. '^ Now, that attitude and that section of sage 212 CITY SCHOOL AND EURAL SCHOOL advice is very much as though the father in the family should come home at the week's end with his wages and say; ^^Well, I Ve worked hard this week, and so has mother; we will divide the earnings between us. As for the little ones, of course they are too small to work; they are weak and have little, therefore they must get along as well as they can with what they have." What sort of a home would that make? Yet the city says to the rural district, *^You have little be- cause you are so small ; therefore, you must make the most of what you have." It is the satirical application of the old saying, ^ ^ Unto him that hath shall be given." It is careless oblivion to the great law, ^ ^ They that are strong ought to bear the burdens of those that are weak." The rural school needs something besides advice; it needs folks and it needs personal help. THE BUKDEN OF THE STKONG The best thing that could come to any school anywhere would be to accept some responsibility for another one needing help. Not that there would come any accretion of grace from playing the Lady Bountiful and, with a condescending air, sending your worn-out quarterlies, express collect, to some rural school. But that, even with all the burdens you are bearing in your city school, you should still be able to say, ' ' God has wonderfully blessed us with opportunities and with some means; we owe it to others to give of what we 213 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL have." The self-giving school will be the grow- ing school. To be everlasting pouring ourselves into ourselves is to choke ourselves. Do not think you can express all the self -giving your life needs by occasional pennies in the missionary collection. A penny or even a dollar dropped into a box is a misleading, soul-damaging way of dodging one 's duty. He must be a mighty small man who can let a dime be his proxy in the working array of the kingdom. If we would have life itself go out, then we must let something besides loose change go out of us. The missionary spirit is not the sending spirit alone ; it is the being-sent spirit. If you would grow in grace you must be willing that the whole of yourself, thought, feelings, sympa- thies, muscles, and mind shall go out of personal interests and into something other than yourself; best of all, into some ideal purpose from which you can hope for nothing again. A DUTY AS AN" OPPORTUNITY Such an opportunity of self-giving the rural school offers to the urban school, the chance for its people to give themselves, not by collections nor by hand-me-down apparatus and supplies, but by personal knowledge, sympathy, and service. Every school worker ought to come in time to know at first hand something of the whole field of work, to know with some intimacy something besides his own little corner of the field. It might work well if the Sunday school officers 214 CITY SCHOOL AND EUEAL SCHOOL sliould study the rural situation about their city, invite in the officers and pastors of the coun- try schools for conferences on their work, visit those schools and get to know the facts and the needs. Then, when the situation was well and sympathetically comprehended, let these officers invite volunteers to be set free from service in their own school and to go out regularly to give service in the rural schools. Let such volunteers serve for definite periods, say six months, or even less in some cases, so that some others might suc- ceed them, and so all have a chance to give some of themselves to it. The greater number of such schools meet either after a morning service or in a schoolhouse in the afternoon. The morning schools would involve missing the service at home, but they would not always mean hearing a sermon of poorer quality. They would offer an unusual opportunity to know people whose lives are after all the same as ours, to love them, and to find the great joy of personal contact, of deep friendships which the country seems to foster so much more than does the city. The afternoon school might mean a dusty journey in the heat, but it would mean a chance to see how earnest are those people in their little schoolhouses ; how the profit of their schools makes them heedless of many discomforts, and how much good may be accomplished with very crude tools. The long evening would follow the school, and if one be a true human being, not a professional charity vis- 215 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL itor, not a peripatetic urban warehouse of wis- dom, but just a friend who can make friends, there will come a new joy in the lives of these dwellers in the wider spaces. The evening will often otf er further opportunities for fellowship and service through the gatherings of the young people. The country will have to be evangelized by the people who owe to it the roots and the enriching of their lives. The men and women who lead in the cities, who are foremost in the work of the churches there, need once in awhile to look back across the years and remember the dusty road along which they went to the Sunday school, tlie green depths of the wayside woods, the tempting blackberries, the long sermon, and the welcome school at its close. For what we are and because of what we have we must share with any whom we may help. The solution of the problem of the rural school lies not in this or the other method which the city may devise for co-operation ; it lies in the free intermingling of the life and love of both country and city for mutual self-giving; it may be that we who seem to- have most to give may find that we have most to learn, and cer- tainly it will be that we shall find life in so far only as we follow love's law of service and sacrificial self -giving. 216 CHAPTEE XXV THE PRESENT OPPORTUNITY IN TEACHER TRAINING Thinking back over a good many years of teacher- training experience — experience including classes in my own church, classes in other churches, neighbourhood classes, advanced and elementary courses, enrollments of from five to over one hun- dred — certain clear-cut convictions emerge. First, we need to pick the students. Teacher-training is not conducting a mob campaign for students. The attempt to persuade great crowds with the delusion that every one can be a teacher and every one ought to prepare for teaching has weakened our teacher-training work. It has led to com- promises; we have been obliged to adapt the courses of lessons to the needs of the larger number and so lost the possibility of selecting courses solely with reference to the fact that the student was to be a Sunday school teacher. It is not true that every young person needs the teacher ^s professional training. If we were to specialize by selecting students we could at once raise the standards, improve the quality of the work, eliminate much elementary and a great deal of unnecessary work and make a decided advance in this enterprise. 