iini!. ! ill! , ijlhli aassV4w4-l- Book^.O^:|__ THE AIMS OF TEACHING IN JEWISH SCHOOLS ISAAC M. WISE CENTENARY PUBLICATION OF THE TEACHERS' INSTITUTE of the HEBREW UNION COLLEGE The Aims of Teaching in Jewish Schools A HANDBOOK FOR TEACHERS BY RABBI LOUIS GROSSMANN, D. D. PRINCIPAI,, TEACHERS' INSTITUTE HEBREW UNION COI.I,EGE WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DR. G. STANLEY HALL PRESIDENT, CI,ARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER. MASS. "i:Dn ^Si'h); iy:h yn CINCINNATI TEACHERS' INSTITUTE OF THE HEBREW UNION COI^IyEGE 1919 i^c G;1 Copyright 1919, by Thk Teachers' Institute of the Hebrew Union CoIvI^ege TRANSFERRED FROM COPYRIGHT OFFieg MOV 22 m9 oUN (dw ( -ji d ©CI.A566698 Dedicated to Isaac M. Wise AND Congregation Bnai Yeshurun PREFACE In view of the fact that religion is a central influence in life, the teaching of it is a prime concern. But no subject is so conventional and so slow to avail itself of large views and the efficient practice of modern education. Religious Pedagogy is a new science and still lacks both the dash of pioneers and the vision of innovators. These pages are offered as a modest contribution, in the hope that they may call attention to the possibilities which lie in the new Reform of Jewish Education, This reform will go deeper, I am certain, into the life of the Jews, because it will be more constructive than was the syn- agogal reform of fifty years ago. Louis Grossmann. Cincinnati, April 3, 1919. INTRODUCTION It has been a real inspiration to me to examine the proof of this book, which is by far the best treatise on reUgious pedagogy that has anywhere yet appeared. It places reUgious education on its proper scientific and con- structive basis. It is fitting that the Jews should take the leadership in this field, and this is the psychological moment for them to do so. I do not believe Rabbi Wise's Centenary could be celebrated in any better way or commemo- rated in any more fitting manner than by the adoption of some such splendid plan as this. Dr. Grossmann boldly and rightly takes, for the first time in this field, adequate account of our new knowledge of child nature and life. He finds fit place, too, in his scheme for biog- raphy, story-telling, and myth, music, nature and utilizes the kindergarten principle and adjusts the rich material to the successive stages in the child's psychic life and develop- ment. I am glad, too, to see the stress he lays upon the Hebrew language. In my long experience as a University teacher, who has had many Jewish students, I have come to regard the degree of familiarity which they had acquired in this language as, to some extent, an index of their docility in general. The library of books that constitute the Old Testament (and as a Christian I should like to be permitted to add those of the New) is the world's greatest text- book on pedagogy, and even their order in the canon follows in a masterly way the stages of the development of the child, which itself recapitulates that of the race. Education the world over was at first and for a long time almost solely religious, and, while it was once a master stroke of toleration to eliminate it from the school, in doing so we cut loose from genetic history and nearly lost from our educational system the greatest of all the motives that make for virtue, reverence, self-knowledge and self-control. Now we are beginning to realize the wrong we have com- mitted against child nature and are seeking in various ways to atone for it. If the Jewish leaders of this country can unite to put in operation some such scheme as is here set forth I should think they would be doing the greatest possible service to the inter- ests of their own race in keeping its priceless traditions vital and effective in the new world now opening to us, and would set an example not only to Protestants and Catholics to recon- struct their own methods to fit the needs of the new times, but would suggest to other stirpes and races in our country that to loyally con- serve their own past and to avoid the break with it which coming to~ this country often involves, they would make themselves thereby not less but more loyal Americans and be able to say of their own past that they could not love it so much, loved they not this country more. G. Stanley Hall. Clark University, March, 1919. CONTENTS. Preface r . . . 7 Introduction by Dr. G. Stanley Hall 9 The Kindergarten in the Religious School 13 Third Grade 29 Fourth Grade 49 Fifth Grade 64 Sixth Grade 82 Seventh Grade 93 Eighth Grade 124 The Relation Between the Public School and the Religious School 149 The Teacher and the Community 158 Story Telling 160 The Text Book 172 Hebrew 181 The Picture in the Religious School 194 The Sabbath and the Holy Days 203 Children's Services 216 The School Entertainments and School Services 220 Music in the Religious School 231 Charily Collections in the Religious School and Charitableness 238 THE KINDERGARTEN IN THE RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. FIRST AND SECOND GRADES. Whether or not the Kindergarten has a place in the ReHgious School is a debatable question. Some defend it, because, they say, religion cannot be taught too early ; everything depends on first influences; the child needs religion at once and should be given direction in it very early Others argue that the method of the Kindergarten is needed to give the Religious School the modern spirit, and they hope the Kindergarten will freshen up the mechanical way so hard on the children in the Religious School, and bring a salutary awakening to its teachers as well. There are finally those who urge that the Kindergarten be introduced into the Religious Schools for moral reasons. Just as the school must come to the aid of the home to compensate for the absence there of specific religious interest and activities, so the Kindergarten should supply to the children that awe for moral experiences which is the basis of individual and social life and which the modern home often fails 14 AIMS OF TEACHING to give. All these reasons rest upon an un- warranted distrust of the home and an exag- gerated hope in mere school methods. Besides, it is not quite certain that the awe and the religious feeling which the Kindergarten is to superinduce in the little children would not eventually become artificial and false. THE SOBER SPIRIT IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. Children of the pre-school age cannot enter upon so high-leveled an emotion as that ol religious awe, and are likely to lapse into con- fusion and moral helplessness if they are forced to add one more to the many "fears" they have already. Nothing could be more calamitous than to set children adrift with darkening fear into the world of life. That is the way toward superstition and demoralization. If, on the other hand, the Kindergarten is meant to bring cheer and "sweetness" into the Religious School, because its traditional tone has been sober, we should go into judgment with ourselves as to this lack of the happier spirit. But we can find in this no sufficient reason to justify the extension of religious education to so early a child period. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 15 THE CULTIVATION OF CHILD-FANCY. The Kindergarten has a place in secular edu- cation, because city childhood needs contact with nature and is entitled to less hindered freedom in play and association, but in the Re- ligious School the function of the Kindergarten is to aid the child soul to unfold from within, as it were, to give free scope to fancies and af- fections. This fine though difficult task is necessary today. We are accustomed to re- gard the religious school as a place for intel- lectual training preeminently, though we ought to concede that mental maturity is only one step in the process of religious growth. It is true that the child should be clear in its ways of thinking, because clarity is necessary for right decisions and correct adjustments in con- duct, and we must even check the imagination which often disturbs and confuses the mind. But when we deny children their natural right to linger on the wonderful, we commit a wrong against them, for we clog in their soul one of the fountains of their joy and hinder them in an essential phase of their spiritual development. If they are to have a well-rounded life, they must be allowed the delights of fancy, for an intelligent character will always seek oppor- tunities for admiration and wonder. 16 AIMS OF TEACHING JUDAISM IS TOO PROSAIC. Admiration and wonder are necessary for religion and worship. Worship is the highest reach of admiration. A reHgion that does not encourage the instinct of admiration lacks one of the essential appeals to human nature. This statement is meant as a caution with re- gard to an intellectual religion such as Judaism. We modern Jews need to cultivate more of the esthetic and poetic side of character. Jewish religiousness and Jewish morals are too prosaically intellectual. There was a time when the Jewish people was more ideal- istic, as is seen in the fact that, as soon as the world's culture was opened to them, Jews took readily to those arts and professions in which the trained imagination is a qualification. It is incumbent on us to see to it that the Jew of the future will want to enter into intimacy with the great and the true and the good, will love and admire those who further these, and will be capable of and eager for free enthusiasm. THE JEWISH CHILD NEEDS TRAINING IN IMAGINATION. In the ultimate sense, religion is good taste, the sanest, the finest, the purest, the hap- IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 17 piest taste for life. Now, fancy is an absolute requisite for this, and free childhood is the most opportune period for the introduction of it into character. The Kindergarten teacher in the religious school should address herself to the task of enriching childhood with the interests, the loves and admirations that are outside of all text books and which text books can neither give nor cultivate. If the Kindergarten will adopt as its aim the cultiva- tion of the child imagination, it will meet a distinct need. Especially is this need apparent in the Jewish child, whose soul should be saved from lapsing into dull intellectualism, and in whose case the truth should apply most empha- tically that knowledge and character are stale without the condiment of fancy. SELFISHNESS IN THE KINDERGARTEN. Mention must be made of one more point as to the function of the Kindergarten in the religious school. It is as to the method of teaching before the child begins to form attach- ments to other children. One of the character- istics of the children of the Kindergarten is the fact that they form no friendships. It is the period of a naive separateness which often seems like individualism. While affectionate 18 AIMS OF TEACHING toward the teachers, the child manifests aloof- ness toward other children. There is in this a natural expression of the preoccupation of the child, busy in satisfying its legitimate demands, but there is danger in this, if it be allowed to become inveterate. THE SOCIAL FACTS OF CHILD-LIFE. I say the child has legitimate needs at this period and we can readily see that this is so. It must know the world, the people, the things and the many elementary facts of life, so puzzling and absorbing to the young be- ginner. The questions the child asks show how seriously he takes facts and the flood of novel- ties that come into his way. They keep him busy, so that he cannot think nor feel himself into any attachments. Besides, he has already in his home and in his family those satisfactory alliances and congenialities which satisfy his social need. He does not as yet possess the "so- cial" sense, and he would not have any use for it, since his life is filled with merely domestic interests and influences. The extra-home rela- tions and the wider scope of life, which is hardly opened to him, will afford him occasions later for the friendships and the social feel- ings which are the very heart of religion. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 19 THE MANNER OF TEACHING. So far as the manner of teaching is con- cerned, it is advisable to eliminate the "gifts," which in the secular Kindergarten have a sig- nificance they cannot have in religious educa- tion. The "action" of the class, during the development of the lesson, must have reference, of course, to its content, and should, by its dramatic representation by the children of their respective roles, evoke in them a realiza- tion of moral situations and thus be a dis- cipline for "thinking one's self into others," sharing similar and opposite sentiments, and for control of their too insistent whims. Adult morality is dependent upon this capacity, just as adult theology requires the ability to imagine another world and another life. It goes without saying that the Kindergarten child must not be contrained to "learning things by heart." "Learning things by heart" is a poor method all along the line of didactics and is a sin against childhood at this period. There ought to be at no time any pride in the ability to recite pieces, and it is dis- tinctly objectionable to mistake restatement of words for proof that the child has taken a moral lesson into its life and character. The Kindergarten class should not be a class in 20 AIMS OF TEACHING which the recitation of cute bits of poetry is a specialty. The "pieces" do not constitute the reHgious lesson, even if the child should remem- ber them, but the spirit and the influence, engendered by the teacher's tactful suggestive- ness, do ; it is the active effort the child makes to think itself into the thought and to feel itself into the feelings of the members of the class and into the personalities of the story and the play, which constitute the lesson. This is in- deed hard, involves thoughtful labor, taxes the child, and should be economized with caution. The child has limits of resources for psychic work, just as it has limits for expenditures of physical strength. RESULTS INTANGIBLE. Indeed, the result of the lesson is in- tangible and unamenable to classification and grading, and so is the result of instruction throughout the religious school. Neither reci- tations nor examinations will exhibit what benefits or injuries the pupils have received. We forego the routine of school discipline in the Kindergarten class not because the chil- dren are too delicate to endure the stress, as an indulgence on our part with the weakness and the naivete of the little people, but because, in IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 21 their case, we see very clearly the futility and the irrelevance of the common drill and dis- cipline. Discipline in the Kindergarten is coex- tensive with interest, as it ought to be in all classes of the school. TKE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE KINDERGARTEN TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILD-RpLIGION. So we may say that the Kindergarten child is not yet ready for religion in the real sense. That, of course, does not imply that the Kindergarten method may not guide the developing child into that condition in which relation, moral and religious, are recognized. In fact, this may give to the Kindergarten a distinct place in religious education. It may make a very important contribution to the un- folding of the religious nature, one much to be desired under the sordid spirit of modern life. The Jewish child must acquire spiritual acumen and interest and its religious feelings may awaken under the finer touch of parent and teacher. THE EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL IN THE RELIGIOUS KINDERGARTEN. This point of view of Rehgious Kinder- garten Class teaching fixes the kind of educa- 22 AIMS OF TEACHING tional material necessary for it. It must not be biblical history, for that would anticipate the later work. It should not be abstract, for that is always dangerously near the abstruse. Nor does the other tool for teaching, hand work, comport with the idealizing aim and may contradict it. The only real Kindergarten material would be Jewish child-lore, child- folk-lore and child-legends. We are confessed- ly poor in these and it is a mere makeshift to substitute for them out of other child literature and child life. Perhaps somebody w^ill supply this need some day. There is rich material lying unused, I might almost say undiscovered, in the customs, popular stories and traditional practices of the Jews which, like the Teutonic Myths, are waiting for some Jewish Grimms to collect and rescue from contempt and oblivion. CARE IN THE USE OF MYTHS. In the meantime, selection and compilation of alien tales and adaptation of them to Jewish uses must serve the purpose. The standard of choice, of course, must be Jewish. Myths, chosen at random, may become insidious and may insinuate into the Jewish child an alien child-philosophy and child-morality whose standards of right and wrong and ap- IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 23 praisals of God and man may confuse the Jewish conception of Ufe. The Jewish stand- ard cannot be easily defined, but is felt clearly enough by the really Jewish teacher and parent. JEWISH LEGENDS. The educational point is to call out admira- tion and to feed the hunger of wonder. It is not recommended to moralize in this class. But it is good to awaken the children's awe, which is, at this stage of the soul life, in the main, a naive admiration. By tales and legends I do not mean the familiar Talmudic stories, for they deal largely with academic life and contain a morality of an advanced type, but I mean those popular tales which were told in Jewish homes in the later centuries. These, it may be, are adaptations of the tales current in European countries, but, when closely examined, they reveal modifications superinduced by the Jewish spirit of life. The standard of selec- tion, of course, must be what contribution these stories, legends and tales make to- ward the cultivation of child fancy. The ex- periences which they portray are subtle to the child, making God and man and the world entrancingly wonderful. Love is chaste, do- mestic life is clean, and God is in the center of all. 24 AIMS OF TEACHING HEBREW. The teaching of Hebrew is entirely out of place in the Kindergarten class. The children of this age are busy enough to acquire con- trol of the vernacular. For it must be remem- bered that language is not merely practice of words, but exercise of the mind that recognizes, classifies and appraises beings and things and experiences. Every time a child acquires a word, it has really accomplished an intellectual and moral feat. To constrain the child to do a similar labor in the case of Hebrew, involves one of two things : either that it must duplicate this intellectual and moral work (that is, do it twice, when once is hard enough and sufficient for its soul growth), or it means confusion to the child-mind, which ought not to be embar- rassed by two (possibly contradictory) ways of thinking and feelings represented by two such unallied languages as Hebrew and Eng- lish. The subjects in a Jewish school, the oriental characters, the geographic lay of the scenes and the Eastern tone of life are in them- selves alien enough for an American child to call for special effort, and it is, therefore, ad- visable to postpone the strictly Palestinian color to a later school period, when the child's intellectual horizon is wider. It is not an IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 25 answer to this to say that the Kindergarten child sees only the spectacular and romantic coloring in this foreign aspect of the stories, for as a matter of fact it does not. The child at this age wants to know its world, that world which it sees and touches and not any other. It wants to know whether this world in which it sees so many marvels is "true." Any other world that contradicts it, no matter how beau- tiful it is to adults, is untrue to the child. At any rate, words the child does not hear elsewhere and cannot use otherwise, must become mere dead weight. There will be better opportunities later on for acquiring a knowl- edge of Hebrew, when the pupil will be freer and more discriminating and will value speech for its own sake. CHILD-PRAYERS. Even the recital of the Hebrew phrases of the prayer book had better not be demanded of these children. For senseless and spiritless re- citals feed the soul with cant, and the childish soul should be protected against cant at the very start of its religious development. This caution applies with equal force to the kind of child prattle which passes under the name of child devotion and child prayers. Many of 26 AIMS OF TEACHING them pave the way for conventionalisms, empty formalisms and hypocrisies that are the death of religion and the handicap of morality. NATURAL RELIGI0U5^NESS. One final word. The Kindergarten in the Jewish school marks only one step in the edu- cational plan of child culture. It is not meant as an attempt to "Judaize" the child. Later grades in the school are reserved for that. To introduce religious influence into the child- life of the Kindergarten period is a first step ; to make for the specific kind of Jewish religious- ness is a second. But this second step must be made only after child nature has had its oppor- tunity to unfold. We must first open up the royal road of human nature to the little soul and have confidence that it will go in the right direction. A good Jew is he who knows, feels and works out the moral and religious tradition of his people, and does so on the basis of the sound human nature he shares with all men. This natural religiousness the teacher must set free in the child before the days come when life is viewed from a definite angle. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 27 THE SENSE OF KINSHIP. The fine normalities of the Kindergarten child are good material with which to build up its religious life. They make it immune against later prejudices and sectarianisms with which the world is so much impregnated. The Kindergarten teacher can establish open- hearted religiousness by encouraging instincts which make for kinship and by repressing those that divide. She should do this in the interest, not of an ideal and vague universalism, but rather of Judaism which inculcates practicable equity. This sense of kinship will help to keep its sympathies spontaneous. Judaism is rip- ened human nature. The Jewish child should enter into moral relations as soon as possible. Cultivate in the child, accordingly, the instincts which make for affiliations. Later life will check and coarsen them, you may be sure, but kinship is the child's only reality, and the seed out of which the best of adult life flowers. MUSIC. As for music, I should urge great caution in its choice. The historian may insist that there is no original Jewish music. But we may trust our ear to tell us what expresses the Jewish feeling. The customary Christian hymns do 28 AIMS OF TEACHING not. A collection of Jewish child music is still a desideratum and not impossible. Some compilations have already been made, though not with the avowed aim to serve the schools. Kindergarten music is a kind of music different from every other kind. Jewish folk music comes very near to it and v/e should revive it for other than merely antiqua- rian interest. The religious school would be the first beneficiary by this restoration. The songs of the Kindergarten are not al- together mere pastime, least of all those songs which are part of the lesson. (To be sure, other songs than those that have a function in the working out of the lesson should not be sung.) What the song means and what it makes the pupil do or feel, give it a place in the lesson. PLAY. Play in the Kindergarten should be some- thing other than child sport. Play has a pedagogic significance in the Kindergarten, distinct from every other kind. It is inter- woven with the "work" of the lesson. It is systematized activity which enables the chil- dren to appropriate the content of the lesson. Every teacher should devise occasions for play expression by the children. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 29 THIRD GRADE. DESCRIPTION OF THE CHILD-LIFE IN THIS GRADE. The type of child-life represented in this class is characterized thus: The children feel dependent. The compass of their experiences is the home and the family. Child-virtues and child-vices have their explanation in the conscious and unconscious influence that come from parents, kindred and such as constitute the household. The vices are not infrequently traceable to the whimsical treatment children receive there. When the standard of right and wrong is con- fused, the child's adjustment will be equally confused and shifting. The children receive and cannot yet give. They are not aware of mutual obligations, and they do not act from motives of reciprocity. Their fears arise through physical weakness and from the inability to account for the ex- periences they have. The children love and do not know why they love. Their likes and dislikes are instinc- tive and impulsive. Some of their affections are real and some 30 AIMS OF TEACHING are superficial. Their selfishness, which is not immoral but natural, is due to their limitation and to their inability to realize what others feel. This selfishness sometimes assumes a subtle form. They do not yet control their impulses ; their will is, therefore, often mere whim. Their obstinacy, accordingly, is often merely misdirected will-power. On the other hand, it may arise from the stress which the undis- ciplined instincts exert. Their senses are untrained, and what they desire are the suggestions of fleeting impres- sions. Their fancies and imaginations are in- coherent. What they see, they do not see with "their mind's eye." Fairy tales and legends, therefore, must be used with care, if they are not to confuse their moral judgment. The children are given to boastfulness. This is posing, calculated to attract notice; the child seems to become conscious of the fact that it is attaining to a moral value of its own. Again, boastfulness may be less naive, less indicative of moral progress, and merely an exaggerated appraisal of self. This must be corrected, for without a right moral measure of itself the child will eventually, as an adult, come into conflict with the world. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 31 THE TASK OF THE TEACHER. One of the problems of the teacher is to enlighten the self-consciousness of the child and to equip it with the checks of discernment and discretion. And this should be done at the time while the moral life is still pliable and the training influence is personal and direct. The dominant purpose of the teacher is to set the child-life into a definite place within the family. The child is to feel that it exists for the home, instead of, as heretofore, the home exist- ing for it. The teacher must supply reasons for such domestic loyalty. But the reasons should be the child's reasons, not the teacher's reason- ing. It is not wise to tell the children why they act and feel in certain ways. Analysis weakens the moral feelings. The teacher should endeavor to preserve the freshness and ori- ginality of child-sentiment. Much of moral- ization, which some teachers impose upon their pupils, denaturalizes them, and a sym- pathetic teacher, who has respect for original child-nature, will be on his guard to pre- serve it. 32 AIMS OF TEACHING THE FAMILY. The child's world is the family and the child's morality is domestic. But no home can be altogether isolated; strangers, even if only servants or friends, cross its threshold and enter it. On the other hand, family interests cannot be so delimited as to cut off the home from relation with outsiders. The home, in fact, is the meeting place of strangers as well as kindred. Both of these have a necessary share in the expanding life of the child. The teacher must regard the home not as any exclusive place, but as a place into which the influences of the active world pour abundantly. The fact that many outsiders touch the child's life already in the home, should be used by the teacher for the widen- ing of the intellectual and moral horizon of the pupil. The child's relations with the servant, for instance, are occasions for moral adjust- ment. ' THE HOME. The home is a moral organization : there are grades of relations in it, of subordination to the parent, of co-ordination with brother and sister, of super-ordination toward ser- vants. And the adjustment which widens out IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 33 from the last to that towards strangers offers problems which require varied experience and prolonged guidance. Many of the difficulties of adult life, not only as to tact and courtesy, but also as to the equities and social justice, are foreshadowed at this period of childhood. A combination of domestic loyalty with an ap- preciation of the fact that the home is depend- ent upon the outside world and maintains itself only when it, in turn, is sympathetic with ex- tra-domestic life, is the very basis of a well- balanced morality. In these several kinds of moral relations — predominantly of submissive- ness to the parents who are types to be imitated, of coordination with brotherhood and sister- hood which trains for mutuality, of super- ordination toward servants which releases the natural craving to be superior to somebody, and finally in the adjustment toward the more distant relative or the errand boy or the pedd- ler or the dinner-guest or even the tutor, when the moral sense spreads out into a larger cir- cle, the dependence is transmuted into inter- dependence between home and world, and be- tween child and adults. This proceeds on the line of the natural unfolding of the child- moralities. Obedience at this age means con- forming to the prevailing domestic type of liv- 34 AIMS OF TEACHING ing. It is emulation of good example, rather than subordination to authority. Will-power is possible only in the degree in which there is heartiness in sharing the home- life. Respect, which is, as it were, the first degree of obedience, comes from admiration. THE PERCEPTION OF GOD AND CHILD- DEVELOPMENT. The child's religiousness is, of course, in keeping with the child's morality. The roots of it lie in the feeling of dependence. It is a ped- agogic error to teach "God" summarily with- out clear suggestion of what God means for the child. The point to be made is not that God exists, but that God meets a child- need, a child-interest. The fact is that the child passes through various stages with regard to the God-feeling and the God-idea, each God- thought and God-sentiment varying with each stage of developing child-nature. Each stage of the child religiousness is in keeping with the intellectual and the moral stage to which the child attains. At the age with which we deal now, the child feels it is dependent upon the elemental facts of kinship, nature and direct experience. The caprices of the natural phenomena, IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 35 because not understood, and the child's rela- tion to people similarly not understood, super- induce in the child a distinct child-philosophy and a child-theology. God is the One to whom the child is subordinate as all other people are. God is He about whom the circle of the de- pendents is largest. MORAL RELATIONS IN THE HOME-LIFE. The aim of the teacher should be to interpret this physical sense of dependence into a moral one; that is, to put the child into such situa- tions, by the lesson and the class-experience, as to help it realize that in the large world, just as in its little family, there are moral rela- tions toward people and moral adjustments to experiences. In the center of these is God, just as the father is the center of the home. God is for this child not yet Creator and Governor and such, for it has as yet neither a scientific interest in, nor a theory of things. He is simply the Father, the Spirit of the Home writ large, as it were. And the World is the home, within which move many people who give and get things and receive and respond to in- fluences. Merit and demerit are prototyped in the child-reward for domestic virtue and child- 36 AIMS OF TEACHING penalties for domestic wrongs. God approves and disapproves, just as the father and mother do. The other relationships and the feelings which go with these mingle in this child-system of compensations. The moral instinct of the Jew is accentuated already in childhood. Of this the teacher should be conscious. He need not argue for morali- ty, nor bear upon Jewish child-nature with the pressure of the physical facts. Even at this period of child-life, God is not a "power," to which men must submit, but a moral person- ality, such as the father, the mother and the kindred are. The Jewish child begins its moral development higher up in the scale. It is the lift which the eventful centuries of the Jew- ish people have given to it. The child feels that it is dependent upon God, just as it is depend- ent upon all personalities with which it is in touch. Moral growth begins when the depend- ence ceases to be one-sided. The child's moral development requires expansion of interests. THE VIRTUES. The child must see duty toward parent, brother, sister, teacher, servant in varying degrees. Do not make an inventory of the bene- IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 37 fits which accrue to the child from home com- forts and home advantages, for such an inven- tory would set up a commercial standard. Vir- tue should not be taught, nor its praises sung, on the score of profitableness. Reasoning about virtues, at any rate, even in later periods of life, tends to weaken their hold on men. In- stinctive virtuousness is the truest source of strength. Orderliness, Tidiness, Cleanliness, Punctuality, Industriousness are desirable qualities because they maintain the child in its environment. The ground of the virtues now is helpfulness. OBEDIENCE. They imply fitting in with the order and or- ganization of the home, and a dawning sense of authority which later makes for respect for society and social obligations. In fact they get their meaning and their value through religious submissiveness. They enlarge by the widening of life out of merely domestic into adult interests in the world, when the religiouc motives begin to assert themselves. Some re- ligiousness lies, in fact, implicitly in these vir- tues from the start, as much of it as is consonant with child-faith. 