USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > The Religious Education Association : proceedings of the first annual convention, Chicago, February 10-12, 1903 > Part 13
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life, that they may have a constructive power, that they are to be used as a spiritual asset of the soul, that play, like work, may have a real ministry to an expanding life, these are propositions with which young people are not generally familiar, and the force of which they are not certain to appreciate.
Play has too long been regarded as the badge of the unspiritual, too emphatically has it been affirmed that a processional of the deeper life means a recessional from play. There is a great chance for religious and moral education as a corrective of this vicious misconception. It is time for a ringing proclamation that there are no longer any questionable amusements : that all amuse- ments are good or bad, and that the quality of sport depends always and in every circumstance upon its ability to "project the soul on its lone way," and thus to strengthen character.
The head master of a famous eastern school recently said : "The spiritual life is not a watertight compartment ; it should take in everything or nothing." Religious education has a waiting task in teaching our young people the inclusion of life, that "the spiritual life is no watertight compartment ; it should take in everything or nothing." The amusement question can only be solved by an appeal to the supreme court of life; a new sense of the spiritual meaning of the old axiom that the whole is equal to the sum of all the parts. Nothing can be insig- nificant; everything tells in character-building. And one must learn to regard his play, not as mere recrea- tion, but as a mightily constructive or destructive force in his life. That play has little or no relation to real life is the prime heresy of youth. The corrective of the heresy is the enlarging of the horizon. It is a pungent remark of Mr. Brierly, "The church for ages with more or less success has been teaching men to pray. It has also, it now realizes, to teach them to play. It must widen its program until it takes in the whole man."
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It is positively iniquitous that what Dr. Moxom felicitously called "the integrity of life" should be sub- ject to insidious and debilitating assault and battery from those irresponsible and vagrant impulses to play- impulses and instincts as natural to life as that of religion or of parenthood -because these are not cor- related to life, are not harnessed and made to work in the fine enterprise of redeeming the entire life.
To define, direct, and dignity the idea of play, is per- haps the most important service modern religious educa- tion can render the young today. To recover sport to its mightiest uses in the interests of capacious character will depreciate the homiletic value of many excellent discourses, the point of which has been the "warning" rather than the inspiration of sport ; but the present is a great time for new sermons to the young about amusement in the interest of a comprehensive life.
It is this sense of inclusion, of adequacy, of whole- ness, which is the prime message of religious and moral education. The present-day response of the wide-eyed, alert, spiritually aspiring youth is the abounding encourage- ment, the fine inspiration of every worker for the redemption of the young life of the world. The idea is distinctively Christ's, and therefore every impression of it through religious education, and every acceptance of it, through personal appropriation, makes one increasingly certain of Christ.
DISCUSSION
REV. GEORGE E. HORR, D.D.,
EDITOR "THE WATCHMAN," BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
One moral principle has certainly been violated in the exercises of this afternoon: the reapers have left nothing for the gleaners.
The doctrine of Roger Williams that " the civil magis- trate ought not to take cognizance of breaches of the first table," has triumphed in the United States. The principle of religious liberty, and its corollary -the sep- aration of Church and State-have been firmly rooted in the national constitution, and in the organic laws of the several states. Any attempt to make civil authority and public money the instruments for disseminating a religious faith flaunts the spirit of our institutions, and is doomed to failure. Except in those isolated com- munities in which the citizens are practically all of one mind, the American people will not long tolerate any movement, no matter what its pretense, to make the public schools the appanage of any sect or church.
But, if we cannot teach religion in the public schools, we can and ought to teach morality, and that morality which finds its sanctions in the authority of our laws and the genius of our institutions. I am more familiar with the statutes of Massachusetts than with those of Illinois, but probably the laws of all our states agree in the essentials. The laws of Massachusetts prohibit murder, theft, dishonesty, unchastity, public disorder, infringe- ment on the rights of others, disregard of contract obligations, and many other violations of morality. And when you add to the statute law, the Constitution of the United States, with its bill of rights, the Declaration of Independence, the federal statutes and the national
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treaties, you have an immense body of material, informed by moral ideas, from which a high moral code could easily be deduced.
And it is not simply legitimate for the state to teach the moral code involved in its organic and statute law. It ought to do so. It has no higher obligation than to instruct its children in the obligations it enjoins. By and by we are going to look back with amazement at a time when we were willing to have a large body of our citizens acquire their knowledge of the obligations imposed by the state through the penalties involved in the violation of law, rather than through systematic instruction in the public schools as to the requirements of the state. And beyond this, there is no graver evil in American life today than the almost universal disre- gard of law as law. If the public schools have any function it is to inculcate respect for law and personal conformity to the moral code involved in the law.