217 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL BIBLICAL PKEEEQUISITES The next thing to work for, one that we ought to attempt right now, is the general acceptance of a standard of Sunday school work which will insure that every person in the school of high- school age has received at the very least that amount of systematic Biblical knowledge which is embraced in the standard elementary teacher- training courses. Every person of an age to enter a teacher-training class should have passed this Sunday school test of Biblical preparation. The present teacher-training Bible study work should be a prerequisite of teacher-training. The Bible drills are not, in any proper sense, teacher-train- ing. They represent — sometimes — the knowledge which every intelligent Christian person should have. The tendency of our present practice in teacher-training is to set apart even this ele- mentary Biblical knowledge as though it were a thing required of teachers, but quite negligible by all others. It is not advanced learning; it is sadly elementary. If we could secure such preparation before entrance on teacher-training classes, by the assurance that our schools gave this Biblical training and tested its people in it, it would won- derfully simplify our work with training students. Instead of attempting to master some four or five subjects, they could specialize on those that were most closely related to teaching and methods. Then we would find it easy to enlist really godly professional teachers in such work. 218 OPPORTUNITY IN TEACHER TRAINING To be able to glibly repeat, parrot-like, a series of elementary Bible drills may have for a while a fascination for feeble minds, but it can have little or no value for a constructive personality; it cannot train teachers. The emphasis on these often puerile drills limits the training class to persons of lesser mental calibre and lesser am- bitions in regard to service. It deludes them into the hope that mastering such drills will fit them to teach; then comes the sad awakening, when they test out the results of such training courses. Following pedagogical courses and work in psychology, teachers in advanced training should receive biblical work which represents modem scholarship. The best plan is to follow the in- tensive study of a single book or a special type of biblical literature in order to introduce the student to this method and to establish right habits of study. Teacher-training must aim to lead teachers to competency as Bible students. MOEE INTELLIGENT COUKSES Second, shake off the shackles of our present mechanisms, of something like forty short lessons of forty minutes each, every one containing forty sentences in apt alliteration. Get these people to think. If you cannot lead a teacher to think, that teacher can never lead another to think. Despite all the well-laid plans of mechanics in this mat- ter, make up your mind to give your class a chance to get deeper into some of these subjects 219 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL tliaii tlie present scheme usually permits. It is a fallacy to argue that, because people have little time, they must try to compass a training course in some forty forty-minute drilled recitations. That is only to waste a lot of their time. It does not train. The same amount of time spent on fewer subjects, with real earnest attempts to get at basic principles and to secure the young teach- er ^s understanding of their application would set us all much farther along the road. If you can only get in twelve lessons in a season, then give all the twelve to one small group of subjects, such as '^Interest and Attention," *^ Lesson Presenta- tion;'' or take some really good text-book or treatise on the principles of religious education in the school, and let every student master that. Of course the book should be within reach of their understanding, but not, as some of our teacher-training text-books have been, beneath their respect. You can depend on it that when- ever a student has been startled with real in- terest in the study of one good book, that is only the beginning; others will follow; the habit has been established. I have seen this illustrated hundreds of times until my faith has become firm that one of the finest things you can do for any- one, one of the farthest reaching, is to get him started just once to study a good book of this kind.^ We have failed in several important respects ^ For suggestions of titles see the book list in Chapter XXVII. 220 OPPORTUNITY IN TEACHER TRAINING in our teacher-training. Yon can see one evidence in the small number who go on with advanced work; they go no further because the first start awakened in them no appetite for more. A light- ning-express, hop-and-skip tour of the whole world is not the best incentive to helpful, cultural travel. BEGININGS ARE ONLY BEGINNINGS Again, cease to delude young teachers into thinking that an elementary diploma is the open sesame to Sunday school success. We must in- sist that it is not by any means the goal, that it is only the starting point. It is the line that we draw and say that no one ought to or can enter this race who does not toe this line. We do wrong when we hand out those diplomas with high- sounding encomiums, as though the recipients had achieved astounding educational heights. Per- haps we have stopped many who did run well by leading them to assume that the race was ended, that they had arrived. We must do everything in our power to make the present elementary course or any series of elementary lessons just the be- ginning, that which shall give the incentive to a life of continued preparation, progress, and im- provement. Only such toil and development gives satisfaction in service. The teachers who have arrived and have no further to go are soon dis- contented; they either go back or they back out. Teaching will not lose its attractiveness to those who ought to teach if we mahe^ its prepara- 221 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL tory course mean something dignified^ serious, and, to a proper degree, even difficult. If we are wise enough to look forward we will be gov- erned in our plans for the training of teachers by