38 AIMS OF TEACHING TRUTHFULNESS. Truthfulness is a central virtue, on the ground of honesty not of word, but of deed. The child should be truthful in the home, because it has a part in the home life and false- ness and unreliability hinder co-operation. Truthfulness is usually interpreted as intel- lectual correctness, but at this period of child- hood truthfulness is a form of conduct. It is a virtue as to doing rather than as to thought and speech. All moral qualities should have a direct con- nection with the God-idea or God-feeling. For the God-thought is not merely a logical con- cept, but a driving force for moral conduct. This is especially true in the case of Jewish morality. God is truthful. We should be like Him, just as the father, the mother, and all of the family are. CHILD-FAULTS. The foibles during the epoch of childhood, boastfulness, for instance, envy, hypocrisy, im- patience, rudeness and the like, are virtues in disguise, or rather virtues in formation. Boastfulness may be trained into ambitious- ness ; envy into self-effort ; hypocrisy into fear combined with scrupulousness ; impatience, IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 39 which is yielding to impulse, into strength by controlling it. The life of the home, when the relations be- come more diversified and more social, will ini- tiate the advance from this period into the next higher. These bring another kind of child- morality and child-theology. THE MATERIAL. The Story Material of this Grade is the account of three homes : The homes of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob. Upon closer examination, these prove to be progressive. Abraham is a nomad, Isaac a hunter (does he not hanker after venison even in his helpless old age.^) and Jacob, who in his youth had been a wage-earner, has estab- lished an elaborate household. Shepherd life and nature are significant to Abraham. Isaac passes from nomadism to settlement. Jacob is a patriarch. There are, accordingly, three distinct types of home-life, with the culture characteristic of each respectively. TYPES OF CHILD-LIFE. There are also several types of child-life, from Isaac the dutiful to Joseph the ambitious. The several virtues and vices, too, have their 40 AIMS OF TEACHING respective compensations. The teacher should be on his guard not to show that Providence is just in every detail, for that is not in ac- cordance with usual experience. The child knows through his own escapades that the bad is often unpunished, and the good unrewarded. Abraham is dutiful, giving up home and kin- dred for the sake of an obligation. Isaac is obedient. Jacob is punctual (does he not do at once what his father asks him to do, while Esau comes late, too late!), industrious, helpful. Esau is the cause of the break-up of the home, of the feud between brothers, and of the grief of his parents. The family life of Jacob is typical, though not exemplary nor deserving of emula- tion. Not only the story of Joseph, but also the characterization of the sons in the Blessing of Jacob on his death-bed suggests virtue and vice. The teacher, in presenting to the pupils the moral problems of home life, should guard against two extremes: in the first place, he should not convey the impression that the Three Homes of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are sublimely classical and therefore beyond practical emulation; and, in the second place, he must not make them commonplace, for that would destroy their educational value. The IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 41 pedagogic value of a subject lies in its natural- ness, and the teacher should tactfully uphold it. These Three Homes are real homes, and describe the joys and the difficulties which every home has. They are pictures of real child-experiences, such as occur today and everywhere. The teacher's duty is not to exalt Judaism, as if it presented the ideally best, but to employ the traditions of human life, as they truthfully are. Fortunately the Bible stories are honestly and frankly true and therefore irresistible effective. GOD. God is not to be taught abstractly. That He has been taught as a philosophic "truth" has been the pedagogic sin all through the history of sectarian schools. The teacher should show that God is active everywhere and in every- thing. God is in every home, in every life and within every experience. Portray God not as "saying," but as doing. PROVIDENCE. This demands from the teacher a delicate sense as to what "Providence" is. In this Grade, Providence is what God does, or rather what 42 AIMS OF TEACI-HNG men do while they are rehgious and moral. The salutary lesson should be brought to the child at this period that emulation is the first step toward religiousness. The child should feel himself in the world as if it were a very large home, where God is the supreme standard, as the father is in the small child-home. When a pupil enters later classes, he will get an enrichment of the God-feeling. But, in this Grade, God is taught as the Father of the World, and the child feels toward God as it feels toward its father. It is not a question of "love," for you cannot teach love ; love comes spontaneously. But it is a question of confi- dence and nearness. The child's dependence is affectionate and brings him close to God. De- pendence does not estrange; it binds and holds. In fact, this implicit trust is a neces- sary step in the development of the "belief in God. Abraham (notice the legend in the Midrash of his child-philosophy as to what God is), Isaac and his readiness to yield up his life, Jacob and his dream at Beth El, Joseph and how certain he is that what he sees in his dreams will come to pass, the loyalty of Abra- ham, the fidelity of Eliezer, the amiability of Rebekah, the sordidness of Lot, the ten- IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 43 derness of Rachel, the intolerance of Joseph's brothers, the manliness of Judah and the filial devotion of Joseph may be exhibited by the teacher as moral situations. The stories of the Bible are more than disjointed Short- stories. They constitute types of life, proto- types for emulation, instances ever the same at the best and at the worst of human life. LOYALTY. The Jewish Religious School must cultivate also a heightened sense of interdependence. The children should carry into their lives the sense of co-operation as adult Jews. The basal condition for that is that the children feel they are near and kindred to one another. The teacher's aim should be not so much to con- vince as to enlist, and not so much to enlist for reasons of personal and private benefit, as that the child feel an interest in other children. The sense of communion sets its face against selfishness and isolation. The bane of modern Judaism is the aloofness of each separate Jew, but the exquisite charm of the Jew of former ages lay in the solidarity which was ingrained in his nature. Mutuality was not a merely gracious tolerance, as it is now. The teacher should aim to lodge loyalty in the children, for 44 AIMS OF TEACHING out of this child-loyalty grow the reliable adult loyalties. Jewish loyalty, loyalty to the com- mon cause, loyalty leshem Shomayim which is the germ of respect and reverence to man and God, is more than merely a concession. He has no real religious culture who considers his obligations with regard only to his own in- terests. Judaism is a social religion and the loyalties it inculcates make for affinity and permanent kinship. INDIVIDUALISM. The teacher opens up the child-souls to mutualities, for these will hold them together after their school years in adult work and adult relations. The Jewish teacher must be on his guard in this matter more than in any other. For the Jew already in childhood is much given to assert his personality. Individual- ism is a bid for recognition and an effort to maintain oneself against others ; and the Jew- ish people, trained by the desperate conditions it has had to contend with in all ages and in all places, has been forced to accentuate it. This may account for some of the difficulties in discipline in the Jewish Religious School. But this individualism of the Jewish child is not to be condemned altogether, for it is the IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 45 psychic force which pushes forth many of the best and most efficient faculties. The ReUgious School should direct this Jewish individualism, that it become a source of intellectual and moral strength. Still, though the Jewish people needs men of self-assertion, it needs also men who appreciate community in feeling. THE COMMON TERM IN CHILDREN. Nowhere is it more necessary than in the Religious School to call attention to the ele- mentary principle of pedagogy that religious- ness and piety are grounded not on egoism, but on fellowship. Traditional church instruction made for "personal salvation" and insinuated a subtle selfishness, but child-religiousness, from which later phases of adult-religion de- velop, grows out of charmingly affable and frank child-nature. Children feel themselves near to one another at the first moment they meet. The teacher of religion should recognize and give scope to this democracy of child- nature. THE TYPE-CHILD. The teacher should have in mind a type- child, which represents the psychological facts. This the teacher, eliminating every personal 46 AIMS OF TEACHING feature and trait, should seek in every one of his class. He must find it so that he may understand the children and the work they do. He must engage every child of his class. He cannot afford to ignore nor neglect to enlist one child. Aside from the fact that an unin- terested child is a storm center of discontent, the teacher who does not properly appraise the qualifications of his children starts and must necessarily end in confusion. Many of the difficulties a teacher encounters cease as soon as he begins to address his pupils from the point of view of their common child-nature. That teacher must fail who has no true view of child-nature, but regards his class as an agre- gation of children reciprocally exclusive of one another. The fact is that a class is a little com- munity, the members of which have common sympathies and like temperaments. They will work together only when they feel similar needs and share similar expectations. The teacher who has made the discovery of this typical child, as to age and physical and psychical condition, is very likely to be tolerant of individual traits in the different children. In a very positive sense he will not allow him- self to be disturbed by them. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 47 ABSTRACT TEACHING AND CHARACTER. The difficulty in instruction in religious schools lies in the fact that it deals with abstractions, hard even for adults to grasp. The process of attaining to generalization requires methodic and sustained thinking. This it is unfair to expect of the child-mind. The child craves for action and learns by what it does and not by what it thinks. The child's mind as well as its character grows by doing things, and moral development comes only by actual adjustments to persons and conditions. In the Religious School, of course, moral and religious teaching will always be more or less abstract and academic. It is a regrettable limitation and a stumbling block in its way. This is apparent nowhere so much as in the period of this Third Grade, in which teachers attempt to busy the children by setting them to work pasting pictures, molding maps and the like, with the expectation that these occupations contribute somehow to sustaining interest. But activities that have no relation to training of character and no moral suggestion of their own are barren of educational effect. 48 AIMS OF TEACHING CONCRETE WORK MUST HAVE RELATION TO THE AIM OF THE LESSON. Neat copy-books, molding relief maps, pictures and maps are helpful in the "les- son" primarily to hold the pupils to the task the teacher has set, and are merely mechanical contrivances for the purpose. The primary aim of teaching in the Religious School, how- ever, is to establish the religious Jewish sense. The lesson should call out the activity by its own moral content and the work the children do should be their spontaneous ex- pression, as it were, of what the lesson contains ; writing, pasting pictures and sand-heaps are merely "mock life" in the class. They are play and not work, for work aims at self-expression. What children do in the class should express what they think and what they feel with regard to the moral or religious truth brought home to them. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 49 FOURTH GRADE. The pupil is acquiring a sense of self. The boy and girl are no longer mere dependents; their moral independence is now awakening. This period is the period of intellectual and moral absorption. The child learns much about the physical world, with which it comes into constant touch. It learns to control the things of life. But it must now begin to control itself. This is the time of wills and whims, which are, for the most part, mere impulses. The child is not yet capable of holding to a line of conduct, nor of persisting in it by strength of will. The child is self-centered and, accordingly, selfish. But this selfishness is not immoral; it is on the contrar}^ on the roaa toward moral maturity. The problem of the teacher is not to suppress this selfishness, but to use it for right ends; that is, to help the child to so use it that it will lead to moral interests. THE WHIMS OF THE CHILD. The whim of the child at this period is often uncontrolled wish and obstinacy. The often contradictory volitions and wills to which the child is subject present the problem how it may so AIMS OF TEACHING acquire capacity to adjust itself to other wills and to other personalities, and how it may find its bearings in the world in which wishes and wills conflict. Especially necessary is the child's adjustment to those who are morally its superiors and its inferiors. Here the most significant part of character is being molded. ADMIRATION. This is the age of admiration, of adjust- ment to desirable types of life. The means are the presentation of heroes whom it is worth while to imitate and emulate. The ad- miration should not be based on the profit that comes from the virtues, but from the fact that the real moral prototypes are lovable and ad- mirable in themselves. The teacher of Jewish children should be very observant of this. Unfortunately, Jewish adults are not prone to transports of enthusiasm in the presence of great men. Hero-worship under the control of sane judgment, is a natural expression of a healthy morality, and should not be deficient in Jewish children. Admiration is, as it were, a bridge between what we are and what we aspire to become. The child should find its lever for moral advancement in the large per- sonalities, which are a living proof of what IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 51 men can achieve, and what children, too, may learn to do. The teacher must awaken in his pupils the passion for admiration, in which healthy childhood always delights. Still, though for this period of childhood heroism is spectacular, it is not mere pose. The child feels there is a difference between the genuine and the artificial, and the teacher must, therefore protect him against the spurious. The child will accept none other than a moral hero. The hero does things the child cannot, but would like to do. The hero is, as it were, the great wish of the child. And the story of the hero should be the moral hunger of the child writ large. The moral difficulties and the moral achievements of the hero in the story should reflect what is going on in the soul of the child. The child should recognize himself in it. Therefore, the religious and moral prototype should be not "ideal," but a man of flesh and blood. He may have the ad- ditional grace of fervor, which we sometimes call spirituality; but even that fervor should be natural. The religious hero should not be a philosopher, nor a martyr, nor an ascetic. Chil- dren at this age like an adventurer, the man who has been in the midst of the great, wide world, and likes to tell of it. In fact, the child 52 AIMS OF TEACHING at this epoch is himself an adventurer who is taking his first peep into the world. The model for children should never be "perfect." Perfect men are not real men and it is wrong to impose upon children stories of the impossible. Goody-goody men and women are of no moral benefit. The biblical men and women were not perfect; they were "true" men and "true" women, and it is in truthfulness we wish the child to develop. As to biblical types of life, teachers should distin- guish between what is significant in theology and what in education. In the class room, Moses is an example of manhood, a notable instance of what a true man will and can do. The restlessness of the people, their vacillations and cowardice, also their valor and their faith, are moral experiences which the child will readily enough recognize as his own. BIOGRAPHY. The form of instruction in this class should be biographical. It should comprise graphic sketches how forceful personalities lived. But it should be neither dramatic, nor mere story- telling; it should reveal the hero's inner self. Each story should be a short-story complete in itself, the moral of which stands out clearly and IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 53 distinctly. The error of teachers in Religious Schools is that they tell of men and women only in so far as they have a place within the history of Israel and the Jewish religion. According to the traditional method of Reli- gious Schools, the men and women of the Bible are little more than pawns upon the cosmic chessboard, showing how God did this and that by them. But this is a theological view. The aim of the Religious School, however, should be not to prove the principles of theology, but to cultivate the religious instincts of children, so that these may be active in their lives. It is clear enough how it has come. Jewish theology was suspicious of everything that might lead to the worship of a man. We have said before that Jews lack adequate admiration of great men; it was due to the fear that ad- miration might lead to the worship of the "Son of God." Judaism wants to be free from every suspicion of a belief in a deified man, and teaches God alone. This exclusive sublimation of the divine has checked the faculty for admiration. To lack enthusiasm is serious enough for men, but childhood can- not do without it. The Jewish children of to- day show the effects of this matter-of-fact at- titude, by which not only nothing great can be 54 AIMS OF TEACHING done, but duties also are reduced to drudgery. The biographical study in this Grade may restore to Jewish childhood the love and the admiration of greatness. The religious teacher can thus revive in the modern Jews an import- ant heart-throb of the moral life. A biography is an exhibit of what religion and morals do in men's lives. The teacher must make the typical men and women live afresh in the children, and the children must be brought into a sense of kinship with them. They must recognize that the souls of the biblical men and women are like their own souls, only finer, clearer and stronger, that they are not distant, but very near to them, as near as truth is, that they represent that truth of life which the children themselves feel. The heroes of this period of childhood, how- ever, do not yet possess definite moral qualities. This period is largely one of general interest in big things and big men; it is not yet time for self-expression, nor for a craving to count as somebody distinct and independent. The child is submerged in the family and has no conscious individual value. Care must, there- fore, be observed not to anticipate a definite moral interest which as yet does not operate in the child. The child is growing in a merely IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 55 general moral capacity; it is not yet attaining to a moral individuality of its own. The examples given by the teacher must have reference to conduct and not to belief. A child cannot go beyond facts and does not attempt to interpret them. Always and every- where religion and morals demand conduct. Religion can never be merely opinion; it can never stop short of action. The teacher's business, whether he teaches religion or ethics, is to establish right interests in the children and to see to it that these healthy interests pass into habits of living. The teacher of Judaism should be the last to mis- take mere opinion for conviction, and he would do wrong to Jewish children if he led them merely to believe in academic goodness, justice and loyalty. The pupils should leave his class so much under the spell of the lesson that they should aspire to be like the men and women of whom they had just heard. The final word of the teacher to his pupils should be: Go, and do likewise. THE MATERIAL. The historic material of the Fourth Grade comprises : The Life of Joseph, the Life of Moses, the 56 AIMS OF TEACHING History of Israel in the Desert, concluding with the account of the Death of Moses. THE AIM. This period presents various types of heroic lives. It is rich in moral situations, and it is these which the teacher should use as educative material. His aim in this Fourth Grade is to develop the child's sense that it has a place in the family and among its associates, and that it must maintain that place by personal efficiency. The old-fashioned teacher took delight in the presentation of the story of Joseph as the story of an ideal boy. If so, the story cannot be one of real boy-life at the same time. It will not do to show that Joseph was a common tattler, and at the same time one who fas- cinated everybody. Nor is it right to stig- matize his ambition as a vice and then again speak of him as one whom "God has sent." Every healthy boy has fancies of the "big things" he would like to do. The teacher touches the springs of the holiest in a boy's soul when he tells the story of the dreaming Joseph. That Joseph should become King over all Egypt is something every boy under- stands quite naturally. He wants to become IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 57 himself a King or something Uke that, some day. Joseph's generosity to his brothers, his eagerness to "be quits" with them, and to forgive them and all that, is in keeping with a boy's frank nature. Mention such things and he feels as if they came from his own heart. Some teachers moralize too much, and seem to deal with the pupil as if he were unregenerate or defective. We may safely trust boy-nature and it is often better to take a moral instinct in the boy for granted than preach it into him. When one sees a painting or a statue, the artist need not stand by to explain. On the contrary, the need of explanation is an evidence of failure. Character is no less a thing of beauty and truth, and the least tutored of us should be able to appreciate it. A teacher is an artist, and he should set up the character of his subject before his pupils and trust their in- stincts to feel its moral appeal. This appeal comes not through the charm of the graphic description, though that is not to be despised, but from the natural truth of the hero. THE "moral" of a LESSON. An appended moral is entirely unneces- sary. There are only two valid reasons for a moral at the end of a lesson: to help the 58 AIMS OF TEACHING memory and to give the child an abstract rule of life, so that he may apply it in similar situa- tions. But let the child look deep into the soul of the hero and his child-nature will do the generalizing himself. To be sure, this makes a great demand upon the teacher, but the teacher of religiousness assumes a grave responsibility and must be equal to it. Nothing else will do in a religious school than transmission from teacher's soul to child's soul, and the teacher must himself feel the moral enthusiasm if it is to thrill in the children. The child cannot attain to personality, unless the teacher give it his own. This a teacher who is serious can do: he can make every biblical character and every character he cites in the class-room live before the children in concrete truthfulness. This demand applies to all the historical material of this Grade, as, in fact, it applies to all educational effort. Moses, the other hero for this Grade, is not a legislator, he is not an inspired prophet, he is not even the emanci- pator of a people, he is simply a man who uses rightly the opportunities that have come to him, and does not lapse to the level of slaves or shepherds or common people. He is gal- lant to the girls at the well and just to a King. For this class, the Exodus is not an act IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 59 of God, but the achievement of a man who has justice on his side. There is plenty of time in later Grades to give the theological or the political interpretation. The children of this Grade are not capable of appreciating the historic significance of the Exodus, and, since our duty is to help in moral and religious growth, theological and political considera- tions are irrelevant. At the beginning of the cycle of the Moses stories, we have a domestic tragedy, motherly anxiety and sisterly loyalty. It is good to bring these to the children at this period when they recognize that each member of their household has a certain and responsible place in it, to help them realize that homes have hazards, and that each one, not only father and mother, but also brother or sister, has a re- sponsibility and should contribute to the domestic welfare. The moral problem of the work of this Grade is, indeed, to accentuate the personal standing of each member in the home. Children have nothing to do with the profound affairs of Providence and the divine choice of a people. Their future is conditioned by their moral discernment. The stories of the Bible, whatever their import from the point of view of theology, are, for the purposes of teach- 60 AIMS OF TEACHING ing, nothing else than means for training. They are, as it were, typical experiences, and it is the task of the teacher to make these stories appear as altogether personal and real. THE "laws." Despite the fact that an account of the Mosaic Legislation is interspersed in the biblical text of these stories, it should not inter- rupt the lessons. Selections may be made of such parts of it as refer to the moral problems of this child-age, such, for instance, as laws that refer to home and home-life, honor and obedience to parents, relation between masters and slaves, treatment of aliens, rights of prop- erty, humaneness toward animals, philan- thropy, the qualifications for the priesthood, dietary laws and the like. But these selections should be incidental to the development of the Mosaic Story, and implicit in the biographies, and should not be taught abstractly. Chil- dren are not students of law ; they cannot learn how to conform to lawful living through formulas. Even the Ten Commandments must be brought home to them (at least, such as are within their scope) in the form of situa- tions of concrete life. That they are "uni- IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 61 versal" laws adds nothing to their significance, so far as children feel. Laws check children in their impulses, or enlarge the reach of their moral personality for good or for ill. The ful- fillment or the violation of law is helpful or disturbs the home. That is all children need to get out of the lessons and that is very much ! There is opportunity for discipline as to law all through the Mosaic Story, to show that the seeds of the Great Legislation lie in what Moses himself felt, aspired to and did in his eventful life. Again the doctrine that these "words" were revealed need not disturb the teacher, for his function is not to give informa- tion on theological origins, but to establish habits of conduct and to help the child to make his first step toward character. It is strange that a teacher should believe he has trained a child adequately and may dismiss it into life when it can do nothing more than recite unctu- ous words and phrases. The Ten Command- ments should be a moral influence, should take a place in the conscience of the child and constitute the controlling authority of the child-personality. Nothing is more servicable for this than the simple and forceful words of The Law, but they must come to the child not as abstractions, but as concrete facts of 62 AIMS OF TEACHING human nature and of its child-nature at its worst and at its best. MORAL INDEPENDENCE. The work of this Fourth Grade is on the Hne of progression from that of the last Grade. That had for its central truth the dependence of the child. But this Grade leads in the child's first effort toward moral inde- pendence. This is not yet freedom, nor even a release from paternal restrictions. It means that the child feels he is not any longer mere- ly a receiver of benefits, but that he, too, can do some things, that he can give something out of his life on his own responsibility. The virtues and the vices of this period are, there- fore, quite new. It is a time for the inculca- tion of heroism, ambitiousness, self-control, perseverance (including patience), courtesy (that is, good manners), kindness (because of sympathetic understanding of equals), regard for persons (from the point of view of justness, not of reciprocal justice), regard for the pro- perty of others, helpfulness (voluntary not mutual service). These duties to others are not social duties for this type of childhood. They are an expression of the self. They have their origin and their end in the personality. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 63 The brother, the sister and the kindred or even the acquaintance of the child is not to be obHgated by the service ; it is the child himself who expresses himself in generous activities. The motive in all these child-virtues lies in the rising sense of responsibility to one's self. The complemental side of this personal morality, which aims at right results, will be supplied later. At this period, the child has too nar- row a view of life to apprehend social morali- ties. It is still busy with itself. It has not yet crossed the threshold of the home. As soon as it has acquired a certain aloofness from the home, and has entered into relations and in- terdependences with outside life, there will be time for social ethics. For the present they do not exist for the child. In the Third Grade we dealt with depend- ence ; in the Fourth Grade with independence. In the Fifth Grade we shall deal with duty. 64 AIMS OF TEACHING FIFTH GRADE. * ' ' ft The child, is acquiring a sense of respon- sibiHty and obhgation. Beginning with duties in varying degrees toward those who constitute the home, and enlarging the domestic circle to include kindred, in gradations of moral in- terest and value, the feeling broadens to em- brace non-relatives and strangers. The child has passed out of dependence into moral self- hood and has become aware of the fact that he has definite relationship to other individ- uals. He is able to do some things which others recognize, and the members of the household look to him or value him because of them. . His sphere of activity is still domestic, and the reciprocal relations he has are not of his own selection (younger or older brother, or sister, helping father or mother, go- ing on errands, doing chores). But the child's life is growing beyond the domestic circle and his relations are differen- tiating. He recognizes, for instance, that the presence of the servant in the household is by contract and for pay, and that strangers come into touch with the home from motives of their own (the grocer, the baker, and also the teacher). These extra-home relations imply IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 65 various degrees of obligation. Contact with some is for a time only, and with some it is permanent ; with some the relation is direct and face-to-face, with others it is more remote and occasional. A scale of values appears in ac- cordance with the contribution the persons make to the home. These graded values are of course not permanent. The teacher must clear up these moral appraisals and prevent their shifting. This is the period when impulses must yield to control, for a right sense of responsibil- ity can go only with deliberation. The child must make this first step in moral progression by acquiring strength of will. He must discrim- inate between what is right and what is wrong, and the first problem of will consists in choos- ing between them. Will does not stop at merely seeing what is right, but goes on to decide to do it. The steps of the child's progress so far are: From dependence to a personal position in the household. From the home-world to appreciation of en- vironment. From conforming to the rules of the home instinctively, to realizing that there are obliga- tions and moral requirements. 