One of the great opportunities of authorship today is the preparation of treatises on ethics for use in the public schools which shall expound, illustrate and enforce the morality involved in the public enactments. If that were candidly done, no one, no matter what his religious belief, could object to the use of such a book in the public schools. If he objects to the inculcation of the morality the law enjoins, he confesses that he is disloyal to our institutions in the most heinous sense.
The reply that, of course, will be made to this sugges- tion is that you cannot vitalize any moral system with- out a supernatural sanction. Most of us probably admit that the supernatural sanction is the strongest; but if, for reasons which I have suggested, we cannot avail ourselves of the supernatural sanction, why should we refuse a sanction that is legitimate, and may be effective? And when we talk about sanctions are we not in danger of forgetting that the intrinsic worthiness of a moral
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ideal is a sanction of the highest value? No matter whence your moral ideal comes, if it is excellent, it carries with it its self-authorization.
PRESIDENT RUFUS H. HALSEY, STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, OSHKOSH, WISCONSIN
If we compare the various statements of the end of elementary education, we shall find that many of them contain the common element of the cultivation of right feeling as the basis for right habits. The cultivation of right feeling is supposed to be the distinctive work of religious and moral education. While there is a very general feeling in the United States today that we are not securing through the public schools the religious educa- tion, nor even the moral education, that we consider it most important for our children to have, there are very few who approve the reactionary course pursued by Eng- land in its recently adopted Education Bill. We are not willing, and I think we never shall be willing, to support denominational schools at public expense. Some people insist that without any change in the present attitude of the state toward .the public schools, religion may be taught in these schools without doing violence to the principles of religious freedom that seem to be a part of the warp of our conception of a sound and just govern- ment. There are many who insist that there can be no religion that is non-sectarian ; that the moment you give any religious ideas definite form, that moment you formu- late a theology, and announce the creed of your reli- gion; that when, therefore, we attempt to teach any religion in the public schools, we are making them secta- rian-a thing abhorred by our American polity.
But the teaching of morals in our public schools is an entirely different matter. Here is a field that has lain : fallow all too long in our school system. It is true that
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in the outlined course of study of almost every city and town throughout the country you will find some time is devoted to moral education. But inasmuch as it too frequently happens that the teachers are teaching sub- jects rather than children, that the percentage of pupils passing examinations is the estimate of a teacher's suc- cess, that there are no set examinations in morals as in arithmetic, geography, history, and grammar, we are likely to find "morals and manners" crowded to one side to make room for the three R's.
I am glad to learn that in the schools of Anderson, of which Superintendent Carr has told us, such disregard of lessons in morals is not tolerated. Many schools are giving concrete lessons in morals to children of the lower grades by the presentation of brief biographical sketches of men, living or dead, who have embodied some good quality which it is desirable to instil into the minds of the school children. In other schools a systematic attempt is made to take advantage of events in the school or town life well known to the pupils, that seem to illustrate the moral qualities we most desire to develop. If Booker Washington were to visit a city, one could select no concrete example that would afford a more inspiring lesson than the simple facts of his life and work.
I wish to emphasize the value of the indirect moral training that is given in every well-ordered public school. We shall find that the lessons in punctuality, cleanliness, orderliness, obedience, taught in these schools are none the less valuable because they are given indirectly. It is our common experience that moral lessons taught in the home are more effectual if the child is allowed to draw his own conclusion instead of having the "haec fabula docet" attached to each lesson. I wish to rein- force what Superintendent Carr has said as to the noble work that is being done by the teachers in our public
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schools in the direction of the moral training of the children intrusted to their care, largely through the example which they set. As one who has had experi- ence as a superintendent of both public schools and Sunday schools, I do not hesitate to say that the moral quality of the work done by the teacher of the day school will bear favorable comparison with that done by the Sunday-school teacher.
A number of speakers have alluded with deep regret to the exclusion of the Bible from the public schools. Though it may not be probable, yet it is possible that, if there be no restriction upon the reading of the Bible in the public schools, a teacher may dwell especially upon those parts of it that we recognize as sectarian, to the injury of the cause of religious training. Those of us who lament the fact that so large a proportion of our youth are growing up in ignorance of the Bible are in part responsible for its being excluded from the schools, in that we have not recognized the necessity for coming to some common understanding with the representatives of other religious bodies as to what parts of the Bible could be retained for use in our schools without doing violence to the conscience of any taxpayer. Dr. Willett called our attention this morning to the fact that different parts of the Scripture have different values, and that we ought to yield ready recognition to this fact. It seems to me that a widespread acceptance of this fact would make us willing to use a volume containing extracts from the Scriptures suitable for reading in public schools. I have enjoyed reading to my school from an admirable small book entitled The Message of Man: A Book of Ethical Scriptures, but I do not wish to be denied the privilege of reading to the students some portions of the Bible that are purely ethical in their teaching, and which can in no sense be feared as sectarian.