the ideal of the school that is coming to be rather than by the fact of the school as it has been. This will be especially worthy of consid- eration inasmuch as we are to-day making the training of young people of first importance, for these young people ought to be teachers in the school of the next two decades; the courses of training ought to fit them for the progress and improvement the school will see in that period. What does this mean to the church, the pastor, or the Sunday school worker anxious to secure better trained teachers? Does it not mean simply this, that we have to put more of ourselves into planning teacher-training work? We may well be grateful for the beginnings that have been made in this work, for the elementary courses that have been worked out, but we must now go for- ward, must secure courses of study suited to the needs of our teachers, recognizing differences of needs and providing for them. It means that we cannot do this work on a wholesale plan. We cannot sit back when some publisher gets out a course, no matter how well arranged it may be, and count that the work is accomplished. Every teacher must, in no small measure, be guided by his own needs and the needs of his classes. It means, too, that, if we would hold the good we 222 OPPORTUNITY IN TEACHER TRAINING have gained already in teacher-training, we must go forward to better things ; we must raise stand- ards; we must offer better courses. The best things in teacher-training have not all been done. There is a great chance for leadership here, a great chance in the local field, and there is noth- ing that will better repay self-investment on the part of pastor or of trained teacher than this work of stimulating and guiding our teachers to habits of study and self -development.^ •For explicit suggestions on courses in teacher-training under these ideals see the report of the special Commission on University Courses appointed by the Religious Education Association. The report is published gratis. 223 CHAPTEE XXVI MAKING YOUE EXPEETS AT HOME The cliildren of light are taking lessons of the other people and becoming wise in their day. Corporations conducting great manufacturing and mercantile enterprises no longer expect any one person to master all the details of their concerns; they have learned that in affairs of magnitude the jack-of-all-trades is ever master of none. The Sunday schools are realizing that they, too, are engaged in affairs of magnitude, and that it is too much to expect that anyone shall be familiar in a thorough-going way with all the details of a school. We need experts — that is, those who have concentrated their thought and energy on some special problem or some special phase of Sunday school service — so -that, as prob- lems arise, they may meet them with special knowledge of the best ways of solving them. There is no need to argue the advantage of ex- pert service; the difficulty is to get the experts. The greater number of workers would say, if you should suggest that their school would be better for the steady service of experts, **That 224 MAKING YOUR EXPERTS AT HOME is perhaps possible in large city schools, with un- limited resources; but we have a small school, with hardly funds enough to get along.'* I wish to suggest a method by which any school, no mat- ter how small, may have its experts. If you cannot hire your experts, get home- made ones. They may serve your purpose much better. All sorts of fascinating associations cluster about the phrase, *^ home-made." Home- made pies were never surpassed. There are ad- vantages much more attractive in home-made Sunday-school experts. They will know your sit- uation and your problems at first hand ; they will have heart as well as brain in the jobs they tackle ; all the growth they get from service will come to the school where they are; they will be always on hand, and, by no means the least consideration, they will have to stay by and see their prescrip- tions take effect. You know it is an easy thing to give advice when you know you will be safely out of the way before the patient feels the effect of following your prescription. INDIVIDUAL SPECIALIZATION" Given a school where the following simple conditions are to be found, the making of your own experts is always possible; the conditions are: A few people willing to take pains and fol- low leadership, willing to use the postoffice, and to apply a little business sense to the Sunday school. ^' 225 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL Here are some of tlie difficulties on wMch every school needs expert advice : Sunday school buildings ; adaptation of present quarters to good work; equipment for classes and rooms; rational, enduring methods of securing all the scholars who ought to be in the schools ; methods of meet- ing the special needs of youth in the critical periods, class records and accounts that save time and labour, and are yet reliable ; selection of les- sons and lesson material; social life of the school; securing and training new teachers ; training offi- cers. Thousands of schools all over the world have been meeting these very problems for dec- ades; surely some have worked out approximate solutions. "We know that a very large number of schools have met with success in dealing with different items in this list of difficulties and prob- lems. The principle reason so many schools go on blindly and alone, seeking to solve problems that have been solved by similar schools long ago, is that no one has stood up saying, *^That par- ticular difficulty is my particular job in this school; I will know all there is to be known about it. ' ' The way to solve difficulties is not to sit down in a body and gaze at them until you are all dis- couraged; the better plan is to let every worker pick his own foe, and fire away at it until it is ** fired.'' Specialization is possible not only for the great corporation; it is possible for the little school. 