66 AIMS OF TEACHING LAW. The child learns that law is sovereign, but also that conformity to law may not be merely formal but must be sincere. Here the teacher lays the foundation for honesty. The line of moral growth is from freedom to law, to the realization that if we want to "keep things" we must have strangers as well as our family on our side. There is only one kind of honesty. It is the naive telling or living up to the truth without being aware that there is anything other than the truth. It is the ingenuous attitude which is aware of neither the difficulty nor the merit of honesty. This untrained instinct is checked by propriety. Some facts we may tell and some we must suppress ; some facts we may not tell, and some we tell with euphemy at the proper time, or in secret. The fact may not be "nice" or "proper." We hesitate to tell the truth, or check ourselves in telling all of it, not because the fact is not really true, nor because we mean to use it wrongly, but because the person who hears it or the person who tells it may be injured or hurt. This motive in the child must not be despised. It is, in fact, the first tribute the child pays to society, and from this tact he will advance to considerateness, IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 67 which is the very heart of justice. When the child's mental horizon becomes extended and he regards the rights of others, he will hold truth precious not merely as a private interest, nor as a mere convention, but as sacred in itself. At this period of life, however, child- truthfulness and child-honesty are impulses, and it is better to guide than to restrict them. The children should be led on lines of courtesy into sympathetic consideration of others. A falsehood "hurts" people, and the imagination of the child should be aroused as to that hurt. The child becomes veracious from the point of view of conscientiousness or exactness later, when he can make moral distinctions and has acquired intellectual clearness. TRUTH AND JUSTICE. It should be noted that truth-telling and do- ing justice are distinct virtues, but they have a common term in what at a later stage of morality is called the conscience. In child- psychology and child-morality the two should not to be kept distinct from one another. For adults, the one has reference to speech and the other to deed. But for the child, there is as yet no divorce between what he says and what he does, and doing is the immediate 68 AIMS OF TEACHING expression of every mental and moral sug- gestion. Truthfulness is not merely a formal aspect of speech, nor justice a formal quality of conduct, as if the one had nothing to do with the other. They are one and the same virtue. The child deems both alike instances of truth, and does not rate one higher or lower than the other. Sound morality is, as in many other aspects, also in this on the side of the child. THE RIGHTS OF PROPERTY. Now those feelings begin which in the developed form we call the civic. They have their root in loyalty, which is first applied to home and kindred. This loyalty grows with the scope of the child's life, till the circle reaches those alliances which parents, teachers and other morally important people sug- gest. This is also the period when the sense of property begins to assert itself. For along with the perspective which rearranges the moral estimates of the people of the house- hold, goes a corresponding scale of rights and claims upon the child and, conversely, of the child upon them. The right of possession goes along with his rising sense of aloofness from the home community and with the growing capa- IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 69 city to create and to hold certain exclusive ad- vantages. The desire to hold things for per- sonal benefit accompanies the power to reach out, to defend, to devise, to earn; all of these are on the way toward a moral personality. It is not material to the child at this period that his right to hold the property has ^public recognition. That is the economic attitude at adult age. For the present, it is sufficient for the child that what he claims he can and does hold. The sanction for the posses- sion is altogether individual. This is before the age of law and lawfulness. Nor does the child at this time regard himself bound to a right use of things. He holds them and can do with them what he likes, on the ground that, since he is their creator and owner, he is also their master. Here freedom has its first diffi- culty. The problem for the teacher is to show that restriction does not reduce freedom, but directs it. Property is not secure nor permanent so long as my title to it consists only in holding it. For I must eventually measure my strength in holding it with the strength others have in wishing and seizing it, so that I must have a better, a more moral proof for my title of possession. The more moral claim consists in 70 AIMS OF TEACHING my realizing what the thing means for me and what it means for others. Is it necessary for what I ought to do ? Then I must have it. If I do not need it for the performance of my duty, then I should not have it. And again, I have a right of possession in a thing only when others cannot deny my need of it. If I desire to own a thing, I must necessarily face public judgment and invite public approval. Finally, the thing I desire was made by others, and even the thing I made is not alto- gether my creation. In some way, invariably, it is the result of co-operation with others. I find in everything some other person's contri- bution, somebody else's interest, somebody else's right. And I must respect these. FRIENDSHIPS. The next step in moral progress is from sympathy by way of imagination to sympathy by way of co-operation. The child forms extra- domestic attachments. He enters upon friend- ships and new loyalties. Having no ulterior use for them, these friendships shift with the child's impulses. They offer oppor- tunities for adjustment to various child or adult characters and, therefore, are a disciplining experience. They enlighten the IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 71 child as to what other people feel, want and ought to get. This subtle exploration of other people's souls and adjustment to them is of prime importance in moral development. To be sure, the friendship at this period is not ideal nor platonic, for that is possible only when the child is capable of fixing upon a stan- dard of choice. He cannot, as yet, be exclusive in his companionship, nor sustain it. Child- friendships are transitory and their significance lies in the service they severally render to the child's growth in social adaptability. They are fostered between boys and girls in complete frankness, a fact explicable on the ground that sexuality is subconscious. It is to be re- gretted that some adults disconcert these naive friendships by foolish prudery or sense- less innuendo. If unembarrassed, children at this period cultivate and maintain companion- ships and real brotherhoods and sisterhoods outside of the home. In fact, this is a discipline for later moralities between the sexes, which lodge in the child-soul the better because they are free from grosser motives. GOD IN THE CHILD-LIFE. The religious notions which arise at this epoch group about a "personal" God. That is, 11 AIMS OF TEACHING God is not an abstraction and He is not aloof. He is real and "true" and the child deals with Him in every experience. Till now, the child's God-experiences came from the out- side. Now they emerge from the inner life, from those moral and mental illuminations which the soul sets aglow. The child projects his personality upon the world-canvas, as it were. He writes himself large, and the child's God is his own moving soul-life expanded and magni- fied. Hence, nothing so satisfies the child at this period as the stor^^ of a God who steps between men and does things, avenges wrongs or arranges the affairs of men. A knight who fights the fights of God and a prophet who re- bukes men are after his moral taste. In the development of religiousness, this is an im- portant phase. The child demands moral activity from his God, he wants a God who is not aloof, but shares the life of men. A God who fights on the battlefields in the midst of the legions fires the blood and stirs the heart. Here the Jewish teacher has a double duty. He should see to it that the Jewish child secure the religious and moral good that comes from hero-worship. The Jewish child-soul must get the flavor of fancy. He has been taught an academic doctrine about the "Unity of God," IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 73 but has not been helped to apply "truth" to life. A normal child wants for his guide and com- panion a person and not an abstraction. He wants the God, and not a God. Judaism suffers today from the metaphysical method it pursues in the demonstration as to existence of God. The God of the Jewish catechism is an unin- teresting God and does not appeal to the feel- ings. He is not brought close to the heart of the child, so that he may "love Him with all his heart and soul and might." God is a "truth," but not the truth. He has no warmth and does not elicit warmth of feeling. For the Jewish child theological methaphysics are bar- ren wastes. That God is, is an obvious truth, and we do not need to drag the child through the catechism to see it. Nor is it necessary to be profound on the subject -of the Unity of God. God should cease to be a formula and begin to be an influence in child-life. A doctrine should be a moral influence and not an academic theorem. Its power to impress life arises not from the fact that it is true, but from the fact that it is moral. When we say that we believe in God, we mean that we know that we must deal with God every- where, and that it is good for us to be in sym- pathetic touch with Him. And when we say that 74 AIMS OF TEACHING God is one, we mean that the world is all of one thought, one purpose and one moral con- tent, that we come across the same true and just and kind God, wherever we go and what- ever we do, that we are face to face with God at every point of our lives and that God is face to face with us. This, made graphic, real and personal, is religion, and should be taught. But this is the very thing we have witheld from the Jewish child. Our historic fear of idolatry has made us suspicious of child-fancy. Religious- ness cannot thrive without intimacy with God. We must connect the child's love of the hero with the child's awe of divine personality, so that admiration may be sublimated into wor- ship. NATURE AND THE JEW^ISH CHILD. The Jewish child must also learn to love na- ture, the hills and valleys, the rivers, the ocean, and feel that they, too, are a part of God and of His life. If the Jew is to get out of the Ghetto indeed, his religion must be turned toward the freedom and the openness of nature. His child must learn to lift his eyes to mountain and sky and to sweep them freely over the fields. We do not help the Jewish child unless we give him something other than metaphysics for the real- IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 75 ities of life. Enthusiasm for nature has been aborted in the Jewish child, I regret to say, through centuries of urban restrictions. But this enthusiasm for the beauties and the glories of the world must be restored to him ; not, how- ever, the spurious enthusiasm which, like Bengal light, dies out while it sputters ; but the true and sane enthusiasm, based upon genuine and affectionate interest. The fear that the Jewish child may slip into paganism is unwar- ranted, for love of nature goes well with the finest spirituality. In fact, only men of imagination can attain to a right admiration of nature. Besides, there is a discipline of the soul in the respect for the beauty and majesty of nature. Joseph loves his sheep, even while he dreams of kinghood, Moses is a shepherd while he prepares to challenge a king, and the Ten Commandments are for- ever associated with thunder and lightning and the solemn grandeur of Mt. Sinai. The Nile, the Desert, the Jordan, the hills, valleys and springs of Palestine appeal to childhood, while he is emerging into contact with the world of nature. 76 AIMS OF TEACHING MORAL IDEALISM. At this period the teacher can initiate con- scious morality. It is not sufficient to establish conventional ethics, for that implies a mechan- ical way of living. We must introduce a moral ideal. This is a difficult task for the teacher; but when he succeeds in it, the child enters upon a nobler and truer morality. The Jewish Religious School should foster moral idealism, for that idealism has constituted the religion of the Jew in the past and is his "mission" in the future. The difference between the Public School and the Jewish Religious School lies in this very fact that the secular school does not aim at more than discipline, while the Jewish School goes beyond mere lawful conduct and works for a moral ideal. We Jews have a moral mission ; that is, we are not satisfied with com- monplace goodness. We stand for a high type of life yet to be ; we want to live our lives with a larger outlook. We must, therefore, implant into Jewish childhood a conscience, not one which merely approves and disapproves what has been done or neglected, but a conscience which directs. This conscience which we wish to enthrone in childhood is not merely an ad- visor nor a monitor nor a judge; it does not IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 11 look backward at what has been done and at what has not been done ; the Jewish conscience points the way, it commands the doing and prohibits the not doing. This moral idealism stirs in children at the period when they begin to look with clearer vision upon life, when the wider interest begins to assert itself. We must guard against leaving our children superficial in matters of conduct. We must not let them be satisfied with mere "correct- ness," for that would be morality without spirit, a matter-of-fact morality which ends, as in the case of material things, with the profit or the loss. This "practical," "useful" interest has impoverished the ethics of modern Jews. It has taken the spiritual snap out of them and it is so insidious that we ought to be very suspi- cious of it. Jewish children should be given the traditional Jewish genius of morality, so that they may regard truth and justice and the virtues not as a policy, but as the Will of God. Child idealism may lack precision and insight and reach ; but through it the child enters into conscious moral relations and gets control of them ; he w^ants to take part in the larger life. Never are the moral discriminations so intense as at this period of childhood, for the child has 78 AIMS OF TEACHING so much to which he must adjust himself. He is face to face, not only with problems, but also with high and noble needs. This is the age of moral enthusiasms, when everything suggests a Utopia. And its piety is its finest Utopia. THE MATERIAL. The Biblical material for this Grade com- prises the biography of Joshua, the history of the Judges and the biographies of Saul, David and Solomon. It is the story of a moral progression. It is the period in which the Prophets arise. The growth is from self-asser- tion of a crude kind, typified by the war in the Story of the Invasion, to moral self-asser- tion and personal morality, as in David and the ethical wisdom of Solomon. The teacher should treat this period from the point of view, not of its politics, but of its morality. Neither the teacher nor the pupil is a warrior or a statesman. History has an entirely different educational content for chil- dren. It is the drama of morals, the story of the effort people make to adjust themselves to one another. Israel is endeavoring to build for itself a home in a new country, an ideal home. Joshua has the stamina of a pioneer. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 79 Saul, David and Solomon are moral proto- types, and the teacher must exhibit their soul-difficulties, so that the child may recognize in them his own moral struggles and find what he may emulate and what he must avoid. They are not placed before the child as "copy" entirely worthy of imitation. Just as in the adult world the good goes side by side with the bad, so the child must accustom himself to the experience that he is environed by the virtuous and the vicious and that he must make a choice between them. He must also learn that we have both sides of Saul or David in us, that the evil may drag us down, if we let it, and that the good may lift us up, if we help. We have so far traced the child from depend- ence through interdependence to a sense of self and into responsibility. We must now guide it so that it may evenually acquire a quality of decided personality. GOD IS A MORAL PERSONALITY. In keeping with their awakening conception of themselves is the children's conception of God. They are impressed not so much by power as by the spirit in the world. While they are not capable, of course, of perceiving 80 AIMS OF TEACHING the immanence of God in the phenomena of the world, they scent it, as it were, by intui- tion. Just as the horizon of their Hves is ex- panding beyond their home, and the world is becoming complex for them, so God seems to rule not by mere power, but in sublimated and moral w^ays. At this stage superstitions arise. Superstitions are interpretations of experience in terms of beliefs which were potent in a former stage of cultural development. They are displaced by explanations that com- port with our present cultural status. Here, then, a two-fold problem arises ; first, we must crowd back the fears the child has, and second, we must suggest a sense of safety. The sub- missiveness which comes through the convic- tion that a moral personality presides over the world is of a higher type than that which has its source in fear of physical force. Since the child aspires to be a personality to be counted with, he invests God with a similar a moral ego. At first, God does things according to child- motive and child-purpose. But the next step in the child-religion will be toward a God who acts with right reason and just will. This really moral conception of God, however, does not arise in the child suddenly and with- IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 81 out preparation. The progress is on a line from a God who is thunder and Hghtning, to a God who is mind and will. It is the function of the teacher to lead the child to a recognition of its moral self and to a spiritual interpreta- tion of God and the world. Here the divergence between the Jewish and the non-Jewish child is complete. For the Jewish child, the transition from the sense of a physically powerful God to a moral God is like coming into his own. 82 AIMS OF TEACHING SIXTH GRADE. The point of view of the teacher in the Sixth Grade is that the children vacillate between whim and will, between what they do according to their impulses and what they do in conformity with the Law which is enforced upon them. THE RISE OF PERSONALITY. The moral problem for this Grade is to become conscious of the fact that the Law of Society is sovereign and that they owe obe- dience to it. Another side of the problem is that the children not only recognize a law that controls their relations to others, but that they also establish within themselves a moral order that holds in check their wishes and passions, and makes personality dominant over them. The distinction must be made between laws and Law. For as long as injunctions are neces- sary, the child has no sense of right, sufficient and forceful by itself. It should not be neces- sary to come constantly to the aid of the moral insight of the child; he should be able to decide by his own moral discrimination. Only when he sees the alternatives of a moral issue and can choose between them, has he acquired a moral character. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 83 AUTHORITY. This involves the subject of authority. Some authority handicaps the child, robbing him of his initiative in a moral choice. There are times when the child must be given freedom to decide independently on matters involving right and wrong, and when the responsibility must ulti- mately rest in his own soul. He must not only seize hold of action, but also assume respon- sibility for what he has determined upon. The child passes through a period when he is very eager to assert himself, but he must learn how, and when and toward whom he may make this self-assertion; that he must establish an in- dependent moral judgment. The following are the steps of progression in this recognition of authority. The first step is conformity. The child does what others do. Parents, elders, teachers are right, just because they are parents, elders and teachers. This is not blind obedience, for the child conforms for another reason than subordination. He imi- tates out of love and admiration, because the elders are prototypes beyond whom he does not wish to go. This first step is in keeping with the child's natural instincts, which can always be trusted and followed. Out of this conformity to right types is born obedience, one of the es- 84 AIMS OF TEACHING sential virtues. On the lowest level, obedience is merely conformity. This kind of obedience requires no surrender of wish or will. The conflict, indeed, of will with authority begins later, is inevitable, and offers a healthful exer- cise in discrimination. It disciplines and en- lightens the will. SUBORDINATION. The second step in moral progress as to authority consists in subordination. This calls for intelligence of a higher kind. Blind con- formity is not moral, for insight is necessary to make a decision moral. The teacher must not force the pupil to "mind," for "mind- ing" dulls the character as well as the in- tellect. Submission to authority must be voluntary and reasonable if it is to be moral at all. Of course, there is a kind of check which helps to train. But this must not paralyze the child's personality, or else there will be nothing left to train or to discipline. Where there is no conscious personality, it is not worth while to bother about training. We must always preserve freedom, the initiative in the child. In the Jewish child especially we must respect individualism. The moral genius of the Jew- ish people lies in that. The pedagogy which IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 85 prevails in Jewish homes deals very kindly and very delicately with individualism. The perse- cutions Jews have suffered might have de- moralized them if these domestic counter-in- fluences had not upheld their self-consciousness and their moral stamina. Child-individualism, however, is not entitled to indulgence and free scope all around. Here the teacher will have to be watchful, for he is face to face with a serious problem in general education and also with a special danger in Jewish life. We all know the opinionated, wilful and pampered child of today. We come across him frequently in Jewish homes in which parents otherwise evidence tact and control. It is on this account that this Grade constitutes an epochal chapter in the moral education of the Jewish child. We must help the child to self-restraint and respect for authority, not merely when this authority is obviously reasonable and com- pliance with it profitable, but when it appeals to the higher aspects of life. In a certain sense, conformity comes from admiration of an ideal ; the child believes this ideal is incarnate in the father, mother and teacher, and wants to live up to it. Subordination is best when it is allied with 86 AIMS OF TEACHING the admiration of a moral personality. The child should respect authority because he has the ambition to rise to its level. The Jewish child appears to regard authority as something of possible approach, and this is a very promising attitude. The best appeal of authority lies in the fact that it is not alien to us, but contains something kindred with us, that we can lift ourselves up to it and be at one with it. Familiarity with authority does not breed contempt against it, but affec- tion for it. A Jewish child makes light of re- spect only when the authority set over it is unreal, and it loves, admires and respects just as soon as the authority is genuine and is not captious. The Jewish child can be trained into obedience when he is shown an ideal ; the ideal, however, must not be mere vague ideal- ization, but should present a definite aim worth striving for. FEAR. The characteristic quality of Jewish ethics is the union of moral aspiration with fear. It comes to us from the most ancient period of Jewish religiousness. Modern thinkers regard "fear" as archaic and cannot fit it in with free- dom and responsibility. According to popular IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 87 notion, fear is abject and cowardly, and some teachers want to reform fear out of the reUgion. But nothing in our practical times is needed more than genuine "fear," which sanctifies childhood with modesty. Modesty should be in the soul of the child in its dealing with men and the problems of life. It should bring the child to feel that wisdom and strength have their limitations. This subtle quality of fear makes the difference between the ethics of the world and the ethics of the Jew. All other kinds of morality pay in one way or another, but Jewish morality never paid, never will and never should pay. The moral doctrines of the creeds and of the political codes cannot satisfy the ethical ideal of the Jew. The basis of Jewish morality is the fear of God and the fear of sin; virtue goes with fear, as reverence does. Fear seeks God and does not avoid Him ; fear faces God, truth, virtue, life, death. Fear, far from paralyzing moral activity, tempers it with delicacy and piety. The fear of God plays the most important role in Jewish ethics ; it gives character to all the forms of conduct. Fear, in fact, is in morals what belief is in doctrine. Fear is the moral scent of the presence of God. We have fear when we 88 AIMS OF TEACHING feel the sanctity of life. Fear may seem mystic, but we have no mystics in Judaism, which is a most realistic religion. Fear faces the light, and the moral significance of fear lies in the fact that it demands that we should be very clear about God and the world. The scientist and the artist know God and fear Him better than the commonplace people; they have the great .awe of life and nature, though they are very near Him. It is not a question of degree, as if the fear of God were ultimate and fear of father and mother secondary. To subordinate oneself to Law enlarges the soul and lets God enter it; to subject oneself to parental authority, lets parental wisdom operate in the child-life. Fear is the appreciation on the part of the child that his moral life is linked with that of the parent. There is a moral union between parent and child. Filial awe has always gone into adult Jewish life and has secured the moral continuity of the Jewish people. I have spoken of fear at some length because of its prime significance in Jewish morality. It is bound up with our life, it is the strain of our blood, it is the law of our souls. It is not sufficient for the Jewish teacher to inculcate general moralities ; he must foster IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 89 the specific spirit of Jewish ethics. The Relig- ious Schools need not, nowadays, teach the commonplace virtues, or repress the well- known vices; the secular schools do that. In the Jewish Schools we have other work to do ; we must secure the Jewishness of morality, in- culcate our reasons why children should be true, right, faithful, loyal. And I need not say that in morals everything depends on the why. Fear in Jewish morality is a "why," a reason and a motive. Fear of God makes for loyalty to God's Law; fear of parents makes for filial loyalty; and fear of truth makes for virtue. We must aim high in Jewish ethics. Fear is the high-water mark of morality. And fear is thoroughly religious morality, for it puts God into the heart of life and makes God's presence the center of the conscience. Fear is fundamental. Of course, being afraid is not the same as having fear; indeed, religious fear and awe are the very opposite of cowardly fear. Fear of God makes for confidence and trust in Him. The naive ideals, the pieties of the child at this period are a preparation for this fear. SOCIAL INTERPRETATION OF VIRTUE. It should be clear to the teacher that he can- not teach the virtues on the ground of the 90 AIMS OF TEACHING personal advantage they bring. They have a social bearing and their significance lies not in what they do for us, but in the moral kinship to which they lead us in our relation to others. The maxim that "Honesty is the best policy" is spurious, for it implies that we are after advan- tages. No genuine virtue begins and ends with- in one's self. The normal development which takes place at this period of childhood comprises not merely the child's own body, the child's own satisfactions and the child's own inner being, but also the child's conduct toward other people. We are turning the face of virtue, as it were, toward the outside. The larger-sensed ethics of today, which declares that our conduct reaches into the lives of others, we Jews have cultivated through ages of solidarity. In the period with which we are dealing in this Grade, nothing is so striking as the child's unselfish- ness. It is an anticipation of adult, broad and inclusive Jewish morality. The Jewish point of honesty is openness to others, not merely consistency within oneself ; readiness to do assigned work because it is a general benefit; industriousness as a prompt response to just demands. The social interpretation of motives, at this period of childhood, may be given in an elementary way, for the child at IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 91 this age is not yet social; that is, he does not yet know the precise bearings his Hfe has to- ward others. But the suggestion of it is timely. FELLOWSHIP. From fear in conduct to fear in wor- ship seems a natural step. This period marks the beginning in worship. Worship in its initial stage, indeed, is moral. The ritual form comes later. Up to this Grade worship was prayer, individual prayer. From now on it becomes social, communal; the form of wor- ship may become more rigid and more elab- orate. Worship, too, must comport with child- psychology; we must make ritual express the simple interests of child-life. Remember that the line of growth in child-life, at this period, is from isolation to companionship. The child is now forming comradeships and friendships, and craves for attachments. The child experi- ences the elation of feeling when he finds that another shares his interest and his ideal. This dawning sense of communion is at the heart of child worship ; though, of course, in a very lim- ited sense. This child-worship is not yet ser- vice and its prayer is merely Thanksgiving and Praise; for worship, too, proceeds on the lines of development. What is worship for 92 AIMS OF TEACHING an adult is not worship for the child; and the worship of a child is something other than the worship of youth. Just now, worship is the expression of fellowship, of the fitting-in with other children, made possible because they have similar moral needs and moral satis- factions. The solemnity of the worship lies in this consonance. It comes out of the hearts of the children, and no formality or ritual can bring it into them. Here, too, we must change the front of things. Solemnity must not pro- ceed from the pulpit to the pew, but from the pew up to the pulpit. The same truth applies to child- worship. An imitation of adult wor- ship, a small edition of the Prayer Book, or prayer in short syllables, is mere caricature. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 93 SEVENTH GRADE. This is the age at which children are at their greatest activity. The body is developing and seeks adjustment to the new physical functions. The mind, too, I should rather say the psychical constitution, is agitated in every direction of mental and moral reach and endeavors to establish right connections. The children are becoming conscious of themselves ; their sense of muscular strength is a sort of reassurance of themselves that they possess a new power. This physical satisfaction often makes the bully. A bully is one who gets pleasure out of the use of strength. The problem is to lead him to use that strength rightly, upon proper occasions and for good ends. The training begins with showing that brutal strength without control is useless and wrong, that real manliness lies in a wise and fair use of power. Many a young bully learns to employ his physical resources in good causes and becomes a leader of men. The rudimentary passion to bully somehow and somebody is in each child. The observant teacher can use this passion for the develop- ment of healthy manliness. The crude asser- tion of self is the first expression of a grow- ing sense of manhood and should be respected and helped. 