I plead for a broader definition of the expression
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"moral education," so that we may not lose sight of the valuable service along this line being done by our public schools.
REV. DAVID BEATON, D.D.,
PASTOR LINCOLN PARK CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
The discussion up to the present, following the se- quence of ideas in the program of the Convention, has considered the necessity for the new education under the head of "The Next Step Forward in Religious Educa- tion," and has given the philosophic grounds for it in "The Modern Conception of Religious Education." We are now at this point of the discussion face to face with its practical application in the various agencies engaged in this work. My observations will relate to the agency of the public schools.
It is important, at this stage of the movement, that people should be helped to see its real significance, and the scope of any organization that may arise out of it. This can best be done by viewing the subject from its relation to our public schools. In this connection we perceive that the agitation for a scientific system of moral and religious education is not a clerical or church inter- est, not a matter of the Sunday school alone, but a vital question of public policy touching the most precious interests of the state as well as of the home and the church.
The church agencies cover only about a third of the school population of the nation which ought to be under systematic moral instruction. In the United States there are twenty-three millions of persons of school age-from five to eighteen years. Of these only about seven millions are in our Protestant Sunday schools. Adding to these the one million and a half in the parish schools, and another half-million for good measure; and postulating that they have the best ethical and emotional education that
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science and piety can give, there would still remain four- teen millions of American youth of school age who do not receive any specific moral training to fit them for the duties and temptations of life. It is plain, therefore, that the present religious agencies are insufficient for the insistent and supreme demands of the hour to provide the necessary moral training for our citizens. Unless we can affect the educational policy, and secure the co-ope- ration of the public schools, all our other efforts will remain partial, limited, and ineffectual for the solution of this great problem. Nay! they will be largely counter- acted by the conspicuous and systematic neglect of this vital part of education in our public schools.
We have in our public-school system an idol called secular education. It was the gradual result of credal differences and philosophic ignorance working on parti- san interests. Every publicist and educator of authority will tell you that it is a failure as far as practical life is concerned, as well as a pedagogical blunder. The con- dition of public morals, the statistics of juvenile crime, the peculiar baseness of some recent crimes attributable to undisciplined youth, and the acknowledgment of teach- ers that the moral question is the alarming defect of the system-all these show that the vaunted secular system has broken down in the house of its friends ; and that the nation has no bulwark against that flood-tide of immoral- ity which must be resisted so long as human society remains as we see it now. It was stated on this platform that the young men and women of our day are going through a great agony ; but this is because we have not provided in infancy for the spiritual crisis which is cer- tain to arise in every maturing life.
Nor is it from a religious standpoint, nor in purely religious interests, that we bring this indictment against the system. A secular education is a piece of pedagogical folly; it is an educational monstrosity in this scientific
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age. Not a single step has been taken in the path of educational progress during the last fifty years, in either the study of child-nature, or the value of manual training, or the social bearing of education, or the re- quirements of the state for better citizenship, but has demonstrated and urged the pedagogical truth that character, moral and emotional training, ethics, spiritual- ity, whatever name you give it, is a fundamental scientific element, as well as a supreme practical part of education. And consequently no blunder is so colossal and so directly disastrous to the public life as a system that deliberately shuts its eyes to, and turns its back upon, the wisest con- clusions of educational science when the issue concerns a whole nation. Yet in the name of ignorance, bigotry, and false peace we have said to our leading educators : "Touch not this national idol, nor turn your light upon its sacred face."
The public-school system of America is the over- whelming choice of the people. Of nearly seventeen millions attending school, only about one million and a half go to private schools. The increase of the public- school attendance during the last eleven years was nearly three millions. When certain parties fondly supposed that the principle of secular education was forever settled, they reckoned without the forces of progress. Alas for final policies when the forces of thought and human betterment in seventy millions of people are set to work on a problem! It is becoming as plain as the sun in the heavens to all thoughtful people who love their country that we cannot fit our children for citizenship, or busi- ness, or the moral battle in their own souls, by any sys- tem of education which either deliberately neglects or fails to provide for the training of the moral and emotional forces of the child's nature.
It follows that this whole subject must be opened for discussion by the educational associations of our country;
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and that practical plans must be prepared for allowing the vital and creative ideas of the science of education to be applied to moral training as well as to history and chemistry. It is not a church issue, nor an academic question, but a question of national safety and progress, an issue of practical life, though bound up in an educa- tional principle. The nation is doomed which does not address itself to the creation of character as well as to the development of intellect. Morals must be taught in our public schools as scientifically and conscientiously as mathematics. Teacher and pupil must learn that the basis for the one is as scientific as for the other; and that sane conduct is as important as sane thinking.