226 MAKING YOUR EXPERTS AT HOME A TYPICAl, PLAN Suppose, to come well witliin the mark, we have a school in which the teachers and ofhcers number only ten, all told. Let them get together some night and, after a conference on what is being done in the Sunday school world and what their school might do, let them decide on the prob- lems or difficulties which ought to be tackled first in their school. Suppose they pick out eight or ten, or it might be better to start with only four or five. The first is, we will say, the matter of making the best use possible of a church building or other room which was not designed for school purposes; some schools would be at the point where they could take up the matter of a sep- arate building. Then the superintendent would say: *^Mr. Thompson, you know something about buildings and that sort of thing; will you just make it your business to get all the information you can on how other schools do, on the use of screens between classes, folding doors, dividing blackboards and curtains 1 "Write around and get any plans you can. See if you can get any help or advice for us. If you'll do this, we won't lay any other job on you, outside of teaching.'' ^^But, Mr. Superintendent," says Thompson, ** where '11 I write to; I don't know where to look for information." *^Look through the Sunday school papers, back numbers and all. Write to the International Sunday School Association, and to The Reli- 227 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL gious Education Association which maintains a Bureau of Information in Chicago; they will tell you where to find further information." Before Thompson has been on that job very long he will be an enthusiast on the subject; he will thoroughly enjoy his job, and he will inspire others with interest and enthusiasm. He will start wheels turning because he will become a crank — the very best kind of a crank, one cre- ated by special knowledge. He will write for in- formation ; he will learn soon of schools that have been working on this matter for a long while, and he will wonder how it happened that their school sat and sighed over difficulties that were being solved all about them. That school, how- ever, will have by that time one good home-made expert. DEVELOPING AUTHOKITIES What happened to Thompson will happen to others, only it will not happen ; it will be brought about by wise direction. The superintendent, be- fore the meeting mentioned above, will have thought over the special aptitudes and interests of his other workers. He sees that Miss Allen is especially adapted to study the teacher-recruiting and training problem, and he gives her a start in that direction. He sees that Mr. Johnson is just the man, with vital force and executive ability, to study the matter of enlisting scholars, and he gives him a task in which he will take delight. 228 MAKING YOUR EXPERTS AT HOME These individuals, as many as are available, needed and willing, by correspondence, collecting facts and literature, stud^dng the same and ar- ranging the material collected both for reference and for the enlightenment of others, soon pre- pare themselves to shed concentrated and focal- ized light on problems one at a time. Each be- comes, in time, the authority on a special subject; they have the literature and material collected at hand. The task becomes a fascinating one to them. If there is a pleasure of collecting pictures of dogs, or piling up postal cards, why should there be less pleasure in collecting pictures and gathering facts about Sunday school classes, buildings, lessons, methods, record-cards? The way to make experts, then, is to cease thinking of all the business of the school as every- body's business, to agree on a separation of tasks among the teachers, officers and any others who will work at them — ^for there are many who would come into school service under this plan — and to hold each one responsible for knowledge of his own special focal point. 229 CHAPTEE XXVn THE teacher's TOOL-CHEST It is a good deal easier to draw instructive and warning lessons from the oppressive Egyptians than it is to avoid their errors. Many a modern church is demanding that its servants shall make bricks without straw; even worse than that, they are expected to do the most delicate work in the world without any kind of tools or technical aids unless they will provide them for themselves. Sunday school teachers are often supposed to have acquired grace sufficient to submit to any degree of criticism while never allowing them- selves to expect any least degree of assistance. Sometimes we say that the Sunday school teacher is the heart and secret of the Sunday school problem. But we have to cut deeper. Back of teacher is the church, the responsible organi- zation. The teacher problem is up to the church ; if ever teacher-training shall be universal, it will be not only because the teachers feel their defi- ciencies, but also because the church sincerely en- deavours to meet their need of training and in- sists on its right to the very best service that can be rendered. 230 THE TEACHER'S TOOL-CHEST Now, when a church says to a man or a woman, Come and do this piece of work, it ought, at least, also to say. Since you are to receive no salary, we will see to it that the proper tools are fur- nished for this work, and that you have any aid you need toward working efficiency. In other words, it is the business of the church to furnish its teachers with good working reference libraries. To do so would be to take a long step toward ade- quate teacher-training and to ensure the continu- ous growth and improvement of the powers of the teaching staff. WHAT THE CHURCH MAY DO The teacher's tool-chest, the working reference library, ought to be placed either in the church or, as might be practicable and decidedly advan- tageous in many smaller communities, in the pub- lic librar^^; at any rate, it should be in the place where it can be most easily reached and readily used by the largest number of teachers. It is worth while to note that the plan of placing such a collection of books in a public library is not evolved out of the whole cloth, but has been in practical operation for a number of years in sev- eral places. And, what is more, library boards gladly purchase the books. This is in accord with the principle of meeting the needs of any im- portant part of the library's constituency. Wher- ever the collection of books may be, it should be by itself. This does not mean in a glass case, 231 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL with the key in the superintendent's pocket or at the janitor's honse, but so set off that it may have at hand a study table or tables, where those who use the library may do their work. One school set the library in a classroom and had that room opened, warmed and ready two nights of the week, before prayer-meeting and be- fore teachers ' meeting. Needless to say, the books were used. It would be a capital plan in such schools as were able to compass it to have one of the class- rooms known during the week as the ^^faculty room,'' where not the library only, but all maps, charts, special teaching apparatus and the teach- ers' records could be kept and be accessible