94 AIMS OF TEACHING SELF-ASSERTION. The Jewish child especially should get at- tention from the teacher with regard to this. For self-assertion has been denied the Jew through centuries of persecution and discour- agement, and a frank declaration of the inner life and a healthy exercise of the natural impulses would bring a fine uplift to him. The teacher must provide for a free exercise of all the instincts which speak out in child- hood, so that the Jew may acquire pride in physical strength as a God-given power which restriction and suppression have forced him to neglect. But, of course, he must use it under the direction of morality. The Jew has main- tained himself in a hostile world only by self-control; and his philosophic temper has not paralyzed his natural impulses. The world must, in all justice, admire the "pa- tience and suffering of our tribe." For his endurance has been sane; it has not run to seed in puritanism and asceticism, and fits in with the aggressive and enterprising spirit of the modern world. Still we shall always have the problem as to the consciousness of self. In the first place, we must give the Jewish child scope for wholesome exercise and induce him to love athletics, and in the second place IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 95 we must moralize these physical activities, that is, we must subordinate the passion for sport, so that the exuberance of health may not de- generate into brutality. Character must dom- inate flesh. SELF-CONTROL. The restlessness of which parents and teach- ers in Public and Religious Schools com- plain is not pathological, it indicates the hunger for activity. The restlessness of many chil- dren is not "nervousness," but inability to employ physical resources rightly; it is fre- quently originates in a moral diflSculty and rep- resents an incapacity to check the impulses urged by healthy life. The child has not been given ability to control them, and lacks direc- tion into which to lead them; he possesses resources of health and has not learned how to use them for right and moral ends. The so-called nervous child becomes tractable just as soon as he is interested in some definite work — that is, just as soon as his personality is awakened. He will use his intellectual and moral energy when there is a cause or an in- terest for which to employ it. But this cause should not be a mere child-cause, or else the work will be not much more than empty play. The discerning teacher should suggest an ap- 96 AIMS OF TEACHING propriate interest out of which the child can build a larger self. IMAGINATION AND SYMPATHY. One ot the means with which we can enhance this developing life of the child is fancy and imagination. After all, fancy and imagination are at the basis of morality. No one can feel sympathy, no one can do justice, unless he can "put himself in another's place." This imag- inary placing of oneself into the position of an- other, this vivid realization of what is going on in another person is a moral effort. To culti- vate fancy, therefore, is a discipline on the direct line of moral and religious growth. At this period childhood cries out, as it were, for the food which it needs. To be sure, the fancy must not be weird and undiscrimin- ating, and much depends upon the pedagogic tact of the teacher to prevent it from becoming such. He must direct the child's reading, for reading is a substitute for experience; it sup- plies idealized experience and lifts the sordid facts of daily life to high levels. MORALITY AND IDEALISM. Here, too, the Jewish teacher has a special obligation. The Jew is said to be a realist; IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 97 to be sure, the Jew has had to take the world as it is. Those in whose midst he Uved were sternly set against him, and he could ill afford to be a dreamer. But he did not allow himself to become despiritualized by this stress, and it is not too much to claim that he has been a classicist in idealism, despite the fact that his history is a record of broken hopes and embittered disappointments. But the Jewish child of today is in danger of lapsing into practicalities. This danger can be met only by stirring his imagination. Morality is always poetic. A morality which lifts the soul above the commonplace is the kind of morality which we should give to our children. We glory in the fact that the Jewish people has given to the world the psalms and that it produced poets and hymnists while the persecutions raged about it in the Middle Ages, and we boast of the many poets of Jew- ish birth, but what are we doing to produce poets and idealists today, or what are we doing to sustain the average Jew in higher aspirations ? If Judaism is to live, it must be more than a mere confession of dogmatic theorems ; and if Jews are to hold their place in the forefront of culture, they must live by a moral and religious ideal. Poetry, like religion, 98 AIMS OF TEACHING has a practical bearing on life. We need the poetic temperament in our every-day virtues. We must moralize life by it. We shall not train the new generation of Jewish children for a right place in life, unless we soften their lives with the solvent of sentiment. The Jewish people will be strong, in the ethical sense of the word, when it has learned to ally the prac- tical with the ideal. We must train Jewish children in keenness of feeling and cheeriness of nature. In all his history the Jew has resented nothing more strenuously than being pitied. He found sufficient comfort and en- couragement in himself. If the next generation of Jews is to be loyal to the faith of their fathers, we must build up in them delight in the gifts of life. Our children should live their lives as masters, not by vulgar force but by refined and high-gauged moralities. QUESTIONS AND GROW^TH. This is also the age in which children delight in asking many questions which embarrass conscientious parents and teachers. The ques- tions call for a clear statement of facts, the more difficult just because the questions are elementary and obvious. There is promise in this persistence of inquiry. The children IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 99 must absorb much, in order to adjust them- selves to the civiUzation in which they are to Hve, and they must learn many facts, familiar to us but new to childhood. We should sympathize with the child while he is in the throes of the birth of his intel- lect and character. We should reply to chil- dren's questions with scrupulousness and sympathy. Parents and teachers should respect this child-curiosity and should be on the alert to satisfy it. Many a parent has laid the foundation for a life-long reverence for high themes by a right reply, and many a parent lays the foundation of frivolity toward the finer aspects of life by an indifferent answer. The little inquirer comes with childish puzzles and innocent ecstasies about God and heaven and angels and those charming mysteries out of which the finer texture of our soul-life is woven, and we have a holy responsibility how we receive or dismiss him. A child's question is an obligation upon us and we should be at our best, in forethought and sympathetic co- operation with the child, when we reply. The child regards his father and his teacher as all- informing oracles, and we must not disillusion him. However, children often ask questions for the sake of argument, and argument is a kind 100 * AIMS OF TEACHING of fight. Children at this age like fight, fight in any form. For fight by way of argument is a show of strength, and strength pleases chil- dren. Besides, this contest of child-wisdom with adult-wisdom offers opportunities for in- tellectual training, the more likely to benefit the child since it originates in a real interest. The child-debates on the profound subject of religion may seem almost blasphemous, but we must scent the sanctities behind them. The child is serious and his questions should be responded to with equal seriousness ; and I su- spect that parents resent the inquiries of chil- dren mainly because they feel themselves in- competent to give the proper answers. But the teacher cannot shirk his duty; he cannot escape the responsibility for the injury that must inevitably come, if he neglect it. The questions of the child show that he is rediscov- ering the principles of life, the world and God, and all those truths which constitute religion. His insistence on his child-point of view is one of the happiest facts of the matter; he re- examines and revalues the truths with his own eyes and his own heart. Enlightenment and correction are not established by proving the child wrong. Character advances by sug- gestions and not by discouragement. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 101 THE JEWISH CHILD AND INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY. We hear much about the forwardness of the Jewish child, that he is wanting in shyness and well-bred reserve. I do not believe this indict- ment is justified, and can say much in defense of the Jewish child. He is acknowledgedly deferential toward the parents in the home and docile in home duties, and, on the whole, he ob- serves due regard toward elders and superiors. But, I confess, he is quite ready to "answer back" and is prone to take advantage of fami- liarities. I concede also that the Jewish child is quick to catch a point in a discussion and, if permitted, will drive on in it with self- assurance. But I should not condemn the ready wit and wisdom of childhood as alto- gether objectionable and bad. We should not object to the child holding his ground honest- ly in the face of opposition ; though we might find fault with his refusal to submit to authority when that authority is valid, reasonable and benevolent. The Jewish child likes to measure himself with the wit and the wisdom of his elders, whereas, I surmise, other children de- light in measuring themselves in physical rather than intellectual and moral strength. 102 AIMS OF TEACHING This polemical habit of the Jewish child can, however, be directed to intellectual and moral interests and checked by tact and the proprieties. If the child is accorded too much scope for self-assertion, and his little wisdom is pampered, he may be encouraged to exag- gerate his worth and get a false standard of intellectual and moral values. Such calam- itous results are not infrequent and we cannot warn too much against them. But whenever this occurs, the source of the misfortune lies in the parents' weakness, who indulge the child- prattle and nurse a secret pride in it. Teachers must meet this difficulty and not infrequent- ly must undo the mistakes the parents have made. It is duty of the teaching profession to go beyond the school-room into the very heart of the home and the community. If parents commit a grave error, and jeopardize the morality of their children, the teachers must come to the rescue. VANITY. Looking at the matter more closely, it will be seen that vanity on the part of the parents entails vanity on the part of the child. The parents delight in the child's show of smartness, and the child ends in himself taking satisfac- IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 103 tion in it. The satisfaction increases with every added instance of approval and the child begins to take unction to his little soul. At this stage of its life, at any rate, he loves to pose. Pose, too, is a claim to superiority. By steady increments this pose may pervert the mental and moral perspective. Conceit, a most fatal illusion, may superinduce moral blind- ness. There are teachers who use the vanity of children in the interest of discipline. But the appeal to vanity is an appeal to a selfish motive and, therefore, bad, and the'teacher who builds up the moral life of the child upon an immoral basis sells it for the mess of pottage of his per- sonal ease. Teachers have a responsibility as to what motive they appeal to. Discipline is not begotten, at any rate, just to relieve the teacher of his hardships. We may make a child tractable to our will, but never by being indif- ferent to his moral health. To keep his develop- ment true and pure is the solemn duty of the teacher, and he dare not be recreant to it for any reason. CONTROL. At this child-period exacting commands are not a forceful form of discipline, for the child begins to feel that there is a difference 104 AIMS OF TEACHING of degree in the demands made by the father, mother, teacher and superiors. A real ap- preciation of authority can exist only where there is discrimintion. A child conforms to another will only when he knows that his own will is not as wise nor as good nor as strong. Only a developed character can respect authority. The teacher must be cautious not to impose his will with summary force; he must not domineer over the child-per- sonality. Much of what we call obstinacy is provoked by arbitrariness on the part of the teacher. Obstinacy is more often misdirected than undirected will power, or it is will power that has been stopped without a fair reason. Obstinacy in the last instance is the honest effort we make to overcome the un- reasonable obstacle but in our way, for moral progress lies always on the road of free will. Nothing damages child-nature more than "breaking its will." The child will need his will all his life, and he must have moral freedom if he is to use his will at all. Will is the very soul of morality, and to endeavor to kill off the child's will, to break his will, is to demoralize him. Parents and teachers have authority over the child only to ripen his life, to guide him and to give him moral strength. They have no right IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 105 to despoil the child of his self-respect, to keep him weak and helpless. Here caution must set in, lest we reduce the child to impotent depend- ence and impoverish his soul. We must not provoke him so that he snap back against the pressure in truculence. Obstinacy may sink in- to the deep places of the soul, from which it may be impossible to dislodge it. If obstinacy is not dealt with while it is in its beginnings, it will handicap the pupil in later life and will be harder to deal with. Right training fore- stalls and does not wait till the evil has set in. This conflict with the child's first declaration of will is serious for his further moral life. His later ability to adjust himself to the environ- ment depends upon his ability to conform to social conditions, to fit in with or be rebel- lious to the community. SENSE OF KINSHIP. For the Jewish child, this ability to conform to the environment is essential. Jewish solid- arity is nothing else than participation in moral interests. The teacher of the Jewish people must foster this ethical communion. That we have cause to complain about the decline of the Jewish spirit, of the loyalty which was formerly strong in Jewish life, is evident from the fact 106 AIMS OF TEACHING that we must plead for it with grown men and women. The instinctive feeUng of loyalty, the response comes out of the child-soul imme- diately when the cause is good. The Jewish child-heart did not have to be trained in the radical virtue of loyalty, but we must train it now. Its kinships should mean much to it; they should stand in its sight as right and best. This is not chauvinism, nor prejudice; it means merely that the child should take his natural affiliations sincerely and seriously. We believe Judaism is a sound cause, that the world needs it and we give to it our en- thusiasm and our whole heart. Many influ- ences have built up this Jewish consciousness in us. It is a pity that today we have no con- structive influences, only schools and formal means, to sustain us in this. The public school must ignore the specific interpretations sacred to us, and the Religious School is not the organ through which the Jewish community speaks. But the justification for our work and the guar- antee of our confidence in the future lie in Jewish child-life. INDIVIDUALISM. At this age, individuality develops. In- dividuality has three forms. The first form IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 107 is the subconscious sense of self and is necessary, for the moral life is based on "know- ing oneself." The second form is the sense of contrast, excluding or opposing others, and has its ground in the conviction that one can do things which others cannot. The last form of individuality bases its claim for the right of way in life on rounded personality. It is this last into which we should help the Jewish child- soul to flower. A balanced character, sure- ness in effort and endurance, these constitute personal morality in Judaism. We hear much in praise and in condemna- tion about the Individualism of the Jew. It may not be a flawless virtue, but neither is it an unmitigated vice. The individuality of the Jew has coexisted with the solidarity of Jews. Individualism did not tear them apart. It was not a solvent, neither of the community, nor of their communion. It did not disin- tegrate Israel during the persecutions. The attempts on the part of church and mis- sionaries to break it, failed ignominously. The Jew is an unperturbed personality in all the tragedies of his history. The union of the Jewish people is a moral one ; it is not conven- tional. Every Jew feels that his life touches every other Jew's. This sharpens his moral 108 AIMS OF TEACHING alertness and makes every Jew feel that he is necessary to all of his people, and that he has a constant obligation toward them. This individuality begins in childhood, when the moral life is being established and the child endeavors to acquire use of its powers. Its boasts, poses and vanities are so many bids of the child for recognition as a personality. Jewish children pass through this period not with more boastfulness than other children, but with no less of it. Still, however this may be, self-regard must make way for regard for others, and the desire for justice for oneself prepares for social justice. DISCIPLINE. The teacher can get the best results of dis- cipline, not when he enforces summary com- pliance with the demands of his authority, but when he respects the moral capacity of the pupils. The appeal, for instance, to the chil- dren's self-effort will make allies of them. The best disciplinarian is not he who dominates, but he who sympathizes with child-nature. BOYS AND GIRLS. When boys and girls begin to go apart, the teacher must heed the sense of difference, IN JEWISH SCHOOLS.. 109 which they begin to feel and which will later on, at the age of adolescence, become pro- nounced aloofness. But, as yet, it is merely an unconscious premonition, and the children are naive about the two-fold division of the class-community. The relationship between boys and girls at this period is entirely frank and they feel as brothers and sisters. To the boy, a girl is somebody's sister, and a boy is somebody's brother. They have learned that justice, truthfulness and helpfulness are due from one to the other. Out of these moral re- lations between brothers and sisters, however, the "Brotherhood of Man" eventually develops. At a later epoch, the sex-difference will be- come more accentuated and make kinship and mutuality more difficult. While, therefore, the training in reciprocal duties had best begin now, the interpretation of sexuality must not be given with brutal frankness, whatever up- to-date experts may say, but with delicacy and a profound regard for its sanctity. Children should not be robbed of modesty, the purest and the best restraint which nature has devised and upon which practical wisdom cannot im- prove. I warn against the gross kind of sex- education, which frequently uncovers the sanc- tities of chastity, while it claims to protect 110 AIMS OF TEACHING them. The brusqueness which boys show towards girls, on the one hand, and, on the other, the petulance of girls toward boys, sug- gest that both are beginning to recognize differences. Jewish children must learn to keep their natural instincts chaste. ADJUSTMENT TO ONE ANOTHER. The subject of co-education might here be touched on, not so much as a moral question of as one of pedadgogy. It may be urged that the association of boys and girls, doing the same task and sharing the same influences, in- duces them to co-operate with one another. But the question might be put in this way: Is it not timely, at this age, to provide for the adjustment of the one to the other.? The boy needs the prototype of manliness and the girl requires the example of womanliness. In grades of adolescents a man should teach boys and a woman should teach girls. The boy must learn how to adjust himself to woman- hood and the girl must learn how to adjust herself to manhood, for they will eventually enter into companionship in the home. This relationship should be more than gal- lantry and romance. The way should be pre- pared for the domestic sense upon which the IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. Ill best things of life are based. The domestic sense is our strength, and the School must con- tribute its share to develop it. The opportune time for supplying mutual respect between man and women is not when the adolescent period has already arrived, but when the boy and the girl deal with each other in naive frankness. The teacher should bear in mind the homes from which his pupils come and should look beyond the school-room into the time when these boys and girls will have matured for the highest and best functions of life. TEACHERS. In a later school-period it is advisable to provide a man as teacher for girls and a woman as teacher for boys. Boys need to ac- quire moral adjustment to womanhood, and girls to manhood, and both need intelligent and respectful attitudes for reciprocal relationship between them. It is possible that the school is feminizing the b6ys, for as long as woman teachers predominate. The growing boy must learn to understand womanhood and the girl must learn to understand manhood, since they will need one the other in adult life. 112 AIMS OF TEACHING "principles" and lessons. The child should not be troubled by "princi- ples." The child needs some general state- ments and some rules which he may apply ; but theological generalities should be absolutely avoided. Modern pedagogy has driven all abstract formulas out of the school-room and forbids the teaching of "creed" in any subject. The object of education is to establish habits of conduct; we do not operate schools in the interest of abstract "truths." We teach and train so that children may become strong and true and good. If any "generalizations" come to the child, they grow out of the work, out of the child's own intellectual and moral experi- ence, and are developed in the course of the school life. The teacher plans his work for the school- year, so that the lessons which the Course comprises may fit into one another and fol- low a line of progression. Each educational aim culminates into a definite lesson. These lessons, which the pupils have worked out one after another, constitute an eventually unified whole. The catechism has no reference to training; it had its origin in the systematized thought of adults and was meant for adult-minds. The IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 113 lessons, however, are worked out in the school- room and each part of them is the result of the children's own work, under the guidance of the teacher. These remarks apply to the subject of abstract instruction in general and have special application to the age with which we are deal- ing. Still, the child must get a larger sense or religion and ethics, for a character that pos- sesses no philosophy of life will be at the mercy of cases and casuistry. Without a large out- look and an all round vision, life will seem to the child a succession of isolated experiences and will lack unity. The child must be lifted above a fragmentary view of life and given a positive conviction of the fact that the world is right, good and worth trusting. For the present, therefore, every lesson should lodge in the child a standard of life. This standard will be modified and bettered in subsequent stages of growth; but the child should not be left to depend upon other people ; he should himself be able to solve a moral situation. The aim of school-discipline should be to give the child moral discrimination and initiative for action. This the child cannot have as long as the instruction is only by speci- fic rules. Moral instruction must culminate in 114 AIMS OF TEACHING "moral truths" and "moral laws," but these must be the child's own and not the ready- made wisdom of adults. GOD. The source of moral truth and moral law is God. God, for the children of this Grade is a God of moralities. Till now, God was the Father, the Spirit, the Person, but now He be- gins to be an authority as to rights and duties. The terms "rights" and "duties" are used with qualification. Even with adults they are not fixed in meaning, and they are less so in the minds of children. Adults project their moral notions upon their God, and the God of chil- dren, too, comports with what they themselves think and feel. At this period we witness the pretty scruples of children and their native orthodoxies. When teachers refer to duties, the children supply them with pedantic exactness As never before God means a constant monitor and judge. The problem is to direct this most promising personal scrupulousness to sound moral interests. CHILD-ORTHODOXY. - Child-orthodoxy is different from adult- orthodoxy. The child is bent on doing certain IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 115 things, not because he regards the thing in it- self important, but because he takes motives seriously. The orthodoxy of the child is al- together a matter of intense conscientiousness. He defers to customs because they appeal to him. Nature secures thus, as it were, a conservative force before the time of adoles- cence comes, when the craving for novelty and the passion for "reform" and the idealisms arise. Jewish teachers ought to welcome this temperamental conservatism. It is the ally of loyalty. The child-conscience should not be discouraged, nor given merely discarded forms of piety to play with, but should be allowed to take customs and traditions seriously, so as to afford loyalty a fair and sincere opportunity. The child should not later on discover that his loyalty was wasted. It is because teach- ers do not get near to the child-conscience and do not appreciate how serious it is, that the child lapses from his loyalty and, indeed, runs the risk of lapsing from the sincerities alto- gether. The stake, in this matter, is not merely ritual and ceremonies, but the child's moral integrity. Teachers should meet this early piety sympathetically, for out of it, if rightly treated, will develop the adult piety so much missed in modern life. 116 AIMS OF TEACHING JEWISH CHILD-NATURE. This child-seriousness is not infrequently the basis of a fine ethical discrimination. If left untrained and undirected, this precious sensi- tiveness and self-contemplation may deter- iorate into moroseness and moral doubt. Under right treatment, however, it may become a healthy, cheerful, whole-souled, moral enthu- siasm. Jewish child-nature is well constituted to pass safely through this stage of piety and Jewish youth is benefited by abundant occa- sions for exercise in moral choices. Notice the difference at this period between Jewish and non-Jewish childhood. Non-Jewish children are prone to run away from home and to in- dulge in the passion of unrestricted freedom. But Jewish children do not. This anti-domes- ticity of the non-Jewish adolescent is explained scientifically; mankind lived a roaming exist- ence, and the child lives over again, as it were, those days of migration. But, while this law of recapitulation may apply to Jewish .child- hood, just as to any other, this period of the genetic account does not apply to him, for his loyalty to home and family is unbroken. No civilized people has gone through enforced migrations as much as has the Jewish, and we should therefore expect the recrudescence in IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 117 the Jewish child. But the Jewish child does not run away and stays at home. We have here a splendid proof of the original moral genius of the Jew. The Jew is moral not because he possesses a correct system of ethics, but because his moral life has gone into his flesh and blood. REVERENCE. The complaint is general that the child of today has no reverence. But we must confess that we do not know how to train him in reverence. We know that reverence is similar to obedience. Obedience need not be a hard- ship; it may become a natural grace. Rever- ence, on the other hand, is a composite quality. It comprising confidence and admiration. He who cannot trust and admire, cannot revere. We must have an implicit trust that all is right and good, and we must feel certain that every- thing in our experience makes for the true and the just and the good, if we are to have rever- ence for God. Our sympathies must be keen, and we must admire what we see, though we may see with the eye of fancy only. Reverence, like obedi- ence,, is based on the fusion of confidence and admiration. A child that does not respect his elders cannot be obedient to them. The child 118 AIMS OF TEACHING that is self-conscious cannot subordinate him- self. Filial respect is voluntary subordination to parent and elders. Out of domestic respect develop religious reverence and submissiveness to God. Where the one is, the other is, and where filial devotion is not, the other cannot be. So also as to confidence. If it is true that the child of today has no reverence, the cause may lie in the fact that the modern parent, despite all willingness to labor for home and family, does not evoke confidence in his child. The home does not give moral re-enforcement and the companionship between parent and child is often, if not frivolous, trivial. The average father is not a hero to his boy, and the average boy is not sure that his father can never be wrong. Besides, influences other than those of the parent, go into child-life nowadays. The moral cleavage of offspring from parent takes place very early in the child-life, making loyalty and respect difficult. THE PARENT AND THE CHILD. Admiration of a parent is an elation of feeling which urges emulation. The child may wonder at his father and still not admire him. Wonder is the suspension of action, it is intel- lectual paralysis; but admiration is moral IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 119 dynamics that stirs to imitation. The child who admires his father wants to do what the father does. It would be a sad day when children should have to look for exemplars in books and stories instead of in the people about him. That father fails who does not stir his child into hero-worship. It is futile to complain that the child does not feel reverence toward high things, as long as so direct a relationship as that of parent fails to touch its soul. The father should be able to thrill his moral stamina. The exaltation we call reverence is a move toward moral uplift. The child should see God as a projection, as it were, of his father's "greatness," "power" and "wis- dom." The child reverence should act as a incentive and a spur and compel moral am- bition. I fear that we think of the lifting of the cap, genuflections and subdued voices, when we urge reverence and respect, or seek it at altars, in temples, vestments and books. But sound reverence invests common things with moral value and interest. The readiness to obey is the first step toward the appreciation of the authority of God, and reverence for it is the second. 120 AIMS OF TEACHING CEREMONIES AND REVERENCE. The duty of the parent and of the teacher is to offer to the child muhiphed opportunities for obedience, for confidence, for admiration. To enforce ceremonies under the supposition that they train the reUgious spirit is unpedagogic and unpsychological. The moral problem can- not be solved from the outside of the child. It is futile to insist on the child's conforming to ritual and formalities, before he has acquired a moral and religious sense. Teachers should not teach ritual and ceremony as facts to be known, for such instruction begets hypocrisy; children induced to ob- serve ceremonies without heart, become obtuse in religious feeling. Perfunctoriness will al- ways lead to immorality. It is not surprising that sectarian institutions fail to establish re- verence through their method; but it is that they do not thus repress moral growth alto- gether. Perhaps some of the irreligiousness of the present day may be charged to this kind of instruction. Religious Pedagogy does not worry about the alleged lapse from traditions and customs ; it knows that the child will per- form religious tasks voluntarily just as soon as he has respect for them. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 121 CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. A word as to congregational worship is in place here. It is a subject of current discus- sions from the point of need of expediency rather than of significance. A child be- comes Catholic through the sacrament ad- ministered by the priest. His attendance at worship is essential. The dogmatic interpreta- tion of church attendance goes through all the Christian denominations with more or less in- sistence. But it does not apply to the Jewish child. He does not become a Jew through a sacramental act, and his attendance at worship is an expression only of feelings and needs. His participation in public worship is his expression that he shares in the loyalties and aspirations which Jews have in common. It is also an exercise and discipline ; the main aim of syna- gogue worship is educational and pedagogical. Jewish adults, as well as children, attend ser- vices and take part in the ritual, not because their religious status is incomplete without such services, but because the influence of the syna- gogue is designed to train their religious life. Public worship is the expression of the soul- kinship of the people. From this point of view, congregational worship is dictated by the feel- ings of community and solidarity. The historic 122 AIMS OF TEACHING influences have gone into the souls of Jews aHke and they have a common need arising from these similar experience. Every man craves enlargement of his consciousness, and finds in his household, his kindred, his people, those who share his past and his ideals. Attendance at Temple worship, accordingly, is an expression of our alliance with our kind. We want to be with those who have come whence we have come, who go where we are going, who have the same interests in life and who bear responsibilities such as we bear. Community of interest constitutes a congrega- tion. It is not individual wants that brings men to the Temple; ideals make a congrega- tional assembly. It is an illusion to suppose we are dealing with a congregation just because the children sit in pews like the grown folks. Every ar- rangement of the Religious School Service made on the presumption that it is for a child- congregation is not based on the fact. He who has listened to a School or a class read the responses prescribed by the Hymnbook or the Prayerbook is struck by the fact that each child reads at his own speed, as if each were alone. Morally the child is, indeed, alone and apart. Concerted reading by children is IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 123 merely an aggregate of individuals reading in mass ; it is unison in voice, not unanimity in feeling. In adult worship a congregation joins in the Responsive Readings under the stress of a common religious exaltation, and the con- gregation is at the time of its worship a Com- posite Soul, as it were, out of which every private interest is eliminated and into which all common interests are merged. But children have no such capacity for communion, they cannot de-individualize themselves. The school exercise in worship should, therefore, be con- structed with due appreciation of this fact and should never be an imitation of the adult serv- ice. To be sure the child-service should pre- pare for the later elaborate, adult form, and there is some ground for the claim that the child should be led to love forever the words in which he expressed his first devotions. But he will remember them only when they have had the right ring for him, when they meant and carried real devotion. 