It is the recognition of these truths that gives this movement its significance and justifies its national scope. We have arrived at a crisis when we must decide what shall be the character of our American citizens. And with ninety-three per cent. of them in the public schools, it is certain that they will be morally what we make them under that system.
FOURTH SESSION
PRAYER
REV. A. EDWIN KEIGWIN,
PASTOR PARK PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, NEWARK, N. J.
Our Father in Heaven, we thank thee tonight for the conspicuous providence which has gathered together so many of thy servants to consider those important mat- ters which have to do with the very foundations of religious liberty, religious faith, and religious hope.
We thank thee that thou hast put it into the hearts of so many, at great inconvenience in some cases, at large expense in others, to come to this Convention. We rejoice that so many are looking into the future and are trying to assume the attitude of prophets: are trying to mold the thought and systematize the teaching for those who are to take up the important duties of instruction in the years to come.
We rejoice, O God, in the conditions that have arisen in our several churches which have created a desire upon the part of those who are most interested in the well- being of thy Zion to come here to discover better means for the dissemination of truth. We seem to discover in this gathering a new portent of better days yet to come. It is as though already the dawn were upon us. We are in the spirit of one of old who cried out, "The morning breaketh." And we trust, under the bles- sing of Almighty God, that the new day may be full, not only of promise, but of exceeding delight and the richest reward.
Our Heavenly Father, we pray that the exercises of this evening may be coincident with those which have preceded. May the spirit of this meeting make not
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only for peace, which has been so conspicuous in our past sessions, but may it make as well for the perfecting of an organization which shall bring immediate relief to those teachers who are engaged in the instruction of the young, and who oftentimes are in uncertainty as to how they should present and apply the truth.
Bless, we pray thee, all who take part in these services tonight ; guide all those who shall in any way contribute to our knowledge at this time; may thy servant who presides upon this occasion, and those who have dis- coursed the music, be guided, strengthened, and blessed. Command thy blessing to rest upon us all. Keep us all while we farther wait before thee. Send us down from this mountain of privilege, as we delight to regard it, to our several places of work, encouraged in heart and thor- oughly alive to the opportunities that are before the church, the state and the school. We ask it in the Redeemer's name. Amen.
SUNDAY-SCHOOL ORGANIZATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION
REV. C. R. BLACKALL, D.D.,
EDITOR OF PERIODICALS, AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
My theme is definite, and its scope limited. From the observations and experience of a lifetime largely devoted to Sunday-school work in its manifold phases, I am asked to outline, as best I may within the allotted twenty minutes, administrative features only, in so far as these bear upon moral and religious instruction given or purposed in what I prefer to designate as Bible schools. I am not to deal directly with any curriculum, or with lesson-helps, or with teacher training.
I desire first to reiterate what I have often said and written, that in the Bible school we have immense potency for good ; that notwithstanding serious defects in its plan and management, it has been the means under God of a mighty work of divine grace in awakening interest in biblical truth, in the salvation of precious souls, and in the culture of Christian character. It becomes us, therefore, to deal wisely with the problems involved and, in most loving faithfulness, to indicate defects only that they may be brought to light for removal, and to urge improvement in every possible direction in order that the divine purpose may not be impeded by indolence or inefficiency.
I. Preliminary. Three points preliminary to the dis- cussion must first be disposed of :
I. Organization is a means and not an end. As a principle, the fewest possible parts, combining the utmost simplicity of construction and action, mark a machine as the best of its class.
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2. The true ideal of membership in the Bible school includes not simply children, but all varieties of age and intelligence. It follows that organization must be adapted, not by striking an average, but by due reference to all component parts.
3. While there are clearly defined grades, from the youngest to the oldest in years, there is no period of graduation when pupils are expected to go forth from Bible schools as at commencement from secular schools. The attendance and the instruction and the progress are properly conterminous only with life itself.
II. Some radical defects. The theme assigned sug- gests a possibility of radical defects in present methods of Bible-school management that are not irremediable. These defects have been frequently indicated in conven- tions and institutes and religious periodicals. To a not inconsiderable degree some of them have been removed in certain individual schools that are favored with com- petent leaders and broad-minded workers, who are hap- pily aided by wise and liberal financial backing. In no instance however, of which I have knowledge, have all the good results been gained that the best educational principles and methods require. I present this part of my subject in no spirit of fault-finding or of pessimism. Progress in one direction indicates and becomes a proph- ecy of progress in other directions. The Bible-school problem has so radically changed for the better during the last decade that I confidently hope to see realized some advances that are harbingered by present attain- ments.
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