to the faculty. But the real advantages of the teacher's tool-chest need not wait for such elaborate facili- ties; they are possible even if you have to keep your collection of tools in a comer in some hos- pitable home. THE WAY TO BEGIN IS TO BEGIN But I hear one saying, *^This is all very well for schools that have plenty of money to use on special libraries." To tell you the truth, there are as yet really no schools with plenty of money to spend; all have to use their little to the best advantage. If a school has such a library it is because it knows that the library pays and it could not do business without it. It is a money- saving proposition because it is an efficiency-in- 232 THE TEACHER'S TOOL-CHEST creasing device. But what if you simply haven't the funds for it! Then begin without them, and get some one to give the book you need most of all. Put this matter before a lawyer, the pastor or anyone who knows the value of books as tools, and see if, after all, you have any real difficulty in starting your tool-chest. You may have to start with one book; but it never has happened yet that one used book stood alone very long. What tools ought to be in the chest! Here one is strongly tempted to counsels of perfection. You know it is so easy to set out an elaborate list of books, if only to show how wide is your bibliographical information. Yet this is true: poor tools are worse than none at all; the best tools are the cheapest. Set out with the ideal of quality rather than quantity. Decide what you need most of all and get the best of its kind. I would say for the average school, first of all, a good Bible dictionary, preferably the one-volume Hastings, the best thing of this kind in print for the Sunday school teacher. Next, a good com- mentary; here again there is a good one-volume work available published by the Macmillan Com- pany at a very low price. These books on the Bible are placed first because this is a reference librar}^, primarily, rather than a collection of study books. If you can do so go a little farther, at least in the matter of books on the Bible ; get, for instance, a few books on the making of the Bible, Price's *' Ancestry of our English Bible, '* 233 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL Kent's ^'Origin and Permanent Value of the Old Testament'' and Bennett's ^'Primer of the Bible." Then books on the Sunday school, its organization and management; on child study, psychology; on teaching and on the general prin- ciples of religious education. Get worth-while books, in which the authors, having the right to speak with some authority, treat their subjects thoroughly and with dignity. Be sure to include James's ** Talks to Teachers" and Du Bois's little classic '* Point of Contact." The list is perhaps too long to give here. Buy nothing because it is cheap, but each because it is just a little beyond you, enough to make you reach out and grow up. Then make sure the library is known, talked up ; make its surroundings attractive ; use it your- self; show beginners how to use it; tell people outside of it, and then watch it grow by use. A WORKING LIBRARY ON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION Here are some of the best tools for the teach- er's tool-chest. The titles are selected in view of the practical helpfulness of the books for teachers. Those marked with an * may be regarded as in- dispensable ; they constitute the minimum require- ments for this Library. Those marked with a § should be added next, and all these books should be secured. The books listed below constitute the titles to be found in The Traveling Library of the Eeli- gious Education Association. They represent an 234 THE TEACHER ^S TOOL-CHEST attempt to select a library, of not over one hun- dred titles, of the best and most practical works in religious education from the modem point of ^dew, including books on principles, methods and materials. BIBLIOGRAPHIES Bibliography on Bihle and Public Schools. (Relig. Educ. Assn., free.) Bibliography on Moral Training in the Public Schools. C'Relig. Educ," Feb., 1911.) Bibliography on Graded Sunday-School Texts. (''Relig. Educ.,'' Aug., 1909. Free pamphlet.) Child-Welfare Bibliography. (Chicago Public Library.) Bibliography of Education, current issues. (U. S. Bu- reau of Education.) Bibliography of Child-Study, current issues. (U. S. Bureau of Education.) PRINCIPLES OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION *5 Volumes of Religious Education Association (Vols. I, III, IV, and V, $1.00 each; Vol. II, $2.50). Christian Nurture, Horace Bushnell. (Scribners, $1.25 net. ) Religious Education; Hoiv to Improve It, C. L. Draw- bridge. (Longmans, 90c net; paper, 50c net.) *Education in Religion and Morals, George A Coe. (Revell, $1.35.) ^Principles of Religious Education, Butler et al. (Long- mans, $1.00.) The Development of Religion, Irving King. (Macmillan, $1.75.) Talks on Psychology and Lifers Ideals, William James. (Henrj^ Holt & Co., $1.50.) 235 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL Personal and Ideal Elements in Education^ Henry C. King. (Macmillan, $1.50 net.) Moral Principles in Education, John Dewey. (Hough- ton Mifflin Co., 35c net.) Making of Character , John MacCunn. (Macmillan, $1.25 net.) Educational Values, W. C. Bagley. (Macmillan, $1.10 net.) The Principles of Religious Development, George Gallo- way. (Macmillan, $3.00 net.) Education as Growth, L. H. Jones. (Ginn & Co., $1.25.) Religious Freedom in American Education, Joseph H. Crooker. (Amer. Unit. Assn., $1.00 net.) Studies in Religious Nurture, A. B. Van Ormer. (Lu- theran Pub. Society.) *The Psychology of Religion, E. D. Starbuck. (Scrib- ners, $1.50.) The Psychology of Religious Belief, J. B. Pratt. (Mac- millan, $1.50.) The Psychology of Religious Experience, Edward S. Ames. (Houghton Mifflin Co., $2.50 net.) *The Child and His Religion, George E. Dawson. (U. of C. Press, 75c. net.) %A Study of Child Nature, Elizabeth Harrison. (Chi- cago Kindergarten College, $1.00.) ^Adolescence, G. S. Hall. 2 vols. (Appletons, $7.50 net.) Psychology of Childhood, Frederick Tracy. (D. C. Heath & Co., $1.20 net.) Training of Parents, Ernest H. Abbott. (Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00 net.) %The Unfolding of Personality, H. Thiselton Mark. (U. of C. Press, $1.00.) 