124 AIMS OF TEACHING THE EIGHTH GRADE. This period of life works out a crisis. The body is adolescent and there are concomitant changes in character. An adjustment to other persons is taking place and social interests develop. All this is going on unconsciously. The educator must bring moral order into this stressful condition and help the youth emerge out of it with control of the physical powers, well-balanced mind activity and a firm will in right interests. The several educational agen- cies must co-operate to lay the foundations for a sound life, for if the youth is served by only one of them he must suffer in those qualities which the others might have cultivated. Secular education cannot prepare adequately for the vocations, the professions and the social relations, since back of them must be will and discrimination. No one can do work without a moral motive, and the value of what we do depends on the purpose for which we do it. The youth, therefore, is not served when he has been taught a trade, but when he is enabled to take up his trade in the right ethical spirit. If he enters a "learned" profession, it is not suf- ficient that he knows it, but that he uses his knowledge for proper ends. And it is, above IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 125 all, essential that his expanding human in- terests be lifted into higher levels where he may free himself from the pressure of the conven- tional and the sordid. Secular education with- out religious and moral refinement is defective, just as religious and moral influences unrelated to the facts of real life are mere cant. The boy and the girl at this age need guid- ance into moral interests more than into bread- winning occupations. Their entrance into the commonwealth without right moralization would be a menace to all that is stable and safe. For a wage-earner who cannot use his wages for legitimate ends is a hindrance to the com- munity, and if his interest in the community is limited to the profit he gets out of it he is a parasite. It is the moral interests that give a man a place in the community and a sense of significance of his own life. Since, as a matter of fact, the largest percentage of boys and girls of the adolescent period enter the wage-earning occupations almost directly from school, and among them not a small number of Jewish children, the duty devolves upon it to equip them so that they be strong in body, chaste and sane in the exercise of health, clear and en- lightened as to the relations they must enter into with their fellowmen, and pure and 126 AIMS OF TEACHING elevated in the interpretation of life, with in- terests in right directions and will power for proper choices and decisions. It is not without recognition of these facts that school and business mark a division at this age. The pupil either passes from the lower to the high school or leaves school altogether to "go to work." This is, indeed, a crucial time for youth, and it should have the benefit of such avowed moral influence as the Religious School can provide. This timely service is called for not merely to help youth to meet the difficulties that now come into its way and to spare it the distractions which tempt it, but also to co-operate with it in its effort to acquire capacity to "earn a living," which is in the main a question of manhood and womanhood. Then again, the community has a great deal at stake in this, for its weal and destiny are determined by the kind of adults recruited into it. THE SELF. The adolescents are developing an essential function by which the life and the culture of the race are ever renewed. The body under- goes vital changes and the soul adjusts itself to a new interpretation of life. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 127 The first sign of the matured self is the pride felt in physical excellence. Hence loudness on the part of the boy and showiness on the part of the girl. Also craftiness and insinuating man- ner, in search of advantages. The self-assurance which the boy exhibits must not be taken at its own valuation, of course, and should be led toward self-judgment. But there is a whole- some promise of stamina in this consciousness of self, upon which some of the strong elements of character rest. The opposite to this is shy- ness or modesty which appears not infrequent- ly at the age of puberty. It indicates a new and perplexing sense of self ; and if it is coupled with distrust, it may unman the character, and unfit the young man for the free exercise of his faculties. This condition calls for the teacher's discriminating influence, so that ori the one hand vanity may be checked and, on the other, self-distrust enlightened and self- reliance established. This is the age of ideals, but of ideals with regard to the self. The boy does not dream of improving the world. He thinks and plans only about his own elevation. This is as it should be at this period of excessive individualism. Coupled with these are the qualities of dig- nity and courtliness. They are dangerously 128 AIMS OF TEACHING near to sham, because they win applause easily. Personal dignity goes with a real ideal, and the true gentleman addresses himself to genuine and not to make-believe obligations. IDEALISM AND AMBITION. There is a difference, of course, between ideal- ism and ambition. The one may be mere day dreaming, the other implies actual effort. The one has no definite aim and takes up nothing with certain grasp; the other, though it may lack circumspection, is sure and vigorous. The boy wants to become somebody big, and he does not count the cost. He talks grandil- oquently and loves to pose, but it would be a grave wrong to ridicule him. His vagueness will some day be replaced by clearer vision, and the boy may make his boast good. This at least is achieved by idealism, that it helps the boy to ascertain his limitations and also attain to efficiency. It is a form of self-discipline. He soon realizes that wishing does not bring things, that he must have a provable claim if his de- mand is to be heeded. RELIGION AND MORALITY. This evolution of childhood into manhood is a struggle after moral self-mastery, and it is IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 129 also the rise of the rehgious feeHngs. Up to this period the rehgious sentiments were rudimen- tary and the child cannot be said to have any precise religious notions and not much more than a vague sense of God. Child Religion seems to comprise up to this time the certainty that God is in the world, and that we had better mind Him. But what "minding" God demands and what results come from it are conceived within the range of morality rather than of reli- gion, a limitation beyond which many adults seem unable to advance. Morality and reli- gion were fused into one another, and the first step forward now is toward a separation of the two. This is possible because personality is be- ing developed. The child is beginning to feel that he is becoming responsible. There is only one step from responsibility toward others to responsibility toward oneself. Out of this sense of personal obligation is born the most im- portant force of religion. The teacher would do well to bend down with sympathy to these awakenings of the child-faith. SOCIAL INTERPRETATION. The educational work of this period is to pro- ject the interest out of the self upon others. The aim of the teacher is to open up avenues 130 AIMS OF TEACHING of moral approach for the child that he may enter the lives of others by sympathetic service, not for the sake of the ultimate good which may accrue either to the recipient or the doer, but, without regard to results, as a widening of his interests. The youth should realize that his conduct bears upon himself as much as upon the lives of others, that what he does either knits or cuts the threads of connection between himself and others, and that the maintenance or the disturbance of his social relations enriches or impoverishes him. For the purpose of this training Charity, for example, may be regarded as an entrance into the lives of others and doing for them what they cannot do for themselves; but, in the first instance, it is an ennoblement of the self; love reacts and makes lovable. The boy of this age wants to do things, for by activity he becomes aware of what he is. For the right development of his character much depends upon what he is encouraged to realize within himself. For this there are innumerable occasions, in the home and in the school and in the relations between them. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 131 VIRTUE AND VICE. For the first time in the child's school career the terms virtue and vice acquire definite meaning. A virtue is a manner of living which aids to get one's manliness or womanliness recognized, while vice prevents one from being respected. It will not do to appeal for good conduct now on the score of the sense of right, the conscience and similar abstract motives. Virtue is observed and vice rejected, not be- cause their moral meaning is grasped, but because virtue is an advantage and vice a hindrance. This is the age of vanities, and virtue is merely an excellence which helps to attract notice. There are cases, in fact, when wrongs are done just because they are sensational. It must be remembered that this is the age of growing individualism, in which the self aims to assert itself. Much of the crime which youth commits at this age has its source in braggadocio. This individuality is crude, but it is the first expression of self-consciousness. It should not be condemned outright, for the bid for attention is natural and the fault does not lie in the making of the claim so much as in the means by which the claim is set forth. It is not the bov's fault that faults almost force 132 AIMS OF TEACHING him to be theatrical, nor that he does not know the difference between people's attention and people's approval. MORAL JUDGMENT. This involves an essential phase of moral development. The boy must learn to look for the standard of right and wrong, not in what others endorse or reprove, but in himself and in his own moral discrimination. It is fort- unate that he is self-conscious and eager to count for something. For that is the pivotal point of character. In matters of right and wrong, approval and disapproval are within one's self. Others do not know our motive, but we do. And it is the motive that makes an act right or wrong. No outsider can know what is going on in us. No outsider can tell, as we ourselves can, whether what we do we mean honorably or not. When we do right we do not require anybody's approval, nor can any one relieve us of the disapproval which we set on the act ourselves. This is not the enthronement of conscience, but the establish- ment of an inner moral judgment. The direct- ing conscience is a still farther step forward, but this moral insight is on the road toward it. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 133 GOD A MORAL FACT. A similar shift of center within the growing personality may be noticed in the boy's relig- ious life. As the authority in morals becomes more intangible and independent of circum- stances, so also the spiritual sense begins to dawn and the world and nature are more than merely mechanical things. The power of God ceases to be merely physical, and He becomes a moral authority. Along with the growth of the child-personality grows also the God-per- sonality. Now He is a Moral Fact. God does not do things simply because He knows how better than any man, but because He considers them right. God does not do wrong, because wrong cannot possibly come from Him. The God-fact develops in the child just as his own ego develops. God is not any longer outside. He begins to be inside of the life. God ceases to be spectacular, as it were, a Great Being in the Heavens, whose approval we try to obtain and whose disapproval we strive by all means to avoid. God is the spirit within us, and we feel we have His approval when we are calm in mind, and we know He disapproves when we feel ill at ease. 134 AIMS OF TEACHING WORSHIP AND MORAL EMULATION. Worship is still an affair of the individual. It does not consist in prayer and petition. Prayer is the expression of admiration of the Great Personality which is altogether right and never wrong, and a desire or aspiration to be with Him and not alien to Him. The prayers at this age should be mediations rather than ad- dresses to God; though the meditation should culminate in admiration and the prayer to God in an appeal to the best in oneself. Worship should emphasize not the defects and the deficiencies man has (or the child) but the satisfaction he has from right conduct and moral achievements. Youth should learn to consider as worship those happy moments when he is at his best. To be sure, I mean by hap- piness not the feeling of satiety, when we have gotten what we have craved for, but that ela- tion and satisfaction which attend our moral activities. Youth feels happy when it can do things well, and we should evoke this moral spiritedness and infuse it with exhilaration. An hour of youthful worship should be an hour of spiritualization, and the boys and girls should return from it to their homes and to their duties with a finer moral acumen and purpose. It must also be remembered that IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 135 children must learn not merely how and why to worship, but also what for. The average child is not clear on the subject, nor is the average adult. But the teacher should know that wor- ship is not an intuitve faculty which children have by instinct, but that they must be taught worship and that there are progressive steps in this as in every other subject. The next step, after individual and personal worship, is toward congregational worship, when the ado- lescent begins to appreciate that his life touches other lives and that he is under the law of man and the Law of God. CO-ORDI NATION. Since the pupil at this epoch is absorbed with himself (which is by no means selfishness justly stigmatized and denonunced later) and preoc- cupied with raising his personal capacities to the highest power, the approach to and co-or- dination with others is his moral problem. This age does not lack the sense of organization ; it recognizes that law is sovereign, but it lays em- phasis on self, and this makes the personal claims seem very big and more insistent than the demands of an outside authority. The danger is that the boy and the girl may settle down into conceits and self-satisfactions which 136 AIMS OF TEACHING make moral advance difficult. They make the skeptic and the inveterate dissenter, who sees only his own questions and hears only his own answers. Objections become a luxury, as does the standing out against others. INTEREST OUTSIDE OF SELF. Unbelievers and disbelievers are made, not born, and it is very likely that the youthful delight in seeing oneself the center of discus- sion and argumentation may whet the appetite and make contrariness habitual and chronic. The treatment amounts to this : Draw the in- terest away from the self and make the world outside interesting; show that other persons and other lives bear upon our own, that the personal life is, after all, only a fragment and insufficient without others ; and finally, show that human life is impotent unless it can count on the God-presence in the world. By the pres- ence of God, however, is not meant a mere ar- ticle of faith that God is and that He is every- where (theological notions about God), but that God is active in this world, and that wherever the boy has work in hand and what- ever that work be he can do it rightly and well only when he realizes that the very material in his hand he himself cannot devise nor create, IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 137 but that God makes it for him. This gives him caution and respect, quickens the reUgious sense and makes him alert to see, to feel and to be with God everywhere. This is the step from belief in God to co-operation with Him, from mere religious opinion to the active religious life. HERO WORSHIP. Hero worship is the moral grace of this period and it is also its religion. God is simply a Divine Hero, even for Jewish children. There need be no fear of idolatry in this. On the contrary, this makes religiousness truly per- sonal ; it sustains imagination and gives admi- ration and zest to emulate ideal types of life. The world is a theater of great deeds and history is a splendid drama. Every one has a role and those are best who acquit themselves best. The question is what one does and that one does that well. And the standard is God Himself. He does the incomparable. What He does no man can do. He is the power above all powers. He is the artist who beautifies the world and makes it admirable and lovable. And He is the Wisdom beyond all human wisdom. Hence, youth loves the- open life and delights in forest, field and brook. Never is the interest 138 AIMS OF TEACHING in nature so genuine as now. But it is a living interest; not a scientific but a moral interest. Every instinct of the youthful person tingles with life and he hails them as coming out of the hand of the Great Life. GOD. The foundation of the God conviction is thus laid. In later years theological instruction will imperil this God reality by making belief a speculation. Now youth sees God with the eye of admira- tion and feels God with the heart of enthu- siasm. The conviction that God is, is a vital pulse in the religious life; it is not mere opinion. At no time in the later years can ar- gument and catechism produce conviction like this. The "proof" adults have may enlighten, but it cannot warm them. Unless youth is free to idealize God, later instruction will not fill the void nor bridge over the aloofness from which adult-religion so frequently suffers. The teacher should stir his pupils with admirations in all directions and encourage them to in- dulge in the naive ecstasies which are the healthy exercise of the soul in moral activity. The very fossil they stumble on in the ground is an occasion for seeing God and feeling He IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 139 is near. Great men represent Him; they come from and reach up to Him. The rise and fall of nations, the tragedies of men and the varied experiences the children themselves have have moral meaning. God Himself, who is in all of them, is the highest Morality, the One who sets His face toward the Right. Not be- cause He makes the right prevail, but because He himself is the Right and the True and Good. All the youth's studies are saturated with God- presences; history is filled with magnificent heroisms, nature with divine activities, and literature tells exquisitely what lies in his im- pulsive soul. TYPES FOR HERO V^ORSHIP. There is need for caution. It is difficult to differentiate between the genuine and the spurious as to heroes. In the first place, even adults often fail to discriminate. In the second place, show is much more obtrusive than intrinsic worth, and young people are easily captivated by appearances. The dif- ficulty is met not by arousing suspicion, but by giving abundant examples of men and women who ring true. The teacher must be cautious in his selection of types. And the parent, too, must protect 140 AliMS OF TEACHING the boy against impostors. The theater with its stagy heroes may do incalculable damage. Even the teacher himself has a serious responsi- bility here. For boys and girls imitate him, down to his foibles. They want to be like their teacher in every detail. Not only in his moral tone is the teacher representative of every virtue, but in the God-ideal which he sets up. His interpretations of God become the boy's interpretations, and what the teacher declares as God's justice and God's law and men's faith enters into the boy's ways of think- ing and feeling, and so the teacher becomes, as it were, the moral parent. What the teacher is, will go into the boy's being and stay there. THE TEACHER IS THE PROTOTYPE. The high regard in which the teacher has been held by the Jewish people is a tribute not only to scholarship but also to character, and it is devoutly to be wished that this may so continue amongst us. A genuine character will readily find the avenue of approach to another soul. And he will also have tact, because he has sympathy. He will not ingra- tiate nor insinuate, and he will look for the right rather than for the wrong in others, in the world, in God. He will also strike a positive IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 141 tone, being sure of himself and of his faith. What youth needs now is rehance upon self. That can be gotten only after there is trust in others. Faith in the world, in fellowmen, in God goes before confidence in self. There is a kind of sureness which seems to be first in the moral development, but that sureness is coarse and cannot grow. There is a later kind of cer- tainty which is better and truer. We admire in order to copy. We accept as authority in order to obey. We trust that we may become trustworthy. We worship God, that is, we edify ourselves and build up our soul life, so that we may be sound and strong. The positive, consistent and manly teacher is in himself the best text-book and catechism. He can con- vince only when he is a moral influence. The Jewish teacher of today must become a living factor in Jewish child-life, and it is evident he has abundant opportunities in this Grade. THE TALMUDIC LIFE. The material for this Grade is the life of the Jews as represented by the Talmud. The Jew maintains himself by his moral force, unaided by government and institutions. He has a moral center within himself. It is a period which we might call crucial in the history of 142 AIMS OF TEACHING the Jewish people. It develops a new rehgious consciousness (more insistent than even the former national) and a capacity for conform- ing to the world-environment. Tradition which heretofore was in the keeping of the few is now the possession, the influence in the life of every person. The self, which formerly had the protection of institutions, is now thrown upon its own inner resources. Compliance with Law is now not a sacrament but a moral fact. And religion begins to free itself from the en- tanglements of priestly law on the one hand and custom on the other. The world becomes significant, for the Jew lives in it and must know and use it. And the world, too, begins to be interested in the Jew, not merely as a dis- senter but as a contributor to its large civiliza- tion. And each Jew is sponsor for all Jews. His aloofness, though living in the midst of men, is for moral reasons. He develops a rec- ognizable individuality in all directions. Even the organization of his people lacks cohesion; in fact, it is only moral and voluntary. The problem of the school is to make solidarity among the youths possible with a minimum of control, and to base it entirely upon sound and well-trained instincts. Talmudic casuistry is merely intense scrupulousness ; at any rate, it is IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 143 valuable from the point of view of what it has done for the conscience of the Jew. There are now no theoretical speculations. God is an actuality, not an abstraction. There was no metaphysics in the Talmudic times and very little mysticism. Religion was altogether a matter of conduct and this conduct, while minutely prescribed, was asociated with per- sonal obligations and responsibility. And the Rabbis, as well as the people, are types of char- acter. From the point of view of the educator, and perhaps also of the historian and of the impartial judge, the Talmudic Rabbis are not ., significant for what they said and taught so much as for what they were and did. Herein lies their title to an assured place in the School and in the Jewish Home. Some of them were martyrs, but all of the were moral heroes, types of high and truthful living. It is a grateful task to restore these men of stamina to the admira- tion they deserve and to the emulation which they may still elicit. BIOGRAPHY. The method of presentation of this material is biographical. For the interest to which ap- 144 AIMS OF TEACHING peal is made is personal, and the moral need of the child is to develop personality. This does not mean that the biographies be detached from one another and that they should not fol- low an historic sequence. There must be a logical connection between the hero-tales, if for no other reason than to widen the child's mental horizon and to prepare it for history as such. But even without this consideration the individual stories will gain educational force when it is felt that the)^ constitute a neces- sary squence, that one grows out from the other. But, in the main, each biography should be complete in itself. For the child must get a survey over a career, and to realize that it con- stitutes a moral unit ; that every act tells upon the whole of life and moral responsibility enters into every detail of conduct. One mis- take unmakes a career and one fine act may recoup it. THE HISTORIC VIEW. It is a mistake to force on the child the larger outlook we call Providence. The child is in- capable of life philosophy or world philosophy, and if it is taught God in such a form its con- IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 145 ception will become vague and confused- God is not truer because the canvas on which He is shown is large, but He is more real when His presence is perceived within one's own life. The study of history as a field of large moral ac- tions of God and men is very impressive, but it demands a trained intellect and imagination, and these the child does not have. The com- paratively small story of one man's life in- volves the same Moral Law which plays in history and is nearer to the eye and the heart. The child gets from biography all the moral benefit it needs and can hold. There will be plenty of time later on to widen the intellectual horizon of the child as to the providential acts of God, to show it that its individual life is only a part of humanity and that law means not merely what man must do, but also what God works out. It will be best for the child's ethical clearness if we exercise it on the play of right and wrong within the narrower field of its own little experience and in the pro- totypes (the heroes) vv^hom it emulates. The error in Jewish education has been that we have given the children too much abstraction and not enough of the concrete. This error is less pardonable in view of the fact that we are 146 AIMS OF TEACHING so rich in fine biographies. But we must not continue to make this mistake today, when hfe calls for action and strong souls. INSTRUCTION AND LIFE. The one insurmountable difficulty of the Religious School is the fact that it is limited to mere talk about virtue, God, life, that it is without means to make activity its form of in- struction, that what it teaches is merely ad- visory, that it has no oportunity for moral exercise and that the religious truths remain ab- stractions. The place for applying, for exercis- ing, for verifying Religious School lessons is in the human give and take, in the contact of men, in the communion of the home, and in the rub and conflict of society. Religious instruction is doomed, it seems, to be nothing more than book knowledge and school-room beati- tude. This is to be deplored all along the line of our work, but most especially at the age when children thrill with a passion for doing things. The pasive and contemplative character of our religious teaching is little likely to appeal to active, vigorous and impulsive children and youth. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 147 ACTIVITIES. To compensate justly for this, it would be good to supplement school-room instruction with such activities as are open to the young. The organization of boys' clubs and girls' clubs might bring out leaders whom to admire and to follow would be salutary moral exercise. It might help in self-expression, which is a moral effort. It will afford occasions for co-operation which calls for self-control and mutual regard. It may initiate ambitiousness, which comes with the rounding out of personality. And last, but not least, it may help to cultivate soli- darity in Jewish youths, that sense of kinship which is so essential to the Jewish people and so imperiled under modern conditions. Per- haps the experiment of self-government clubs in this Grade would produce happy results in some of these directions. The teacher must re- member, however, that in these clubs he does not deal with a "society" whose members have social sense, but with individual boys or girls who are morally aloof from one another. The problem is to break through this reserve and to cement these young people in a common interest and common cause. Opportunity for social drill can be found in plays which the 148 AIMS OF TEACHING class may agree to enact. The rehearsals are valuable for that and so is the working together for the same purpose (to bring honor to the class or to please an assembled school, or to raise its reputation in the judgment of the parents and the public.) For that matter, the discipline of the class, while together at its les- sons, makes for moral stamina, loyalty and mutuality. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 149 THE RELATION BETWEEN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL AND THE RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. The Religious Schools should be conducted on the plan of the public schools, and super- intendents and teachers should familiarize themselves with the methods of teaching and discipline which obtain there. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, the child must have a uniform educational life. All the influences that go into its soul must be of the same kind. Much of the difficultv in the Religious School is traceable to the fact that the children find no connection between it and their public school life. It is not because other subjects are taught there, but because the tone, manner and management are different and often contradict what the children are accus- tomed to. And the second reason for making the Religious School parallel to the public school is the fact that it will aid the Religious School teacher. He will know what the pupil is learn- 150 AIMS OF TEACHING ing, what his mental capacities are, what new information and what new intellectual training are coming to him. And the teacher will be able to adjust the religious education to that. Much of the religious teaching in the with the other parts of the child's education. It is the duty of the Religious School teacher to make himself conversant with the work his pu- pils are doing during the week, and it is his distinct duty to connect his religious instruction with the other instruction which enters the life of the child. But he cannot do it unless he knows what his pupil is receiving elsewhere. Every teacher should supply himself with a copy of the "Course of Study" of the local public schools and familiarize himself with it with the greatest care as to the respective work of his Grade all the year through. This alignment of the Religious School work with the public school work is necessary for another reason. Secular education needs the supplementation of the religious instruction. For the public school education is incomplete without it and does not and cannot furnish it. The Religious School, therefore, has a duty in that regard. Nor should the Religious school merely give information about reli- gion; it should follow the child's soul in its IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 151 religious development, step by step. This will afford to the teacher an insight into child life and child religion, which cannot but en- lighten him. RELIGIOUS TRAINING A NECESSARY PART OF CHARACTER. Since religious training is essential to right character we must supply it, and since we can- not supply it in the public schools (and should not), we must give it in separate schools. But we must on that account not isolate religion from the rest of the formative influences which go into child life. Religion must be woven into the texture of the child soul if it is to be a quality of character, and we must avoid the danger to which the two-fold division of child- training is exposed under present conditions. We must not mislead the child to believe that religious education is something other than and totally different from general education and culture. We must disabuse the mind of parents of the notion that Religious schools are outside of child needs, merely because Religious school hours are outside of those of the public schools. And we must bring to the children the feeling that when they go to the Religious schools they go for the same purpose for which 152 AIMS OF TEACHING they are sent during the week to the public schools. But we shall not bring this home either to parents or to the children unless we frankly and fully commit ourselves to the fact that public school education and Religious school education are of the same spirit and aim at the child character. Just as the public school addresses the whole child and fosters essential phases of its develop- ing life, so the Religious School has for its purpose to promote the growth of the child up to the highest and best of its powers. The public school addresses the mind, the hand and the eye; the religious school addresses the same capacities and raises them to a higher power. It addresses the mind, that it may see not only things but that which is beyond things; it appeals to the spirit and the heart to give it clarity and a finer sensitiveness ; and it asks for certain ways of conduct that the child may learn how to respond to the demands of experience. THE RELIGIOUS SCHOOL INTERPRETS LIFE. In the public school the child learns the facts of everyday life. In the Religious School he learns to interpret them, to see their meaning and to use them for high ends. Secular educa- IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 153 tion is incomplete without religion. Parents should be told of this, and children should be made to feel it. How.f* By the teachers first of all believing it themselves, and then going at it with positive conviction and with a trust in the fact that children will respond to true idealism. Most teachers of our Religious Schools talk to their pupils about Judaism and religion with unmistakable aloofness. That is in itself suf- ficient to chill the heart of pupils as much as it chills the heart of the subject. Feel an ideal and tell children of it and you will see wonders. PUTTING RELIGION INTO THE HANDS OF TEACHERS. The linking of the course of instruction in the Religious School with that of the public school will effect a salutary reaction upon the Religious School. Not only will it improve, as if by magic, the "discipline" of the Religious School, but it will give Religious School teach- ing a reality which it sadly lacks. It will bring religion near to the heart of children because it will bring religion to the level of child interests. Religion will be treated not as a theological abstraction, but as a practical interest. It will take religious education out of 154 AIMS OF TEACHING the hands of theologians and put it into the hands of teachers, where it belongs. REALITY IN TEACHING. Every teacher of the Religious Schools should visit a public school, preferably the one where his pupils attend, once a week, to acquaint himself with its pedagogic spirit and the con- creteness of instruction. Teaching must be real if it is to be effective. Religious School teachers have the notion that they must be unctuous if they are to be impressive. But children despise cant and they will reject high-wrought reli- giousness as affectation and false. Children would not endure for one moment in the Public School the unnaturalness which is so often im- posed on them in the Religious School. There is nothing in religion that requires cant, affectation and abstruseness. In fact, real religion is hindered and destroyed by them. A public school teacher goes at his work with decision, with evident aim and with his heart full of sound feelings, and we have a right to demand the same of the man who teaches reli- gion ; in fact, more than a common right. I find one of the reasons why children do not take to Religious -school work is the fact that Religious School teachers do not suggest to them that IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 155 genuineness after which the child heart hungers. Judaism must be taught sincerely, with open- heartedness and with frank directness, or it had better not be taught at all. We need not only sincere teachers, teachers who know w^hat obligation they have assumed, but also teachers who commit themselves to these obligations and go at the fulfilling of them as a definite and scrupulous business. And there is another benefit that will come from joining hands with the public schools. It will open the eyes of the Religious School teacher to the fact that his work is not mere solemn preaching, but that it is actual teaching. Hollow preaching has damaged the usefulness of the religious schools. There has been too much pious talk and not enough real teaching ; too much story telling and moralizing and vacuous praying and hymn-droning, and not enough of training and building. Teachers think they make pupils honest by telling about an honest boy, or that they inculcate respect for parents when they give out the lesson (to be learned by heart) "Honor thy father and thy mother." As if qualities of the soul were born by the recital of words. Character is not born. It is trained by utmost patience and care- fully thought-out method. A virtue cannot be 156 AIMS OF TEACHING made to arise in the child soul by any other method than that of training. Beliefs and con- victions will never rise in the child soul through memory gems, Biblical quotations and par- agraphs out of a catechism. NATURAL UNFOLDING. The teacher will have to make clear to him- self what virtues his children are capable of, what doctrinal truths they are mature enough to see, grasp and hold, and he must content himself with a little religious advance that is real and sound and spare his children the doubtful privilege of knowing "by heart" texts and words that do not stick. The school tra- dition which loads children with useless text book learning must come to an end. It has come to an end in the public school education, and we must put it out of our religious schools. Children go to school to develop all around, and whatever is done for them, with them and by them is to aid them to flower forth as nature and family history and family life and God enable them — in religion as in every other soul capacity. And it is the business, the holy busi- ness, of the teacher to afford this child nature all the opportunities it needs. The teacher's business is not to stuff the child with knowledge IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 157 but to give it a free road for natural unfolding. God and nature can do (and do) infinitely more for the child than you and I. The public school is nowadays, under the guidance of modern pedagogy, on the side of the child and gives it freedom to grow. It does not stuff the child with information, but sees to it that the child's interests may go in the right direction. And the teacher of religion should learn to achieve this also, to awaken in the child religious interests, moral interests, in- terests in high causes. The Jewish teacher who stirs interests in Jewish ideals has achieved the best that is possible. But these interests must be within the reach of childhood. 