236 THE TEACHER'S TOOL-CHEST Parenthood and Race Culture, Caleb W. Saleeby. (Mof- fat, Yard & Co., $2.50 net.) Child Problems, George B. Mangold. (Macmillan, $1.25 net.) The Training of Infants, H. G. Moore. (Longmans, 75c.) The Daivn of Character, Edith E. R. Mumford. (Long- mans, $1.20 net.) ^Rational Living, Henry C. King. (Doran, 50c.) Girl and Woman, Caroline W. Latimer. (Appletons, $1.50 net.) Tip Through Childhood, George A. Hubbell. (Putnams, $1.25.) %The Essentials of Character, E. 0. Sisson. (Macmillan, $1.00 net.) Moral Education, E. H. Griggs. (Huebsch, $1.60 net.) Education of the Will, James Payot. (Funk & Wag- inalk Co., $1.50.) BIBLE STUDY The New Appreciation of the Bible, W. C. Selleck. (U. of C. Press, $1.50 net.) Jesus Christ and the Christian Character, F. G. Pea- body. (Geo. H. Doran Co., 50c.) Hebrew Life and Thought, Louise S. Houghton. (U. of C. Press, $1.50 net.) The Origin and Permanent Value of the Old Testament, Charles F. Kent. (Scribners, $1.00 net.) The Great Teachers of Judaism and Christianity, C. F. Kent. (The Methodist Book Concern, 75c.) The Prophets as Statesmen and Preachers, H. T. Fowler. (Pilgrim Press, 40c.) 237 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL THE CHURCH The Efficient Layman, Henry F. Cope. (Amer. Baptist Pub. Soc, $1.00 net.) §The Educational Ideal in the Ministry, W. H. P. Faunce. (Macmillan, $1.25 net.) The Church of Today, J. H. Crooker. (Amer. Unit. Assn., 75e. net.) Training the Church of the Future, F. E. Clark. (Funk & WagrnaUs, 75c.) THE SUNDAY SCHOOL *The Modern Sunday School in Principle and Practice, Henry F. Cope. (Revell, $1.00 net,) *The Graded Sunday School in Principle and Practice, H. H. Meyer. (Eaton & Mains, 75c.) Principles and Ideals for the Sunday School, Burton and Mathews. (U. of C. Press, $1.00 net.) The Making of a Teacher, M. G. Brumbaugh. (S. S. Times Co., $1.00 net.) Elements of Religious Pedagogy, F. L. Pattee. (Eaton & Mains, 50c.) The Evolution of the Sunday School, Henry F. Cope. (Pilgrim Press, 75c.) *Hand-Work in the Sunday School, M. S. Littlefield. (S. S. Times Co., $1.00.) *The Pupil and the Teacher, L. A. Weigle. (Geo. H. Doran Co., 50c.) Organizing and Building Up the Sunday School, J. L. Hurlbut. (Eaton & Mains, 65c net.) Adult Bible Classes, Irving F. Wood. (Pilgrim Press, 75c.) 238 THE TEACHER'S TOOL-CHEST The Training of the Twig, C. L. Drawbridge. (Long- mans, $1.25.) SUNDAY SCHOOL CURRICrUI.A An Outline of a Bihle-School Curriculum, George W. Pease. (U. of C. Press, $1.50 net.) Missions in the Sunday School, Martha B. Hixson. (Young People's Missionary Movement, 25c net; paper, 15c net.) The Teaching of Bible Classes, Edwin F. See. (Y. M. C. A. Press, 50c.) ILLUSTRATIVE SUNDAY SCHOOL TEXTS The Life of Jesus, Herbert W. Gates. Illustrating '* Con- structive Series." (Univ. of Chicago Press, 75c.) Gospel in the Church, illustrating ^' Young Churchman" Graded Series. (Young Churchman Co.) Epistles of New Testament, illustrating S. S. Commis- sion of New York. (Young Churchman Co.) Stories from Old Testament; World Stories and Bible as Literature, illustrating Unitarian Series. (Amer. Unit. S. S. Soc.) Heroes of the Faith and Christian Life and Conduct, illustrating Bible Study Union Series. (Chas. Scrib- ners. ) Religious Education Through Graded Instruction, illus- trating Constructive Series. (Univ. of Chicago Press, free.) Boys and Girls in Hebrew Homes, J. L. Keedy. Illus- trating ^'Keedy" Series. (Graded S. S. Pub. Co.) Kindergarten Lessons for Church Sunday Schools. (Young Churchman Co., 75c net.) The Books of the Bible, Hazard and Fowler. Illustrat- ing Senior Texts. (Pilgrim Press, 50c net.) 239 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL THE HOME The Culture of Justice, Patterson DuBois. (Dodd, Mead & Co., 75c net.) *T}ie Progress of Moral and Beligious Education in the American Home, C. W. Votaw. (Religious Edu- cation Association, 25c.) Making the Best of Our Children, Mary "Wood-Allen. 2 vols. (McClurg, $1.00 each, net.) Fingerposts to Children's Beading, W. T. Field. (A. C. McClurg & Co., $1.00 net.) §The Training of Children in Beligion, George Hodges. (Appletons, $1.50 net.) PUBLIC SCHOOLS Moral Training in the Public Schools, C. E. Rugh, et al. Ginn & Co., $1.25.) Moral Instruction and Training in Schools, M. E. Sad- ler. 2 vols. (Longmans, $1.50 each.) Systematic Moral Instruction, John K. Clark. (A. S. Barnes Co., $1.00 net.) Wider Use of the School Plant, C. A. Perry. (Charities Pub. Committee, $1.25.) Laggards in Our Schools, L. P. Ayres. (Charities Pub- lication Committee, $1.50.) SOCIAL The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, Jane Addams. (Macmillan, $1.25.) Social Development and Education, M. V. O'Shea. (Houghton Mifflin Co., $2.00.) Social Education, C. A. Scott. (Ginn & Co., $1.25.) Social Solutions, Thomas C. Hall. (Eaton & Mains, $1.50 net.) 240 THE TEACHER'S TOOL-CHEST Social Settlement Movement, William I. Cole. (Bulle- tin, Harvard Univ.) COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY Individual Training in Colleges , C. S. Birdseye. (Mac- millan, $1.75 net) Trend in Higher Education, William R. Harper. (Uni- versity of Chicago Press, $1.50.) BOYS AND GIRLS The Boy Problem, W. B, Forbush. (Pilgrim Press, $1.00 net.) How to Deal with Lads, P. Green. (Longmans, 80c net.) *The Coming Generation, W. B. Forbush. (Appletons, $1.50.) Building Boyhood. (Association Press, $1.00 net.) The Girl in Her Teens, Margaret Slattery. (S. S. Times Co., 50c.) Building Your Girl, Kenneth Wayne. McClurg, 50c net.) Girl and Woman, C. W. Latimer. (Appleton, $1.50 net.) 241 CHAPTER XXVIII PUBLIC OPINION AND THE SUNDAY SCHOOL Peesonal inquiries at first hand of many schools in many different parts of the country leaves one with a very clear impression as to at least one hindrance to the general adoption of the graded lessons for Sunday schools. The impediment which obtrudes itself everywhere is the suspicion on the part of persons of at least only average intelligence that the lessons are simply the pet propaganda of pedagogical faddists. One meets the antipathy and opposition due to this notion not so frequently in the minds of teachers as on the lips of officers and laymen. Sometimes it is expressed in terms of rather cheap derision by pastors whose intelligence on matters of wider interest than sermon-making is often sub-normal. That is a safe statement to make here, since these pastors would scorn to be guilty of reading any- thing dealing with the foolish fads of psychology and pedagogy. These people will tell you that the one thing needed to *^run a schooP' is good, old common-sense and religious devotion. Of 242 PUBLIC OPINION AND SUNDAY SCHOOL course, they forget that there is nothing more sane or sensible than the open-eyed recognition of truth, nor more truly devout than obedience to divine laws as written in the