158 AIMS OF TEACHING THE TEACHER AND THE COM- MUNITY. The Jewish teacher must be interested in all the affairs of his community and the Jewish people at large. He should be a member of a Jewish household and family and should take part in some essential communal activity of a Jewish character. A teacher who limits himself to the perfunctory work of his school hours, and who does not think of his duty as such during the intervals between the sessions, cannot bring to his work the intensity and genuineness which are the fundamental conditions of his profession. Only a large-hearted interest will elicit the respect he claims from his pupils. I will not humiliate the noble profession of teaching by stating baldly that the teacher of a Jewish religious school should not expose him- self to criticism by his pupils for being persistently absent from worship and being an outsider to Jewish affairs, which the pupils hear discussed in their homes with feeling and earnestness. This is a matter of course. But when I demand from the teacher that he give to his pupils his sincere conception of the facts of Jewish life essential for IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 159 Jewish character, I mean to urge upon him that he cultivate these by active participation in the communal activities and by observing an honest consistency in his personal conduct. The Jewish sense of life is not an inborn gift. It requires prolonged spiritual communion for its cultivation. And since the teacher should communicate the Jewish sense of virtue, free from every subtle selfish taint, he must strive for it with persistent aim and sincere effort. Nothing weakens more the prestige and, in fact, the value of the teacher than the suspicion of his pupils that he is aloof from the things their parents are interested in and the Jewish com- munity stands for. If, on the one hand, he is to have any sort of standing, other than the con- ventional one children yield in their general school discipline, and his instruction is to have the respect of his pupils, and if, on the other hand, he is to exert a right influence on them and give to his teaching that breadth and depth which religious teaching ought to have, the teacher must identify himself with public causes and fill his soul with real public-spirited ^eal. Even if he teaches but one hour a week, he should be genuine in that one hour, or other- wise he misrepresents and harms the cause and his teaching becomes futile if not injurious. 160 AIMS OF TEACHING STORYTELLING. Why do the stories of the Bible occupy the field of religious education? What do teachers expect from them and what constitutes their pedagogical value? These questions are fundamental; but they are never put, because we regard it as a matter of course that the Bible should be central in every phase of the subject of religion and Judaism. But it is not self-evident that the biblical stories are the inevitable means for the train- ing of child-character, and we have a right to ask by what authority other than that of the- ' ology do they hold their place in the course of study of the Religious School. THE STORY IS TOLD FOR THE SAKE OF TRAINING. Teachers differ widely as to what they aim for, when they tell the stories of the Bible. Some tell them just for the sake of telling them. They believe these stories, when prettily told, contain lessons which are good and helpful and they are certain that somehow some benefit will IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 161 go into the child-life. Just what goes into the child-soul is not clear to them, nor do they trouble themselves about that. Each story has a "moral" and that suffices. What the moral implicit in these stories is, depends upon the insight of the teacher and upon his in- genuity to "make it out." There is only one condition for this ingenuity. The implied lesson must be religious, and in the case of Jewish Religious School work it must be "Jewish." Despite this limitation there is ample latitude for the teacher's originality and invention. In fact, the current method is altogether invention and feeling one's way. There is no other guide nor criterion except the teacher's tact and the teacher's way of seeing some- thing in the story which, according to his no- tion, will benefit the child. One story after an- other is told and each of the stories serves for something indefinitely good, edifying and moralizing ; there is no plan in the work and no plan seems possible. Moral growth, the development of the child from simple moral notions and simple moral feelings to moral habits and large moral viewpoints, applies everywhere, it is conceded ; but no one seems to know how to apply this to story telling. The lessons are concrete and 162 AIMS OF TEACHING disjointed, and they would be haphazard if it were not that the sequence of the Bible enforces a sort of continuity. But this continuity is historical rather than educational, and the teacher has in his mind rather how Judaism got to be than how the child is to become Jewish. THE ART OF STORY TELLING. Story telling is a difficult art, and one of the oldest and most dignified. And, as in the case of all the great arts, everybody tries his hand at it. But great story tellers, like all artists, are born and not made. Story telling is an art teachers must acquire, for it constitutes nine-tenths of their power. Children love a good story-teller, and nothing offends them more than to hear a good story poorly told. It it not at all unlikely that some of the failure of the average Religious School is due to the lack of the cultivation of this art. Surely some of the inattentiveness of the pupils can be traced to the fact that the teacher does not seize nor hold their interest. Children have an al- most insatiable hunger for stories and he must be dull, indeed, to whom they will not listen. The teacher should prepare not only the material of his Biblical Story, but also the IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 163 very form into which he proposes to put it. The first rule of this art, so far as the Religious School is concerned, is that the narrator stick to the text as much as he possibly can. The biblical writers were wonderful story tellers, and none of us can improve on them. The Story of Esther, for instance, simple as it seems, cannot be told well otherwise than as the Book of Esther tells it. Independent and ingenious people have tried to tell it in their way, but every departure from the order and the setting of the incidents turns out to be a mutilation. Even the moral of the story is ob- scured and lost when the story is not given with the sequence of the original version. THE LAV^S OF THE ART OF STORY TELLING. Religious School teachers cannot raise their efficiency better than by sedulously practicing the art of story telling. The story must have a moral point ; or rather the development of the story must work obviously toward a human need, a human truth, a human experience. That moral must be implicitly in the story. It should deal not with abstract law, but with a fact of common life, such as the children will meet with, it may be at the very door of the school, in their families, or at their play. The 164 AIMS OF TEACHING story teller faces his hearers and he should hear their heart-throbs. The second law of story-telling is this: The story must be told in well-ordered man- ner. There must be organization of the facts. What is mere setting must not crowd out what is essential, and what is essential must not obtrude in the guise of pompous cant. The teacher should not say: "Now, I am going to tell a story that shows that you must be good." Nor it it a wise practice to an- nounce to the children that the story that is about to be told, for instance, refers to a nice mountain, when what the teacher intends to do is to impress the Ten Commandments. Such an inversion of values will puzzle the pupils and put the lesson into confusion. The very introduction must be suggestive of seriousness and of proper proportions. The progress of the story from situation to situation should be logical and psychological. It should be reasonable and it should be in accordance with what the children themselves feel under the given circumstances. Even fairy tales must be "true" and dare not violate common sense. Extravagances are rejected by children as readily as they are rejected by adults, for they prove nothing, convince nobody and, if they do IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 165 not bewilder the listener they certainly confuse the lesson along with the facts. The third law of story telling involves the very core of the art. The story teller has the notion that his recital must be dramatic, and in a general way that is true ; only every- thing depends on what is meant by the dra- matic. We must certainly differentiate between what is dramatic for adults and what is dra- matic for children. To the child the dramatic story is not one of intricate plot. The plot must be simple, direct and obvious. THE TRAGIC. The tragic for the child is an incident of life which brings out a true act of God. Child-drama deals with every-day questions and every-day solutions of life. It becomes intense only because it is felt to be real, because the child is genuinely concerned in it, just as if his own life and his own interests and his own ambitions were at stake. The dramatic, the truly dramatic, is warm with the passion of life. Many a teacher could spare himself much un- necessary labor and effort to give ingenious turns to his story. In fact "turns" and such are dangerous to childhood, for they establish the appetite for sensation. There is no literature 166 AIMS OF TEACHING so full of the genuinely tragic as are the stories of the Bible, but they are neither petty nor sensational. In each biblical story man is shown to be in conflict or in alliance with the law of God and the law of God is shown to be dominant and good. THE SHORT-STORY. Another point in story telling is not to be ignored. Each story must be a complete whole. The old-fashioned serial form of narrative will not do in teaching. Each story is a lesson, that is : it is a unit of some truths one clear and well-directed influence which the child is to receive and incorporate into his life. This rule should be most scrupulously followed. The narrator, who is always more teacher than story teller, must construct his story with this aim well in mind. The details of the story must crystallize about this central aim. Every story in school work should be a short-story, and it would be helpful to teachers to study short- story-telling from the biblical masters of the art, at once the most modern and the most ancient. The story is the oldest material in the history of teaching and has the approval of all teachers by the experience of all races. The wisdom of ages transmutes itself into "stories." IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 167 The Arabian Night's Entertainments are a chain of short-stories, the Fables of ^sop are exquisite bits of short-story literature, and every one of the biblical stories is a short-story. A STORY SHOULD PORTRAY A DEFINITE EXPERIENCE. It may be remarked here that the short-story form is recommended not merely because it is compact and more easily held by the children, nor because this congested form of teaching is more likely to be in the grasp of the teacher, nor finally because the succinctness aids in lodging the lesson though these several reasons are very respectable and fundamental in teaching, but because every lesson hour should stand out in the child's school experience in a definite way. It is not only the teacher who should have a clear conception and clear realization of the work, but also the pupil. And, in fact, the pupil will not be benefited by the teacher un- less the lesson stands out with graphic preci- sion. Nothing helps in that more than the story told with lucidity and with directness, so that the pupil cannot be in doubt and cannot escape its appeal. A conscientious teacher, therefore, will not content himself with merely "looking up" his work, but he will determine 168 AIMS OF TEACHING the purpose for which and the manner how he will tell it, he will employ his story even to the least detail. He cannot devote too much thought and preparation to that phase of his work. When the art of story-telling is once acquired, it is a most gratifying part of the teacher's life. THE STORY IS MERELY A PEDAGOGIC HELP. All this that has been said about the story and its place in education is not meant to encourage Religious School teachers to treat the biblical story as story. The story is only a means and should not be regarded in any other way than as a tool for teaching. Religious School teachers seem to think they exhaust their duty by the child when they tell the biblical stories, this and nothing more. Fond parents, too, take pride in telling the teacher, when they bring their child to the Religious School for the first time, that it knows the stories already. Some teachers are even embar- rassed by this parental anticipation of their work, and declare they do not know what more they could do for such children who know all about Adam and Eve before they have entered the class room. But these teachers, as well as these vain parents, should be told that it is their IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 169 duty to put meaning into the story, and that in interpretation of the life these stories report Hes work iine enough for the best of teachers. It is the business of the teacher to provide the educational content. Stories are illustra- tions, they point a truth, they are not them- selves the truth. They are means by which the teacher brings home the lesson, and they are nothing if they remain in the rough un- used, unapplied and undirected to an educa- tional aim. The story is an incident in the lesson hour, not its main content. Whenever the story sprawls over the lesson and is un- related to an educational purpose, it remains barren and might as well not have been told at all. The present generation does not know the Bible, nor the biblical stories, not because the stories are not told, nor because they are not told well, but because they are told without purpose, without proper pedagogic point. The stories we remember all our life are not the stories that have been told us in our childhood at random, as mere enter- tainment, but the stories to whose telling the reminiscence of some happy, or serious, or it may be some sacred, experience clings. It is not enough that there is a glint in the eye or sweetness in the voice of the teacher, or that 170 AIMS OF TEACHING the story has been admired or can be retold cor- rectly and faithfully. A story makes a life-long impression, such as we wish the biblical stories to make, only when the child feels a profound something behind the words of the story. This something is the subtle content of the les- son and constitutes an influence. We do not teach religion by arguing about it, and we must not expect that matters of fact of history or literature or catechism change in the child-soul into piety by themselves. Teachers must realize that stories are gold, which gets real value only after it has been minted and has received the right stamp. Story telling is an art, but as in all art, excel- lence and power come from the undefinable per- sonal touch. The teacher must cultivate the personal side of the story telling art and feel his way with sympathetic hand into the soul of the child. He dare not expect that mere words will do what heart throbs and a feeling imagination alone can achieve. The biblical stories seem almost as if they were invented for the purpose of conveying religious spirit and religious feeling. But this precious capital is frittered away by many teachers, who trust too much to the stories themselves and expect some magic in them to IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 171 accomplish what they, as instructors, should devise carefully with plan and purpose. An uncouth hand, plunging among roses, fills with falling petals and gets for its pains not much more than thorns. Each teacher must determine whether the story is oportune or not, and in accordance with his decision on that opportuneness and rele- vancy to the work in hand lies his call to tell or to postpone the telling of the story. Nothing is more likely to dull the edge of his work than playing the role of constant story teller. I do not know how much irreparable mischief has been done in our Religious School by the no- tion some teachers have that their constant business is to tell stories, and that children come to Religious School to be told stories. 172 AIMS OF TEACHING . THE TEXT BOOK. Most of the interest in Religious Educa- tion centers about the text book. Everybody hopes that it will bring the Jewish Renaissance so devoutly wished. If only we can get the right text book we are saved, is the prevailing cry. But nobody has as yet told us what is meant by a text book, and what its place is in the Religious School, what things it should con- tain, what its construction should be, and a number of other matters v/hich should be clear- ly defined. Is the school book to serve the teacher, or the pupil .^ Is it to further the in- dividual work of the pupil, or the work of the class .^ Is it meant for home work or for use in the class room.^^ It is to supply information, in addition to the conventional stories for which the school hour offers no opportunity, or is it to give information as supplementary reading .f* Has the author or compiler of the school book in mind a sort of convenient en- cyclopedia for the teacher to whose rescue he wishes to come, or is he thinking of the child whom he wishes to interest.^ Does not IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 173 the average text book, which is a mere compila- tion of the traditional material, make public confession, as it were, of the fact that the teacher is incompetent to tell the story aright? Or will the ideal text book, for which we are looking, have more confidence in the teacher? If it will have more confidence in his scholarship, or in his pedagogic ability and discretion, what will this saving text book of the future do for the teacher, and what will it do for the child ? FOR THE TEACHER. When we review the school books now in use, we notice that all of them imply distrust in the competence of the teacher, and frankly give him merely elementary information. They do not pretend to assist him in the practice of teach- ing, in the method how to present the matter, in professional aspects of the work. They are frequently so elementary that it is difficult for the teacher to hold the respect of his pupils be- fore whose eyes these "Helps" and "Sugges- tions" are spread on the same page with the children's lesson. Lamentable insufficiency and tactlessness have preoccupied the field of the Jewish text-book literature. 174 AIMS OF TEACHING FOR THE CHILD. As for the text books offered to our children, they differ according to the subjects with which they deal. We have text books that give the Biblical History, text books of later Jewish History, and some text books called Catechisms that deal with belief. The text books on Biblical History attempt to give the well-known facts in puerile manner, often mistaking childishness for childlikeness ; they interpret Jewish history, and supply gratuitous apol- igetics for supposedly wrong science and doubt- ful morals, and attempt to justify Judaism over the heads of the children. And the catechisms sin against the law of pedagogy, for they deal with abstractions and their artificial form of "question and answer", and the quotations they give prevent and suppress spontaneous inquiry and thought. THE BIBLE. The text book on Biblical History is really a substitute for Bible reading and ought to be not much more than that, for no one can pretend to tell the stories better than the Bible tells them. The most classical story tellers in IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 175 the history of the art of story telHng (which by the way has played a very important role in civilization) are the authors of the biblical records, and the best text book is, after all, the one which follows the original Bible text most faithfully. It is best to cling closely to the very phraseology of the Bible. Even the language of the text book should comport with the high character of its contents. THE STYLE. Some teachers and text-book makers attect a popular style of narrative as a bid for child-attention and child-interest, but the child is willing enough to listen to quaint language and is even charmed by it, and the unique biblical language is likely to impress him very profoundly. On the other hand, commonplace language disillusions the child and drags down the sacred ideal of religion and religiousness in- to familiarity that breeds contempt. The teacher must observe the happy medium be- tween the classic prototype he has in the biblical sources and the every-day life of the child, which he aims to refine and fill with a larger significance. 176 AIMS OF TEACHING PEDAGOGIC AIM. Now, there are as many kinds of text books possible as there are pedagogic aims. One kind should give the facts for the teacher and an- other for the pupils. The teacher's should give the matter with due perspective as to history and with larger outlook as to what place the facts have in current life. The pupil's book should supply the facts from the point of view of the child-life for which they are meant, and of the bearings they have on the child's judgment, on his feelings, on his habits, on his intellectual, moral and religious development. TEXT BOOKS SHOULD NOT BE USED IN THE LESSON-HOUR. The teacher must leave his text book at home and stand before his class free as master of the situation. The children, too, must leave theirs at home; they should be free in the class room from the dead letter and be open to the influence of the personality of the teacher. With the book in his hand, the teacher is fet- tered to the letter, and the children also are unfree so long as their eyes must be on the page. Let the teacher prepare his lesson care- fully at home and he will have resourcefulness IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 177 before his pupils. Hold him down to the book and all his freedom and his geniality and his personality are gone. And so also the pupil should study his lesson at home and be open to the influences of the school. The text book is often a hindrance to the work of both teacher and pupils. Another kind of text book may be designated as "Helps," one to help the teacher and another to help the pupil. But these "Helps" should be kept distinct and apart. What is an aid to the teacher cannot be offered to the child, and what is an aid to the child is totally different from the other. Teacher and pupil cannot learn out of the same book. The teacher needs the fullest information, the clearest suggestions as to what to teach, when to teach and how to teach. The pupil needs in his book clearness of presentation, sympathy, and a timely assist- ance toward growth. "Simple" language is not enough, nor is it enough to interest him. The child is willing, much more willing than superficial book makers are aware, to take his education seriously, and he does not care to be merely entertained. We have a telling instance of this in the failure of many a text book which the pupils rejected just because it 178 AIMS OF TEACHING was so obviously a book of entertainment. The text book should be an aid, a book of sources, a reference book, to which the child can go for reliable information, and care should be taken that the information is full, certain, and given with authority. The work of the class room should arouse so much of vividness and eagerness in the child that he can carry his in- terest in the subject home with him, and it should induce him to "look up" for further in- formation what has been talked of and dis- cussed by himself and his teacher. THE PERSONAL W^ORK OF THE TEACHER. It is not right to help the teacher by getting ready for him what in all seriousness he ought to seek out for himself. Much of the so-called "Helps for Teachers" is an encour- agement to laziness and dullness. Only such text books as arouse personal effort and painstaking research are real helps. There is no reason in the world why the Religious School teacher should have everything he needs put at his very elbows. On the contrary, he should not be robbed of the zest which lies in working out the information himself. That he is not adequately prepared and does not know IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 179 how to do it, is no justification. A teacher who cannot look for what he needs and cannot recognize it when he gets at it, should not un- dertake to teach. And the teacher who forgoes the delight of the discovery of the facts misses the real joy of his work; and if he is willing to be robbed of it, he dooms his work to failure by the low tone of his professional conscience. No one in the whole realm of the teaching profession has so much scope for personal expression and personal influence as the teacher in the Religious School. He should be the last to chain himself to a text book and to depend upon "helps" for facts, for thoughts, for guidance. Far from resting our religious revival upon text books, we ought to emanci- pate the teacher of our Religious Schools from the limitations of text-book knowledge and text-book directions. We must have free teachers, if we have any at all ; we must have teachers who can work without the artificial helps and prods and stilts. Those are teachers indeed, who know because they want to know, who teach with a genuine interest, who get the confidence and the admiration and evoke the emulation of their pupils not through the notes of a text book but by their intimate acquaint- ance with and love for childhood. 180 AIMS OF TEACHING Teaching is not a trade; it is the noblest of all callings, one which demands the highest powers of soul. The teacher who is helpless without the text book is as unworthy of, as he is unfit for, the great trust reposed in him. At least one of the tests of fitness, one of the elementary tests, is how free of the text book the teacher can be. Whosoever is not free in this least of his duties is not free in the highest of them. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 181 HEBREW. Hebrew is the characteristic subject of the curriculum of the Jewish Religious School, the other subjects, biblical history, ethics and religious principles, it shares with other de- nominational schools. Only Hebrew is an avowedly Jewish subject. When the Hebrew is dropped out of the religious training, the Jewish school loses much of its uniqueness. The Hebrew accentuates all the other subjects: of the school and gives them their Jewish "genius" and charm. Jewish heroism and Jewish martyrdom, Jewish poetry and Jewish philosophy, Jewis customs and Jewish ritual lose the largest part of their distinctiveness when they are taught without relation to that tongue which is the source of their life. It is not only Judaism that is hazarded by the ignoring of the Hebrew language and liter- ature, but the cultural good which it contains. So far, Hebrew has been assigned a place in the course of Religious School work largely for sentimental reasons, but its pedagogic content has not been thought of. 182 AIMS OF TEACHING MORAL TRAINING. Even the technical drill in the rudiments of the language should aim at moral training ; the alphabet, the consonants and vowels call for keen watchfulness, and the very vocabulary is religious. We may teach Hebrew not only for the sake of absorbing the subtle Jewish spirit that lies in it, but also because the very letters, words and phrases call for concentra- tion, interest and respect. HEBREW^ SHOULD GIVE WHAT THE VERNACULAR DOES NOT. We may begin teaching Hebrew in the Third Grade, because at that period of child life the language instinct is alert and most responsive. Care, however, must be taken that the teaching of Hebrew aim at something other than the mere getting of additional names for objects which the child can already name in its own mother tongue. A new language is an educa- tional asset only when the child acquires words with new contents. The new vehicle should carry new goods. The child should get not merely new labels for old things, but new things and new feelings and new experiences. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 183 THE JEWISH LIFE IS IN THE HEBREW LANGUAGE. And it will be found in this case, as in so many others, that as soon as we go at the matter directly, with our aim clearly in view, those worries which hindered us on the way are allayed of themselves. Hebrew will gain in interest for the pupils as soon as we do it pedagogic justice, and give it that place in Jewish education which it is entitled to have. Hebrew does not want more time in the hour plan, but more pedagogic appreciation on the part of the teacher. He should not any longer teach it as a mere Jewish orthodoxy, but as a subject that has classic religious and moral life in it. He should teach it, as all language and all literature are taught, for cultural influence. We have been troubling our children with the mechanical aspect and have not thought of, let alone urged, the moral and religious aspect of Hebrew word and text and the life embodied in them. « THE EDUCATIONAL CONTENT OF THE HEBREW LANGUAGE. The alphabet has stopped short most of the teachers in the Jewish Religious Schools 184 AIMS OF TEACHING and they seem not to have gone much beyond it. The child has not been given the larger sense of the subject and has not been allowed to "enter the promised land." Do not blame the child for having gotten a distaste for He- brew. The bungling methods and half- heartedness on the one hand and the blind push and shove on the other are to blame. The teacher himself has lacked the pedagogic conception of the subject, and where there is no spirit there can be no good work. The very introduction of the Hebrew in the child's Religious School life has been unfor- tunate. The child is made to plod over technicalities of the Hebrew and scents no feeling with regard to it in either teacher or book. I cannot suppose that American Jewish children are so dull that the acquire- ment of the Hebrew alphabet should be such a hardship as the failure of Hebrew in the Relig- ious Schools all over this country implies. Nor will I concede that the teaching of Hebrew must forever be hopelessly dry and mechanical. Behind every subject must be the teacher and back of every lesson must be a deep sincerity. Good intent, a large view and a deep apprecia- tion will make the subject of Hebrew real and IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 185 effective. The teachers must get a deeper in- sight into its educational meaning, and an honest belief in its vitality. It is the teacher who has been the skeptic and not the pupil. A.nd the reform must set in with the teacher. THE NEED OF THE CHILD THE CRITERION. Specious pleas, such as that the Hebrew lan- guage will die unless we rescue it, or that the Hebrew is a bond between Jews of all lands, have no force, in view of the confusion that prevails as to the exact position Hebrew has in the scheme of Jewish education. We are not called upon to rescue anything except the Jewish child, and as for an international bond between Jews of all lands, we must establish it by something morally positive and spiritual, and not by the phrases of the prayer book. At any rate, as teachers we must keep in view, not any eventual good outside of the school rooms, but the present need of the child before us. Only in so far as it helps train the present generation has a subject standing in the reli- gious school, as in every other school, and the real question before us is not whether adults feel themselves at home when they hear Hebrew in foreign synagogues, nor whether the 186 AIMS OF TEACHING Hebrew is saved from oblivion, but whether it makes our children better and stronger and more real in their Jewish life. Instead of going around the issue on sentimentalities, we must face it frankly as an educational question. The call is so insistent for immediate influence upon the present Jewish child world, that we cannot afford to run after will-o'-the-wisps outside. THE HEBREW^ LANGUAGE IS THE VEHICLE OF JEW^ISH RELIGIOUSNESS. The Hebrew language has been and many desire that it should continue to be a part of the curriculum of the Jewish religious school. Why has it been taught, and what expectations from it do they have who urge it today? What do teachers plan to do for the child by means of the Hebrew.^ Why shall a Jewish school teach Hebrew as an essential for the equipment of the Jewish child for life.^ Remember that we are not educating the child in our Religious Schools for the synagogue nor for Judaism, but for his own destiny; we assume responsibility not as confessors but as teachers. The child is entrusted to us by the parents in order that we should fit it for life, that we should give IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 187 to it the interests and the powers by which the child may Hve that Jewish Hfe which they beUeve is good for it to Hve. Hebrew is to con- stitute an influence by which Judaism is to be ingrained into the child character. We are justified in employing Hebrew for that educa- tional end, since we know that the genius of the Jewish life has gone into this language. What we are doing in the class room is merely taking out of the language what is in it, and giving that to the children that they may have and hold it. THE PEDAGOGIC AIM. The pedagogic place of Hebrew in Jewish religious schools should be definite. The Hebrew literature is the bearer of the Jewish tradition and life and it should be made available to every generation of the Jewish people. It is true beyond doubt that Jewish literature is the vehicle for not only the classic expression, but also for the vitalizing influences of the Jewish life. Nowhere else are Jewish thought, Jewish morality, Jewish faith and Jewish ideal so unalloyed and so definite and so forcefully put. As soon as this is acknowl- 188 AIMS OF TEACHING edged, our duty to teach Jewish literature be- comes a matter of course. HEBREW IN THE CULTURE OF THE WORLD. The difficulty cannot lie in the admis- sion of this fact and principle, but only in the technical and didadic aspect of the matter. But most of the difficulty is brushed aside when we have a clear and definite educational aim. We teach Hebrew, not for the sake of Hebrew, but for the sake of the Jewish child. And we bring Hebrew to the Jewish child because we wish to foster the ' Jewish feeling in the Jewish child, and this can- not be attained by any other subject of study so directly and effectively. The Hebrew lan- guage and the Hebrew literature are essential for Jewish education. Jewish literature is not dead literature, in the sense in which the classic literature of the Greeks and Romans is spoken of as dead. In a very real sense, in fact, even these may be said to be living more than any national language that has been derived from them; for they have as many lives as there are dialectic descendants of them, and they are either themselves the organs of great cultures or help voice the life of other IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 189 and more recent cultures. By this standard the Hebrew is entitled to a place in the cur- riculum not only of a Religious School, but of every large-scoped institution in which the educational material is chosen by reason of vital content. No civilization has so permeated the civilization of our day as has the civiliza- tion of the Jewish people, and when we apply the moral and religious standard, which is the only one we may apply to educational subjects, Hebrew is the world language par excellence. This should be a truism for Jews and in Jewish Pedagogy. THE CONNECTION BETW^EEN HEBREW AND OTHER SUBJECTS. Again, the subject of Hebrew has been an all- around embarrassment, for Hebrew is detached from everything else we deal with in the Relig- ious School. We have not made any connec- tion between Hebrew and the other subjects; but such a connection must be made if Hebrew is to have a legitimate place in the Course of Subjects. And such a connection can be made. A language is the expression of civilization, its most representative part. Without its language, the picture of the period is incomplete and un- 190 AIMS OF TEACHING real. We should bring the pupil to feel the same sort of awe in the presence of a Hebrew word as we want him to feel in the presence of a Jewish hero. Joshua, for instance, must talk his own tongue to complete the picture of him. It is a pedagogic mistake to bring a personality before children, talk about him all the time and never let him open his mouth himself. Let Joshua play upon the imagination full-tide, but let him be a Hebrew Joshua, who talks Hebrew. A snatch or two of his own words, on signifi- cant occasions in his story, will help to make him real. And it will help to solve the pro- blem of "Hebrew in the Jewish School." We have looked at the question of the teaching of Hebrew only from the point of view of the services and the prayer book, but we have not looked at it from the point of view of consistent portraiture of Jewish history. Hebrew gets value and meaning just as soon as the child sees that it is talked by the men and women whom he is admiring. And Hebrew becomes also a religious language just as soon as the child sees that great men speak it in great situations. We have made Hebrew merely a vehicle for our liturgy, quite unreal in our day, and it is small wonder that childhood does not take to it. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 191 HEBREW IN THE LIFE OF THE BIBLE. Hebrew is necessary to the correct setting of the story, but, of course, the lesson must not be crowded with quotations; the tactful teacher will know the limits, as he will know also how and when. But into the texture of his story he must weave the right word into the right place. It should not be, in Jewish Schools, that the men of the Bible talk English, being, as it were, ancient Englishmen. Let the Hebrew v/ord the teacher gives be signifi- cant, uttered by the hero on a significant occasion. Associate the ancient word with the ancient fact. I might also demand that the child should, at the end of the lesson, possess a number of Hebrew clinch words, so that by the recollection of them he can re- vive the moral situations which the lesson contains. I recommend this method of treat- ment not only because it is suggested by truth- ful pedagogy, but also for reasons of expedi- ency. The employment of Hebrew in the midst of history - teaching will familiarize children with the Hebrew sounds and give them the language feeling toward the He- brew, as a preparation for more technical instruction in the language later on. When 192 AIMS OF TEACHING once the child has ceased to regard Hebrew as aloof, most of the long-standing difficulty will have been overcome. THE MORAL SPIRIT. Do not begin to teach Hebrew by impos- ing upon the children the unreasoning task of laboring with consonants and vowels ; there is no life in such a task. Lay the founda- tion for a respectful attitude toward the Hebrew; that is enough for the time being; later classes can advance from that toward more. Besides, it is the cultural content of Hebrew at which we should aim. It is not im- portant that the children should know Hebrew for its own sake, but it is important that they get the moral and religious spirit which the Hebrew holds. The Jewish conception of charity, for instance, is suggested by the term Zedakah, as by no other term. Nothing can so convey the Jewish psychology as the Hebrew terms and the Hebrew language do. The teaching of Hebrew will have a revival just as soon as we make a right appraisal of it as a form of discipline for moral and relig- ious ends. A language is spoken only in so far as it is the vehicle of the moral life. An official, IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 193 a ritualistic language, a language employed merely in the church or in the synagogue, is no language at all. We cannot galvanize the Hebrew into life ; we cannot make it solemn by any artifice. Children feel and resent the con- fusion into which we have brought the subject of Hebrew. We cannot cut the Gordian knot by abolishing the Hebrew, for then we aggra- vate the difficulty. The Hebrew language had a place in the life of the people and it was the organ of Jewish piety, and it must remain a vehicle for it as long as we need that piety and want to possess it. 194 AIMS OF TEACHING THE PICTURE IN THE RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. Much has been said about the educational value of the Picture. It must be conceded that it contributes effectively to bring out con- crete facts of life and history. But not every period of childhood requires the aid of the picture and at certain stages of the child-senses and the child-mind the picture might be even harmful. It may disturb or hinder the per- sonal fancy and the constructive capacities which are an essential element of the soul. The teacher should so present the lesson that the pupil will invest it with life himself. •There should be better ground for introducing the picture than that it furnishes enter- tainment. Many an entertainment is ac- tually an educational disturbance. It often introduces matter which is foreign to the school work, having only a remote relevancy to it, and not infrequently it is a direct interference with the development of the subject which the teacher in his lesson has worked up with care. The picture is mostly presented to the entire school at its assembly, and the subjects and persons are chosen with disregard for the specific mental and moral status of each IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 195 of the grades, causing a confusion from which the children do not recover easily. A class that is busy with Abraham is told about David, and a class of Kindergarten children is entertained with pictures on piety whose ethical significance they cannot and perhaps should not grasp as yet. Nor is it advisable to use the picture in all class rooms alike, for it remains still to be proven that the delicate virtues are rightly introduced into the child ex- perience by the crude means of spectacular entertainment. At any rate, what is im- pressive in this manner to one period of childhood may cause diffusion of mind and bring merely superficial sensation (and there- fore cause a downright harm) to others. At best, the picture can be employed as a rein- forcement of the lesson, and should never initi- ate a new lesson. Some pupils may find in the picture what is already familiar to them and some may get the pleasure that is incident to right training in the rediscovery of a truth and an interest. PICTURES SHOULD RE-STATE THE LESSON. School pictures on the whole should be educational and should restate and rein- force the school purpose and the school aim. 196 AIMS OF TEACHING They should never become mere amusement. There is plenty of that and too much elsewhere. Nor should the school compete with the theater and the art museum. PICTURES AND THEIR RELATION TO IMAGINATION. There is another point of view which should make teachers cautious with regard to the em- ployment of the picture in Religious School work. A lesson is impressive not merely because it is true, but also because of the characters that personify it. The men and women of the Bible are typical of religious and moral truth by themselves, and do not need spectacular means to make them so. Besides, no edu- cational influence is complete until it has set the child's fancy at work; but artistic pre- sentations may handicap its fancy. The child's own imagination should be free to work, but the picture may either anticipate or con- tradict it. In either case, the picture has de- stroyed what the lesson meant to build up. The injunction of Moses "Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image!" shows a profound knowledge of soul-life and is the best plea we have for real creative imagination. It has liberated the finest power we have. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 197 JEWISH CHILDREN AND THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION. Jewish children need the cuhure of the imagination as all children do, and a little more. For in the first place there is much prose in Reformed Judaism in its prin- ciples and cold intellectualities, and this is what makes Jewish life so narrowly practical and the Jewish communities so stolidly con- ventional. Our Religious Schools would do a needed work if they would lift the next generation of Jews and Jewesses into more love for and participation in the culture of the beautiful. Perhaps modern Jews are unspirited because they neglect the imagina- tion. Where the soul is dependent upon what others give it, there is spiritual poverty and im- potence. Instead of putting before the children what others have conceived, the lesson should act upon them in such a way that they would project out of themselves what they see with their own mind's eye. The test of a good lesson is not whether the pupil knows it, but whether it has stirred his in- ner life. The deepest stir possible, however, is that of the imagination; it is the most active and the most personal. 198 AIMS OF TEACHING CARE IN THE CHOICE OF PICTURES. It goes without saying that when the picture is employed, it should be chosen with the ut- most discrimination. The usual biblical pict- ures are rarely conceived in a Jewish spirit. In such Motion Pictures that are now available the biblical theme, as well as the characters, are adjusted to the exigencies of the modern stage and the taste of the average theater- trained public, and so degraded and not in- frequently brutalized. THE USE OF THE PICTURE AFTER THE LESSON. I should recommend the use of the picture only after a completed lesson, provided, of course, the teacher has himself studied the picture before he introduces it into his work. It may serve the following purposes : The picture may restate the lesson, and help make it vivid and real. But the picture must not cheapen the effect of the lesson, nor rob it of its sanctity. In the Motion Picture an Abraham who struts the stage before the children runs the risk of familiarity breeding contempt. The picture may correct misunderstandings due to the haziness of the subject or the in- exactness of the teacher. A picture therefore IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 199 should be brought forward only after the lesson has been presented. The picture should not be offered at the beginning of the lesson, for that forestalls self-effort on the part of the children. Nor should the picture be mere amuse- ment. The child should feel a certain satisfac- tion that the picture endorses what he himself imagined. The picture may be resorted to in order to convey information which words might be incapable of conveying, as for instance, oriental life, which it is too much to expect the American child should know without aid. Sometimes it is advisable to connect ancient life with modern life by means of representations of contemporary oriental customs and conditions to illustrate and vivify the lesson. THE CHILD-STANDARD. Finally it is conceivable that the artistic portrayal of religious life cannot but heighten respect for it. Here again I must warn against the melodramatic, the spurious and the false. Who knows what spiritual harm has come to child souls from certain works of art, even the best, which, true to adults, are misleading and perplexing to children.^ What is true for the mature is not necessarily equally true for boys and girls. The criterion for the choice of art 200 AIMS OF TEACHING expression is the child himself. How will the child see it, how will the child understand it, what will the picture do in the child — these are the prime questions. THE LOVE OF THE BEAUTIFUL IS PART OF JEWISH MORALITY. It is a misconception, from the point of view of Jewish education, to maintain that Judaism, or rather Mosaism, has discouraged art. Noth- ing is farther from the actual facts. If the art instinct had really been methodically aborted amongst us Jews, modern Jews would not have taken to it so readily and so enthusiastically as soon as the avenues for liberal culture were opened to them. On the contrary, imagination and creative fancy are of the very elements of Jewish psychology. In the Jew the sense of the beautiful is interwoven with all the phases of his soul life. The fact deserves a full con- sideration, and I mention it here because I wish to apply it to Jewish pedagogy. The Jewish religious school does not limit itself to the teaching of principles and doctrines, it culti- vates the Jewish soul and the love of the beau- tiful is a cardinal virtue in Jewish religious- ness. The search for the beautiful is a IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 201 part of the moral and religious life. This, per- haps, is what the Rabbis meant when they said, "The ignorant cannot be pious ;" that is, the dull, the unobservant, those who cannot go beyond the limits of their senses, cannot attain to the real serenity of life. The Religious School must save our present Jewish generation from the error that Judaism regards the love of the beautiful as outside of religious and moral interests. Judaism has been altogether too philosophic; it is time it were made more human. One can be spiritual and still love life and desire to enhance and beautify it. LOVE OF ART IS PART OF HUMAN NATURE. Art is not an accomplishment, it is a moral phase of life. For the most part, art is taught for its application to industry. But in the Religious School, love of art is a trait of human nature to be cultivated because it refines. It has a moral value because it is part of the char- acter. The Jew is sensitive, sympathetic and quick to respond to appeals, because he realizes the tragedies of human life in his own person. One must have imagination to have sympathy. 202 AIMS OF TEACHING JEWISH MORALITY INTENSIFIES LOVE OF THE BEAUTIFUL. I plead for more attention to the esthetic instinct, so that the Jew may make his moraUty deeper than mere opinion, and loftier than mere conventiality. The Jewish Religious School fails to stir the Jewish child, because it teaches conventional morality, while Judaism, which the school is to teach, has a finer moral content. We teach ethical precepts which we could well take for granted for the Jewish child. We argue too much in our schools, and we will never win the child for high moral ideals unless we open his mind and eye to the beauty and the sanctities all about him, in his fellow men and in nature. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 203 THE SABBATH AND THE HOLY DAYS. This subject is usually not dealt with in the school in any specific way. The children are told to observe the festivals at the same time, in the same spirit, and in the same manner as adults do. But experience proves that chil- dren do not associate any deep feeling with the religious holidays, not even such a feeling as they have for holidays of a secular character. It may be too much to expect that children shall appreciate the solemnity which attaches to days of profound religious exaltation, but it is fair to presume that, as these festivals have a religious bearing in the first instance upon men and women and the community, they may also contain some spiritual food for children's souls. It is only a question of right interpretation, and the teacher should be able to supply that. The Sabbath may mean something other to children than it means for adults, if for no other reason than that the appeal of the Sabbath for rest from labor has only a secondary application for children. But the Sabbath may be made for children an occasion for occupations other and higher minded than those of the week- days. 204 AIMS OF TEACHING THE FESTIVALS AND THE PLACE OF THE CHILD IN THEM. Each of the three Pilgrim Festivals can be brought home to the affection of the childhood of today. Our fathers associated them with Festivals of Nature, as Jewish custom and folk-lore show very abundantly. The child has a place in all of them (as questioner in Haggada, as noisemaker at Purim and, happiest of all, at Simchath Thbra) and from the aspect of training much can be done by them for the child. Pesach is a festival of freedom, the very theme in which chil- dren require guidance. Shabuoth, with its boughs of green, is a beautiful spring festival, and the feast of Sukkoth touches the youthful delight in nature. The children almost antici- pate us in all of these. Even the days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, with their simple message that man can and should work with and not against God, are not only not out- side of child comprehension but of the very substance of naive child piety. Hanukkah and Purim are in the very form of their celebration, as well as in their original conception, festivals of loyalty. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 205 HOLIDAYS ARE EDUCATIONAL IN PURPOSE. We can well afford to postpone the teaching of the more pretentious dogmatic content of the festivals to the period of growing youth, when it does not regard as a vacation a day conse- crated by religion, but with a more mature con- ception of mind. The duty of the teacher is pre-eminently to help the child as child. It has a right to being served in the needs it has now and it is not fair to it to neglect it now for the sake of a remote need which may arise later on. Festivals, even the national and so-called secular ones, are educational, if they are any- thing at all, and they are influences in the child's moral and religious development. CHILD-SERVICE. The ritualistic celebration of a Festival is only its formal side, and formalism is tolerable in the school only by virtue of the discipline it carries. The ritualism of the Synagogue was developed by men and women in centuries past, the ritualism of the school is yet to be devised. It is not sufficient to reduce the services to child-size, to hold services in the School Build- ing just as they are held in the Temple, with no other change than shortening the prescribed formulas of the prayer and simplifying the 206 AIMS OF TEACHING vocabulary and the rhetoric. A child service is altogether different from the worship of adults in conception as well as in form. We hear all through Jewish history the complaint as to the unruliness of children in the Syna- gogue, and every parent and teacher knows how difficult it is to hold children down to decorous and regular attendance. The reason is not that the adult services are too long, but that they mean so little to childhood. Their content is devised to express adult religiousness and not child religiousness. It is not a difficulty as to word or phrase, but as to what these are all about.. THE SABBATH AND THE CHILDREN. We can make the Sabbath, for instance, a living fact in Jewish childhood, if we interpret it in the sense in which it is significant for child life. We can solve the trouble- some Sabbath Question, at least for children, when we reassert the moral meaning of the Sabbath. Similar educational reform work could be made for the holidays and the festivals. Their now unused resources should be em- ployed in the congregational life. The Great Holidays which, under the present conditions, have such a forbidding aspect to the boys and IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 207 girls might become springs of religious stir, for they take place at the beginning of the season of school work and of the school year. Youth is open to the charm and the mystery of life, and nothing the children learn in the course of technical study is as likely to enter their souls as the solemnity of the Rosh Hashana and the Yom Kippur. The three holidays of Pesach, Shabuoth and Sukkoth, which the pupils of our Public and Private Schools treat almost with contempt, could, by the mere opening of the doors of the Synagogue to the children for active participation in a Service of their own, become at least a counter attraction to the schools. The insistance upon the children's absence from the sessions of the public schools on holidays, without offering a quid pro quo, is unfair to the schools and unjust to childhood. Only our giving the children something better than the public school can give and something which the children con obtain from no one else except from us, can warrant our demand that they spend the day at the Synagogue. We should be able to convey to childhood some of that spiritual good which the holidays hold. But we cannot convey it merely as through a funnel. We cannot expect fruit by pasting 208 AIMS OF TEACHING blossoms upon twigs. The soul grows from within, as everything else grows. And growth is not mere coaxing. It is activity of the self. We allow no opportunity for self-activity. The Holidays, as the weekly Sabbaths of the year, should become occasions for self-effort, just as is all moral life, all life. The youths should have an opportunity for religious work, if we demand from them that they ripen into religious char- acters. They must have it, for they cannot ripen otherwise than by working out their char- acters. THE DAY OF ATONEMENT. Even the prescribed fasting is a moral disci- pline. Voluntary abstention from food on the Day of Atonement re-enforces the power of self-control so necessary in life. We have a right to expect to get from religion that self-possession which is so sorely absent from the average man and woman of today. We must introduce a right and broad motive if the virtue of stamina is to have any moral worth. That is why our fathers prescribed days of self-abnegation, on which all were alike under the same moral stimulation — an evidence of psychologic insight of the highest degree. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 209 BELOW THE AGE OF TWELVE YEARS. Children under the age of twelve should not be constrained to attend public worship. They have no capacity for co-operation in spiritual activities, and the ritual we observ^e is largely contemplation, for which children are not mature enough. PARTICIPATION OF CHILDREN IN PUBLIC WORSHIP. The age of Confirmation is the period at which the child may begin his public religious functions. There was a time in the Syna- gogue when the child was accorded at least some minor participation in the worship of men, and it is possible to find a place for him there today. I might suggest children's choirs, if I did not remember that Jewish Congregations are so pretentious about the music in the Synagogue ; they want "fine" music and do not think of hearty, genuinely felt music. They think of esthetic enjoyment and forget that music is a sacred art. They esteem artistic values and make sacrifices for it and neglect an oppor- tunity, perhaps the best opportunity afforded them, to train elevated feelings in their chil- 210 AIMS OF TEACHING dren. But we may admit children to the Read- ing from the Thorah on the Sabbath and on the HoHdays. Only that I must warn parents against their natural weakness to regard such public reading by their children from the point of view of parental pride. The reading is not meant for elocution, it is training in piety and in the avowal of it. I might even suggest letting the children read some of the Prayers of the Service, if I did not fear that it might provoke precocious self-con- sciousness. But this danger may be obviated by the tactful teacher, supported by sympa- thetic parents, who can lead the children to re- gard religious exercise in the light of a solemn duty. We must satisfy the growing religious need of the rising generation which often finds itself debarred from participation in matters of the Synagogue. Indifference creeps in where there is inactivity. Some congregations as- sign to the young men the office of usher- ing and the like, and think they are thus giving them recognition. But the work young men do in the Synagogue should be commen- surate with their religious needs. They are to do religious and not menial work. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 211 THE NEGLECT OF CHILDREN ON THE HOLIDAYS. One thing is certain, we do little for the chil- dren when we signalize the Sabbath and the Holiday for them by simply shutting up shop. It frequently means not much else than literally shutting up shop as to every exercise of the mind and sentiment, and releasing the children for a freedom which sets adrift their irresponsible spirit. I wish I could disabuse anxious parents of the notion that it is good for the health of children to romp about indiscriminately. We are letting the most im- portant element of character go wild for lack of any chastening influence. Festivals are, so far as training is implicated in them, not mere pauses for rest and occasions for jollification, but occasions devised by the ages-long wisdom of our ancestry to put into the relief of con- sciousness the great facts of our human life. Nowhere else than in the Religious School is provision made for these — surely not in public school education, which is practical and almost sordid and addresses itself to the child's event- ual earning capacity alone. 212 AIMS OF TEACHING CHILD-DEVOTION AND THE MORAL MEANING OF THE SABBATH. We may demand that children attend reU- gious services, but we must supply them with reasons why they should. That it will benefit them remains everlastingly unproven, and perhaps not to them alone. The allegation that it will please their parents, children do not take seriously, since it is not taken seriously by the parents themselves. We cannot have more than superficial results from child-attendance at Festival and Sabbath Services as long as they do not provide satisfaction for child-needs and child-soul life and we maintain the theological forms of the Sabbath and the Festival which have nothing in them for child life. We persist in a sad error of judgment, to our irreparable loss. The Sabbath has potent power for good in child-life, even more than it would have if we succeeded in forcing it upon modern business. For the Sabbath is essen- tially a moral institution and so is ever}^ holiday in Israel. If the teacher were free to re-interpret Jewish devotion, we should enter the finest stage in our history, and we should be relieved of much cajoling which we must now do to catch adults. The Sabbath and the IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 213 Festivals are, when the last word is spoken, les- sons of the great Schoolmaster of all the ages (sometimes we call him the genius of our race), by which all the truths of the Jewish life have been made impressive and real. THE child's sabbath AND CHILD-IDEALS. Let the Sabbath become a day on which the child is directed toward ideals it either feels or has heard and read of ; let the child do some- thing (under guidance) that its little soul wants to do and for which during the course of the preoccupied week it has had neither oppor- tunity nor freedom ; let it come into touch with the finer things of life, of which it has heard during the week and which it wants to meet face to face; let the Sabbath be a day for in- terests which are crowded out by the daily routine; let the child feel the exhilaration of freedom which, after all, is the real meaning of rest. Let, in fine, the child apply what it has been taught and found itself restricted all the week to express, and the Sabbath will acquire a sanctity for the child such as our conventional ritual can never produce. The Sabbath is a great opportunity we have for ennobling the souls of our children, but we neglect and debase 214 AIMS OF TEACHING it by our insistence upon their conforming to the semblance of piety as comprised in Syna- gogue attendance and which in our hearts we know is often mere hypocrisy. To be sure, the genuine use of the Sabbath, as a day for the cultivation of ideals which, though unde- veloped, are still real in child-life, throws a burden upon parents and teachers, who must be keen to watch, tactful to handle and sincere to foster them. They should be the last to com- plain as to this responsibility and ought to rejoice to respond to it. CHILDREN DO NOT NEED PUBLIC W^ORSHIP. The point that the children assemble is not so important as that they should grow spirit- ually, and we must not forget that child- hood does not thrive best under the spur of meetings. There are times when we adults prefer to be alone, and there are times when we are anxious for the invigorating stir of assembly. Similarly the child at certain periods of his religious growth is at his best and sometimes he is at his worst in "assembly." At least three-fourths of our child attendants neither desire nor need and are better for not attending assemblies in prayer and IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 215 worship. The necessity for and the benefit from congregational worship arises later in life, at the age of adolescence, when it might be reserved for the boys and girls with great profit. They are then more capable of merging their personalities into communion with other personalities and can enter into that intangible soul communication which is the necessary basis of public worship. 