nature of our lives. But that is not the point of this discussion. Yet the people who scoff at gradation as fad- dism are the people whose general sympathy either sustains or breaks down the school. They do not teach, but they touch the general life of the school either vitally or fatally. Their opin- ions percolate through the church body, turning the minds of parents to indifference, chilling the mental atmosphere breathed by the teachers, cre- ating a public opinion that leads to expressions of congregational opposition for which there is no conscious rational basis. The need of the Sun- day school to-day is a widespread, healthy public opinion — perhaps one might better say, church opinion — to support its endeavours toward reli- gious efficiency on educational lines. EDUCATING THE CHUECH The greatest single need of this moment seems to be the education of general opinion to a clear understanding of the reasons for the graded school, to a recognition of the sound common- sense of which modern educational plans are only the clear and practical expression. It ought to be possible to lead every sensible person to see the folly of labelling gradation as a fad. This facile phrase, **only a fad,'' is the easiest and 243 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL most witless weapon of the slothful mind. Every intelligent pastor owes it as a simple duty to his people to teach them something of our more recent readings of God's ways of bringing souls to their fulness. He is dealing to-day with people who get their education from ephemeral maga- zines and their prejudices from daily papers. Yet he has the task of directing and training them to the tremendous undertakings of the church. It will not do to leave the people to form their ideas on the important subject of religious edu- cation from the cheap witticisms of cub reporters detailed to interview the college professors on some scientific discovery. The newspapers are not to-day a sufficient guide in either educational or religious matters. The work of the Sunday school calls for the service of the scientific spe- cialist. That means nothing esoteric, porten- tously academic, nor in any way removed from common sense. The pastor owes it to his people — ^the greater number of whom know nothing whatever on the subject of religious pedagogy, and therefore are able to discuss it with absolute freedom — ^to lead them to a sympathetic under- standing of the service that science is rendering in this particular. We need sermons such as Horace Bushnell preached for the education of the popular mind on religious education. We have to convert and educate the constituency upon which the school leans for moral and financial support. 244 PUBLIC OPINION AND SUNDAY SCHOOL In sucli a campaign of popular education we have to look to the pastors for the most direct and effective work. Besides preaching on the subject in such a way as to clear the mind of prejudices, he may do such to direct the reading of his people. Either in the discourse or in the church publica- tions or by bulletins posted in the church he may call attention to the current literature on the modern work of religious education, both in church and school and home. Not a month passes nowadays without some really significant, read- able article appearing in our current literature on religious training. In one month there were in popular magazines, not counting weeklies nor technical publications, some half dozen good ar- ticles on religious training in the home, Sunday school and college. People will read these if their attention is directed to them. They need this leadership. The pastor should lead his flock into such pastures. He must feel his intellectual re- sponsibility. The uplands of knowledge are not for his enjoyment alone. A leader is not only one who goes before, but one who so goes before that others follow. The test of a widely-read pas- tor is a well-read people. The books which laymen will read, the books which mothers will study on the training of chil- dren, the work of the church and the home in teaching religion, multiply fast. They ought to 245 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL be in the possession of the churches, to be passed from home to home. They ought to be owned by every man and every woman who cares at all about the welfare of youth and the future of the church. If the pastor will call attention to them, read them himself and advise their reading, he will find that many of his problems of religious education are solving themselves. He will find that when new plans, approved by the scientific mind, are adopted in his school or church, there is a sound, informed, sympathetic public opinion ready to back them up. With that we can go far and fairly fast; without it but a little distance at a time. We cannot too soon begin the creation of a supporting public opinion for the forward movement of the Sunday school. Public opinion must be educated in the church, for church opinion supports this school. Here are some suggestions on a method of developing thoughtf nines s and shaping opinion within the church: Have some large placards, or display banners prepared with striking arguments on the need and value of Sunday school work. Secure permission to hang these in the church on a Sun- day when the pastor will agree to preach on the work of the school. Let the placards include short mottoes like these: *'The Soul of All Culture is the Cul- ture OF the Soul.'' — BushnelL 246 PUBLIC OPINION AND SUNDAY SCHOOL You Cannot Purify the Well by Paint- ing THE Pump. Begin With the Springs OF Life in the Sunday School. We Need Not Predict the Future — We Can Determine It if We Educate the Whole of Every Child for the Whole of Life. The Children of To-day are the Church OF To-morrow. How Much Do We Invest TO Hold and Train Them for the Church? It is Better to Form Than to Reform. Besides these small placards there should be large displays containing more careful arguments. The following will serve to suggest the idea. They should all be designed to awaken thought as to the efficiency of the school and its claims to adequate support. the child tests the church You may know how seriously a church takes its work by the provision it makes for the child in : I. Adequate Plant for Religious Culture. Building designed for child instruction, activity, —inspiration. 247 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL Building separate and designed for child religious worship and life. Special rooms for classes. Special tools, blackboards, manual and play ma- terials. II. Adequate Working Force. 1. A '^Director" of Religious Education. (Many churches have these directions. IVIany others have paid Sunday school superintend- ents. ) 2. Directors of Play and Gymnasium. (A number of churches have salaried instruc- tors. Some do their physical work in the Y. M. C. A.) 3. Teaching Force for the School. Trained to teach. (Some churches pay their teachers. ) 4. Home Workers who take life of church into children's homes. III. An Adequate Program op Child Culture. 1. A Graded Curriculum of Studies meeting child's developing needs and interest. 2. A graded series of activities and service for child life. 3. Training in social relations and duties. 4. Practical preparation for lifers duties as citi- zen, home-maker, church worker. 5. Educational organization of the church school according to (1) Life Periods: Infancy, up to 7, Beginners. Early Childhood, up to 10, Primary. Later Childhood, up to 14, Junior. Early Adolescence, up to 18, Intermediate. 248 PUBLIC OPINION AND SUNDAY SCHOOL Later Adolescence, up to 25, Senior. Adult Years, Adult. (2) Each Division having: (a) A principal in charge. (b) Group of suitable teachers. (3) Each grade or class having special social life and activities. A PERMANENT EDUCATIONAL EXHIBIT The next suggestion calls for more work, but it offers promise of larger and more varied re- turns. Enlist the workers of the church and school, including all students who will cooperate, in the task of collecting and installing a perma- nent Exhibit on Eeligious Education in the Church. This exhibit should seek to show the scope of the educational work of the local church, includ- ing the school, the best metliods in use, the plans of operation, the needs of the work and the pro- gramme for the future. It should include pic- tures, charts, maps, diagrams, samples of work, outlines and objects showing just what is being done or is to be done. The exhibit should be installed in classrooms convenient for visitors. Much of the material can be mounted on cards to be hung on the walls. The best way is to hang the cards on tapes run- ning through eyelet holes in the cards. Other materials can be set up in book-cases and cabinets. All the labour involved is not a drawback, but an advantage. Plan to take plenty of time for this 249 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL work and to enlist the services of as many of the boys and girls as you can. You will thus educate them, and they will keep their parents informed, awakening curiosity and preparing for the very purpose of your exhibit. Scarcely any form of manual work for the Sunday school stu- dents could be designed which would be more valuable than participation in the preparation of this exhibit. The two schemes or outline plans for exhibits which follow are for (1) An Exhibit for the Local Sunday School, and (2) An Exhibit on Moral and Civic Education. Plan to gather and install the exhibit on the school first. The very work on that will reveal the need for the other. PLAN FOR A LOCAL SUNDAY SCHOOL EXHIBIT A. Historical. Photographs of church, Sunday school building and rooms in the past. Text-books used in the past. Supplies of previous years, including circulars, an- nouncements. B. Equipment. Photographs and drawings showing present physical plant, buildings, etc. Photographs and drawings showing other plans of schools. Drawings of an ideal Sunday school plant for the community. Books on Sunday school building and equipment. C. Personnel. Photographs of present officers. 250 PUBLIC OPINION AND SUNDAY SCHOOL D. Organization. Chart showing scheme of organization and officers. Chart showing plan of gradation of classes. Photographs of school assembled; all, by depart- ments, by classes. E. Sunday School Principles. Large cards setting forth the principles of a mod- ern Sunday school, showing how large an invest- ment it needs and justifies, how small a propor- tion of time and money it now receives, etc. Set this section here, so that interest may be first quickened by all that goes before, and ready to receive the arguments of these cards. F. Lesson Materl^l. Chart showing plan of graded studies. Examples of lesson material, text-books, shown by departments, by grades and by classes. Large chart showing the subjects studied. G. Activities. Examples of pupil's lesson work, home work. Examples of manual work. Institutions, etc., aided by the school. School recreation, play and social life. Sewing classes, cooking, etc., etc., adjuncts to school. H. Demonstrations. Of class at work. Manual work. Teachers' council, sitting in meeting. Kindergarten assembled, plays, etc. I. A Statement of Aims and Needs. Set out, in simplest shortest terms possible, on large cards the facts of your community ^ the plans you have to meet its needs, the support which all can give. 251 EFFICIENCY IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL SUGGESTIONS FOR EXHIBIT ON MORAL AND CIVIC EDUCATION 1. Section on Philosophy of Moral Education. Special work on this subject. Keference books. Reports. Set up in large placards terse statements of leading thinkers on the moral aim in education. 2. Section on the Student. Studies and diagrams showing moral, personal en- vironment of school children. Diagrams on foreign population, with its needs of education in civil duties. Diagrams on Heredity, as Juke's family. Photographs of school children, '^before and after." 3. Organization. Agencies for promoting moral and *' religious" ed- ucation. Pamphlets, circulars, prospectuses of organizations. Material published by such agencies. Descriptions of institutions. Place of the home as agency in moral education. Training-schools for nurses. Public schools, place in work of. Photographs of special institutions, as Sunday schools of modern type. Plants and equipment in public schools and other agencies. Preventive work, as boys' clubs, *'gang" organiza- tions, school-civic organizations. 4. Curricula. Text and study material. Morals, ethics, civics, pa- triotism, heroes, biography. National history, civics, physiology and hygiene. Sample lesson outlines. Pupil's work. 252 PUBLIC OPINION AND SUNDAY SCHOOL School and other curricula ; diagrams showing place of these studies. 5. Method. Outlines of plans. Photographs of groups in ' ' expressional activities," as in school government ; school cities, groups en- gaged in relief work, ambulance work, improve- ment and city beautiful work. Story-telling in public libraries. Mothers' and parents' councils. 253 Date Due fly f^'^ ''' , *> ft -ru '^ -■ - m T -f- '1 f/kCUtn AG 2 '48 AG 31 '48 SMMMm m f