216 AIMS OF TEACHING CHILDREN'S SERVICES. Children cannot constitute a congregation and cannot enter into congregational worship. Our adult synagogue service requires adjust- ment to child nature and child needs. In a Children's Service the children look up to the teacher rather than to the minister. The con- ventional Children's Service books now in use confuse child faith and child education. We cannot engage in worship and teach at the same time. A book of child worship must be written by one who knows and respects the character of child faith. Worship implies submission to the laws which rule the world and to the God who sustains it. The healthy child is far from feel- ing such pious submissiveness ; it wants to do big things and delights in the show as much as in the use of strength. It expresses its regard for law and for the great God of life by seeking rather than resigning power. Its worship is therefore quite other than adult worship. We should not insist upon children attending Temple Services, as if through such attendance IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 217 religion were borne into them in some mystic manner. We should certainly not lead them to believe that prayer and ritual as such do anything for them. We may let children share in worship that the spiritual influence play about their growing souls, but not for self- expression. Children can say nothing of creed, for creed is formal and speculative, while child- hood is rich in instinct and craves activity. A service that has its center in the formal accept- ance of a creed cannot express nor satisfy child nature and child life. THE COMMUNAL CHARACTER OF WORSHIP. And again, worship is a communal function, into which riien and women enter by a com- mon social need and through common history, and, as such, it is alien to childhood. Children up to the age of adolescence are individual, not social. A pre-adolescent child feels itself lost in the crowd and does not think of attaching any- where. No child under twelve should be constrained to attend a public adult service, for such attendance is, at best, nugatory. Partici- pation in public worship does not create reli- giousness; children are not a whit more reli- gious when they have gotten through a public service. This does not mean that children are 218 AIMS OF TEACHING not capable of a religiousness of their own, of a child religiousness ; but it means that we must afford them an opportunity for the cultivation of their own pieties. The adult public service does not affect them, because it ignores them. CHILD-V^ORSHIP. Children should have a service of their own, not one in imitation of what grown people do, nor an adult service shortened and inf antilized. It must be constructed altogether differently ; it must have action in it and more symbolism as well as poetry. Remember that the drama and the arts, even dancing, origi- nated in worship; traces of this origin still linger in modern church liturgy and church literature. Child worship may have an antique form, for the archaic form is impressive. Bibli- cal selections have, therefore, a legitimate place in child worship. But the most important point is that child worship may not contain refer- ences to sin and contrition, for these subjects are not a part of child religion; the child has no sense of sinfulness and should not have it. It is wrong to force upon the child regret and remorse before it has the capacity to do the right or repair the wrong. Sin is a theolorical notion and the child conscience is IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 219 as different from the adult conscience as child wrongs are different from adult wrongs. Adults do wrong, being aware that they can choose between good and bad, and make the choice deliberately. But the child does wrong not in conscious rebellion, but through incapacity and unripeness of will. In fact, I should say child sins are really virtues in the making, for the child carries on an unconscious struggle toward the right. To constrain the child to dwell on the bad things it has done is cruel. It is much more helpful, and it is also more humane, to encourage the better instincts and capacities of the child by reminding it of the good things it has achieved. Worship, therefore, would have more moral point for the child if it emphasized what childhood does and means to do well. Child service should be full of encouragements and incentives. 220 AIMS OF TEACHING THE SCHOOL ENTERTAINMENTS AND SCHOOL SERVICES. The term "Entertainment" is a misnomer so far as it refers to the Rehgious School. It must have an educational meaning, if enter- tainment is to have any legitimate place in the school. Mere diversion and amusement are there entirely out of place; there is plenty of that for the child outside. I suspect that much of the entertaining done in the Religious School is resorted to to keep the children in good humor and to hold them in attendance and at- tention. But school exercises and school en- tertainments have a serious educational signi- ficance and are a part of the work of school and teacher. COMMUNION. School exercises have the function to culti- vate the larger sense of community and com- munion into which the children will enter by and by. Children must learn to adjust them- selves to society and acquire the sense of citizenship. There was a time when the attainment of the age of majority was a holiday IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 221 and a sacred function. In a certain sense the Bar Mitzvah was and the Confirmation ought to become such. The assembly of children, their entrance into a congregation and their sharing in a common exercise, should constitute an ex- perience for them. The program of such gather- ings, therefore, should result in the children's feeling of community. The children should be broadened in their conception of life and feel themselves near to one another in the profound things of human experience and they should pass back to their homes and their respective class work with the feeling that the world is larger than the class room and human life is something bigger than child-life. For Jewish children, finally, the school gathering is an opportunity for the cultivation of that soli- darity which is so essential to all that is momentous to the Jewish people and for the cultivation of which modern life offers so few opportunities. SOCIAL SYMPATHIES. These exercises signalize and help to im- press, not personal feelings nor personal be- liefs, but social sympathies, such as youth in- 222 AIMS OF TEACHING dulges with splendid dreaminess. This larger sense of life, accordingly, determines the aim and the content of school entertainments and school festivals. The assemblage of the chil- dren offers occasions for influence of this broadening character. PROGRAM. This conception of school assemblies, of course, determines their program. It must have a definite construction almost like that of a liturgy. Nothing has contributed more to the inaneness of congregational gatherings, than the conventional program of "numbers." A program must have articulated construction if it is to have any inherent meaning. It should be built up as a ritual is built up. The man who will help us to be clear and definite in this mat- ter will make a substantial contribution to Religious Education. But, of course, he will have to make a similarly clear analysis as to what ritual is for adults. For the purpose of school work, however, it is sufficient for the time being to lay down this rule: that every assembly of the children should be occupied with a precise thought and ideal as to associated Hfe. The children should IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 223 be given a presentation of what is inevitable and dominant as a law of their relationship to one another. They should be made solemnly aware of the great good that comes to them from co-operation, just as they should have an intimation of the damage that accrues to each when loyalty is violated by one of them. They should carry away the conviction that the law of God is in them, in their lives and in all about them equally. To be sure all this is to be done with due regard for the range of child thought and child feeling and child experience, but none the less with a view of lifting these into the plane of religious fervor. THE TEACHER IN THE CHILD-ASSEMBLIES. Since it is a discipline and a training, this child worship should be under the personal guidance of the teacher, and the practice of putting up some child to read the prayer, or, still worse, of converting the children's assembly into an occasion for bright pupils to shine, is to be condemned. The Children's Service is either a part of instruction and dis- cipline, and then it is a matter of the teacher's work, or else it is an experience in piety, and then its performance by a child reduces it to 224 AIMS OF TEACHING the level of a recitation. On the contrary, it is just on such earnest occasions as prayer that the teacher attains to his real dignity before his pupils as the spokesman of religious veri- ties, and his withdrawal from leadership at worship is tantamount to his neglect of duty. Every conscientious teacher should welcome the opportunity to stand before his children as the interpreter of sacred aspirations. He will find that the significance of such functions will lift his work and will enhance the children's respect for him. Given the purpose for which the classes of a school assemble, the program becomes defi- nite. In the Assembly Room there should be no teaching. It is a place for child-worship. The main object is to give expression to mutu- alities, to large-hearted feelings, to common enthusiasm into which each child enters with natural and generous elation. These child- gatherings and child services are a training for adult congregational worship in Temple and Synagogue. We complain that adults do not attend Services, but what right have we to ex- pect them to attend when we have done nothing to establish in them either the interest in religious worship or the self-abandon with- out which there can be no devotion? IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 225 THE CHILD-SERVICE. The fact that the school worship has for its aim to estabHsh the broad reUgious sympathies and the feehng of solidarity, under the dictates of common humanity and tradition, gives the standard for selection of the prayers and psalms and of the other features of the Child Prayer Book. In the first place these should approximate the Prayer Book of the adults as much as possible, so as to help in making the transition from child prayers to adult prayers natural and to obviate the break which has ob- tained between them till now. It is not fair to thrust the Bar Mitzvah or the Confirmand into Adult Service and expect him to take part in it intelligently and sympathetically. It is not even suiRcient to tell him about it, and expect the information to do the rest. There must be training for affiliation with impersonal public worship, if the boy and the girl are to take their place in the Temple and Synagogue fully. In the second place, children's services should ad- dress themselves to child-life and should not be copies of adult philosophy and adult theology. The Child Service should have meaning for the child. The prayer should express what the child prays for, or rather what the piety of the 226 AIMS OF TEACHING child craves. It is not a question whether the thoughts should not be "above the heads of the child," or in simple language, or short, or terse. The main consideration should be that the prayers be the child's own and express what the child longs for and needs. It will be found that the high moments of child-life are very different from those of grown-up men and women. The objects wished and the soul-con- dition seem trival, but the child's psychic nature can also rise to noble heights. RESPONSIVE READING. Responsive reading has decided value in child worship. It constrains conformation in the recital of each to all, and it is likely to express the common terms of child thought on religion and conduct. (It must, of course, be prepared for in the separate class rooms.) It is the simplest form of ritual and therefore quite practicable. But it must not be used too much, for the ministration by a presiding teacher or minister is more impressive for chil- dren. Responsive reading in adult worship was originally a concession to the democratic spirit, but this has no relevancy in the school service. Children alternate with the teacher not because IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 227 they have any official standing in worship equal to his, but because they require some oppor- tunity for co-operation with one another. THE MUSIC. It would be helpful to give the form of chanting to this responsiveness between teacher and pupils. Music is a better vehicle for spiritual consonance than prose recitation. The well-known musical responses, are very useful, but they should not be sparse in the Service. The hesitation of the teacher, on the score of his not being gifted with a melodious voice, is entirely unwarranted. Any voice will do, if it is backed by real feeling and earnestness. Children are tolerant to the man they respect and are oblivious to shortcomings which loom large to adults only when they think of themselves rather than of their duty. Every teacher should chant with the children as ministrant, frankly and sincerely, and he will find to his delight that the children accept him as a matter of course and respond to him with hearty readi- ness. I have heard Catholic priests intone with great harshness, but I have not heard any wor- shiper express contempt or protest. Genu- 228 AIMS OF TEACHING ine piety has no time to watch others and to find fault, and where there is devotion there is no impertinent criticism. THE SERMON. The Sermon should be the culmination of the worship. This, in fact, it is meant to be also in adult services. It comes after the Reading of the Law, and as its interpretation. For children, however, it is doubtful whether the sermon, be it ever so short, is not an intru- sion upon the spiritual uplift which the chil- dren's service is designed to produce. A sermon is either a lesson or a plea and a pleading. But the emotional stir should be sufficient re- ligious experience at one time. Anyway, in- struction has no place in an exercise which has for its aim the cultivation of feeling. We must hold instruction rigidly apart from edification. Besides, teaching in the mass is never effective. There is a certain reserve which even the most tractable and susceptible child, almost as a grown-up, holds sacred to himself, and he feels hurt at being harangued in public. If, how- ever, the teacher deems it necessary to address his children, he should be careful as to the choice of his subject and the manner of his treatment. The children's assembly pre- IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 229 scribes neutral subjects. There should be neither innuendo nor blunt reference to indi- vidual children, and every form of scolding or disciplinary correction should be avoided. The children's sermon, if it is made a part of the service, should present idylls of life, such as will heighten and refine the piety of the children and send them back to their environ- ment with an ideal. One word as to the manner of presentation. Children are entitled to noble language and they expect the sermon to have a form that com- ports with its significance. The teacher who talks cheaply lowers his influence and degrades the high cause he stands for. He does not come nearer to his pupils by being commonplace, and in all likelihood he causes estrangement be- tween himself and them. The language should be chosen with refinement. It should be clear, direct and sincere. The text of the ser- mon should be more than homiletic; it should fix the lesson. The teacher is ad- vised to select his biblical citations with care. An apt biblical quotation, employed at the right occasion and with well-calculated psychological effect, is worth a good deal as an educational influence. It is not so im- portant who said the significant word of the 230 AIMS OF TEACHING quotation as it is what truth it states, and, especially, what it signifies to those to whom it is offered. One more word: Some school-preachers think they must feed the children with stories. Nothing has done more harm than that notion. A story is a tool for the educator, and it must be used, as any tool, only when it is needed. It is helpful, but it is nothing in itself. It is a tool, but it is not the material. Story telling often degenerates into an entertainment, and this is the more to be deplored, since the art of story telling is so difficult. A story told clum- sily is spoiled for right use forever. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 231 MUSIC IN THE RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. Music is a means for religious influence in the Religious School or it should not be there. As a fine art it cannot be abused with impunity, not even with children. Religious music, and in our case Synagogue Music, should be a subject in the Course of Study of the Religious School, since it has an intrinsic educational value of its own. A wise teacher of music will relate it to history, to life and to character. Children should know who wrote the music that wings Jewish devotion, they should know that Jewish songs were sung in home and community under the stress of deep piety, and they should hear the story of those who composed them. We need not be discouraged by those who say that there is no original Jewish music; it has been the vehicle of intense feeling in the Jewish home and in Jewish community, and that is sufficient. The aim of the teacher must be to restore religious music to the present-day Jewish home and to see to it that the melodies are sung as part of the pious life of the people. 232 AIMS OF TEACHING Sulzer, Naumbourg and Lewandowski should be restored to us before the droning church melodies now in vogue in our Religious School Hymnals have wrought their mischief. That alien hymns have crept into the Jewish Religious School is due to our lack of thought on that matter, to indifference of those from whom we have a right to expect professional help, and finally to the confusion into which the subject has lapsed. SCHOOL HYMNS. The hymns and responses which the children learn in the Religious School should be expres- sions of the religious emotion of the children while they engage in worship. They should be means for religious teaching and in- fluence just as the other subjects of the Relig- ious School curriculum. And in the third place, the school music should prepare for home worship and bring back into Jewish households the songs which were there in for- mer days. No teacher has done his duty in this matter until he has assured himself that the songs he teaches in his school room have become household songs in the homes of his pupils. We must crowd out the cheap and de- moralizing songs which are now current in IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 233 Jewish family life. We may be able to do this by the school hymns if they are carefully chosen with reference to their fitness for the expression of genuine feeling. THE TEXT OF THE HYMNS. The texts are an important feature of hymns, and it is to be deeply regretted that so little thought has been given to their selection. For the most part texts have been taken over from Christian hymn books, on the easy assumption that they are religious. But we Jews need not borrow anywhere. We have abundant material of our own. The poems of Solomon ibn Gabirol and Judah Halevi are as good as, and better than those of any author of a Christian hymn book; they are, at least, more in keeping with Jewish sentiment. We can well afford to give them to our children; it is our duty, in fact, to give them to our Jewish childhood, which will quickly enough feel that they are spirit of its spirit. The text of the average School Hymnal now used in our Religious School often contradicts our teachings, and its flabby tone and stilted phraseology perplex the children and contribute much toward making Jewish child music uncongenial and repellant. 234 AIMS OF TEACHING CONGREGATIONAL SINGING. Perhaps the difficulty we experience in the introduction of adult congregational singing is to be traced to the fact that the music forced on the congregation is alien, and the hesi- tation of the congregation to sing it is a subtle suggestion that the music and the words make no appeal to their souls. I have yet to come upon a congregation which does not take to the En Kelohenu quite readily. Text and music seem out of the very life of the Jewish people. Let us re-introduce Jewish congregational singing (for as a matter of fact congregational singing is Jewish in origin and came into Christian worship by way of the synagogue) . We can restore it best by teaching our children to respect the responses and the hymns they learn in the school. We need not plan that they, in their turn, may teach these melodies to their parents, for this is an inver- sion of the natural order which even the sacred cause cannot make either logical or natural. These children will eventually themselves be parents and will hand down the musical and liturgical tradition. Music can do more than anything else to impart piety to the modern home and to hold it there. And it is IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 235 the oportunity of the Religious School to bring this about. SINGING SHOULD BE NATURAL AND HEARTY. There is no absolute need for an organ or a piano. Good singing can be called out of chil- dren by any suggestive teacher without elabo- rate equipment. Nor is a hymn book in the hand of each child an essential requirement. In fact, it is advisable to see to it that the chil- dren get the repertoire of Jewish music "by heart." Music comes best out of the soul of the children when they sing freely, without their eyes on their books. It is especially desirable that the children sing their responses in the service spontaneously. This is merely a matter of previous drill and right spirit. But, by all means, the pedantic "beating of time" during worship by the leader must cease. It is a dis- turbance of the worship and offends its spirit. Let the drill be given in the class room and at other times than during wor- ship. Again, the musical feature of the worship is only a help ; it should never become a feature by itself. The solo, for instance, is a precarious embellishment and had best be discouraged. A selected choir is less likely to be a distraction, but it tends to assume the weight of respon- 236 AIMS OF TEACHING sibility for good singing and to induce the rest of the school to lapse into listening. The sing- ing must be done by all the pupils, if the wor- ship is to have meaning for all. Each with all and all with each, applies to religious as much as to all social phases of life. THE RESPONSES. It is good to bridge over the music of the school into that of the Synagogue, and to familiarize the children with the main re- sponses and hymns which are sung in the latter. To be sure, this is equivalent to an appeal to the Synagogue to be less pretentious as to classic choral feats b}^ the Synagogue choir, and to put the chants within the compass of child voices. But in the end this simplification and this considerateness for the young gen- eration will bring a great gain to child piety and to adult worship as well. JEWISH MUSIC IN THE HOME. The School should also provide the Home with religious music ; the songs and the school- service responses should become household music, as it were. There need be no fear that they would thus become cheapened or lose their sacred character. On the contrary. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 237 they would become endeared to parents as well as children, and it is not at all unlikely that they would, in the course of time, become the vehicle of serious thoughts and feel- ings as these inevitably arise in the experiences of every household. It is a mark of the decadence of modern Jewish family life that it assembles so little, I was going to say almost not at all, for solemn and serious com- munion, and I have the hope that we may touch the hidden springs of the sentimental kinship in our families by the magic of song. When once parents and children have begun to sing together, they will have entered upon their religious reawakening. It is here that the printed hymn book may be of use. But in order to satisfy this side of the usefulness of the hymn book, it must contain matter that has reference to family life. There should be morning songs, evening songs, and hymns and chants appropriate to significant household events. The school is one of the agencies of the com- munal life, and it should bear a direct and forceful influence on the home. 238 AIMS OF TEACHING CHARITY COLLECTIONS IN THE RELIGIOUS SCHOOL AND CHARITABLENESS. Charity is not a virtue all along the line of childhood. There are periods of childhood when charity is disconcerting to it, and im- possible. From the point of view of life the sovereign law of child-nature is the main- tenance of self. But charity is a means devised by our morality to preserve the race on a higher level; we wish to hold free from pain and ag- gravation the life which we enjoy and we feel we cannot enjoy life and freedom rightly as long as they are disturbed in any person. The charity which is offended by the wrongs of the world and hastens to correct them or, wanting correction, to alleviate them, that larger charity which feels the keen edge of social wrong and evokes a fine impatience and a still finer patience, is the very culmination of moral maturity. The child goes through the successive stages of the feeling and has to tread a weary and long path up to that moral altitude. Adult charity is quite other than the charity which is conceivable by and possible for IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 239 childhood. In adult charitableness there are three components, one of sympathy, another of helpfulness and a third of reparation. The first two are open to childhood, in some degree, at some time and in some directions. The last is not open to it in any way, even in sympathy children have their limitations and it is easy to mislead them into maudlin impulsive- ness. In the cause of helpfulness, too, we must not demand of the child too much, for the child couples kindliness so easily with pose. Charity is far from so simple a matter as class donations and "visits to institutions" make it appear. It requires fine discriminations. Like all other virtues, charity begins by being simple. The fact, therefore, is fundamental that child- charity is not identical with adult charity. CHARITY COLLECTIONS AND TRAINING. It is customary in many Religious Schools to make a collection for charity. This is done in order to inure children to the sense of benevo- lence. The charity contributions are gathered by passing the hat, or by dropping contribu- tions into a charity box. Some even make a solemn affair of it, a sort of sacrament. The point, why is the charity given by the children, for what purpose and what is their conception 240 AIMS OF TEACHING of it, is ignored. But the main educational stress should lie on the aim that the giving of the charity contribution be attended by a sense of its significance. The act should represent a moral effort on the part of the child. But when he brings the pennies his parents have put into his hands and places them into the collection box according to school regula- tion, the moral meaning of charity has fled. Some teachers flatter themselves that the child has gotten some good out of it, for has he not delivered the money and forgone spending it on his way to school ! But even if it were true that the child donation represents a sacrifice, the act would be a discipline in self-control and not in charitableness. The child is still left un- trained in sympathy, which is at the basis of charity. The significance of the charity does not consist in the child's simply giving, but in his giving out of a certain feeling and convic- tion that he is doing a definite good to someone or perhaps to himself. This, however, the "col- lecting" does not provide nor satisfy. The fact of the matter is that the charity collection in the Religious School is a pious affectation, and does not impress the child. Right sympathies and readiness to act up to them constitute the important element of the moral life; to let IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 241 these go and come as they please is intolerable. The collection of charity from children should not have a place in a school, and parents should not be taxed with the furnishing of the con- tributions, unless both the teachers and the parents are clear as to the bearing donations have on the growth of the character of their children. Some teachers allow collections to accu- mulate until they aggregate a considerable sum and then a sort of grave council is held by the teacher and the children in which the teacher suggests a worthy object, or cause, sometimes one which the news of the day has brought into public notice, and a donation is made in the name of the class or of the school. It is clear that such a donation has very little moral content, since it is of the very essence of a moral act that it be done by the child himself by his own initiative. Such a donation in the name of the class or school may bring a cer- tain gratification to the class or school, for, say, generosity or public spirit, but it has no bearing on the training for charitableness ; it may in fact lead to vanity. Again teachers go to an- other extreme; they take the children to see poverty and miser>^ The organize visits to hospitals, to orphan asylums, to the streets and 242 AIMS OF TEACHING homes of the poor, to institutions and homes of the deaf, bHnd and lame and the rest of the wretched. I cannot protest against this too strongly. Children should be protected against maudlin sentimentality and gruesome experi- ences. The fact is, the teachers are at sea as to what charity really signifies to childhood, and have no definite policy in charity train- ing. This is not the place to go into an analy- sis of the subject, important as it is, but this much may be said: Charity requires a vivid imagination as incentive. The donor must realize, must feel, must have a picture, as it were, within himself, of the misery, the mis- fortune of the poor man, of the poor child ; he must have an imagination, so keen, so real, so dominant, that he goes at the work of help as an inevasible duty and feels in the completed performance of the charitable act a relief from the anguish he has felt. Charity must be an experience, and must issue in an act. A donation of money is a substitute, which we may concede to busy men, but cannot allow to children. Nor when chil- dren do charity, is it expected that they will reform society and better conditions. They do charity to reform, to better themselves. IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 243 And a visit to a hospital will cater to the child's instinct of inquisitiveness, satisfy his morbid taste or provoke it if he has not felt it before. It cannot engender the real sympathies, because it is not a real experience. The visitor's eyes and ears are so engrossed with the novelties that he carries from them a confused sense of things which, when the best is said, bewilders. The child carries away from the visit not the refinement meant for him, but the dangerous thrill of pruriency. He had been allowed to stare at grief which should have been holy to him. He was free to indulge an impertinent, curious peep into sor- row, which he should have respected as private. He stood at the bedside of the sick whose pain it would be better he had learned to regard as a mystery of life, and as to which he will some day bear responsibility before man and God. Beyond all, he has not gotten the lesson of charity at all, for which he had been brought there. He goes away from the hospital, the "slums" and the rest, neither wiser nor better, nor more respectful to poverty, but less rever- ent and on a level of indifferent familiarity with them. 244 AIMS OF TEACHING NOT SENTIMENTALITY BUT CHARACTER. Besides, this procedure to train children into a virtue is experimental and fragmentary. It lacks method and does not originate, as all edu- cational effort should, with the teacher, on the basis of methodic pedagogy. If charity is an essential quality of life, it should be taught not by the hap-hazard manner of a visit or a col- lection or a donation, but by a well-devised method of training. Charity cannot be taken out of the connection it has with constructive religious and ethical instruction. It should not be a bid of time-serving teachers to assure parents and the community that they are "do- ing things" with children and showing results. A class donation has nothing to do with the child's own adjustment to the sad and the sick. Charity and sympathy are qualities of child-life which should come out of the center of child-character and are more than flitting sentimentalities. The problem in this matter is not that the child shall be led to say: "I am sorry," but that he shall feel a personal eager- ness to be helpful. A gushy sympathy is noth- ing, but a noble intolerance of the ills of life is eager to mitigate and abolish evil. This thrusting of children into the midst of IN JEWISH SCHOOLS. 245 the perplexing problems which embarrass the adult world and tax the most serious and the most pious men and women is nothing short of violence to childhood. Children should be fed on faith in the world, on unclouded joyous acceptance of its gifts, and should have a rever- ence for sorrow and pain as a mystery which God has in His keeping and man can never lift. But, above all, charity must not be stopped short in mere pity. It must drive the sym- pathy beyond inactive pity into helpfulness. 019 605 996 9 Hi; iii|i; iifiiiiiiiiiiliiiiiliiiiliiiiiliiiiiiil i i^ttlllliilfiiiiiiiiiliiiiii: JiiiiiiiHillitiiiliiiiiiniiiiiiHiitniiitiiniihiWihiiiiiiiitiiiiilit