USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > The Religious Education Association : proceedings of the first annual convention, Chicago, February 10-12, 1903 > Part 4
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Indeed, if we ever reach a scientific knowledge of
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human nature, and if Christ furnishes the only scientific solution of its problems, verifiable by the test of experi- ment, we shall eventually reach a science of religion; and we shall teach that science just as we teach the Copernican System-not in the name of the church, or in antagonism to it-but in the name of science and for the welfare of our children. If, indeed, young people pass through a period of storm and stress in their ado- lescence, and if Christ alone brings peace to turbulent souls; if, indeed, no man ever secures his highest inter- ests by selfishly seeking them, and if Christ presents the scientific method of human progress in the law of love; if, indeed, the human heart eternally aspires after the ideal, and if this ideal finds its only objective embodi- ment in Christ and its most perfect subjective realization through our union with Him, then civilization will yet reach the period when Christianity shall become the common law of the Republic and the highest science of the race.
SECOND SESSION
PRAYER
MR. FREDERICK B. SMITH, SECRETARY INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS, NEW YORK CITY
Our Heavenly Father, we thank thee for thy mani- fold blessings to us, for all the privileges we enjoy in life and for the revelation of thyself which thou hast seen fit to give in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord. And as we assemble together in this Convention, we would lift our hearts to thee in earnest prayer, asking that thou wilt grant the presence and the power and the spirit of Jesus Christ. We thank thee, dear Lord, not only for Jesus Christ, but we thank thee for the church that he founded upon earth, for all its magnificent and splendid record in the years that have passed, and for all the methods that are being used today to advance its truth and build up its cause. We thank thee, too, for thy Holy Word, that reve- lation of thyself which thou hast given ; and as we meet together this morning we unite in praying that the study of thy Word may be greatly increased and that its majestic truths may be unfolded, that we may come to know of the things that are truly worth while.
We thank thee, O God, not only for thy church and for thy Word, and for Jesus Christ our Lord, but we thank thee for the saints of God who have stood true during all the years that have passed. Our hearts are made sad when we remember that sometimes those who have stood for thy truth have suffered martyrdom. And. yet, our Father in Heaven, as we worship thee this morn- ing, we praise thee that thou hast given in the past such a spirit of loyalty for truth to those that have followed
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PRAYER
thee in other years that they have not counted their lives dear unto themselves, but have shed their blood and have given up life that thy gospel might be proclaimed and preserved.
O God, we thank thee for the stubbornness of reli- gious conviction and of the religious power in the past. We pray that there may be no waning of such a spirit ; but as the days swiftly come and go, bringing us from one scene to another, may there be more and more of those who shall stand for the truth as they believe it.
Hear our prayer for thy blessing upon the deliberations of this Convention today. Our Father in Heaven, some of us are constrained to believe that there has come an opportune time to pause and for a moment to think over the old truths again. We pray that thou wilt forgive in us the errors of the past. We do worship thee and praise thee that over and beyond the errors of men thou hast seen fit to have thy truth go on; and Lord we pray that the mistakes of the past may not be repeated in the future. Believing as we do that there must ever come to us better truths and better ways of applying them, we meet this morning and pray for thy blessing, that our deliberations may be without passion and without preju- dice : may we come as one united body, one group of united people, believing in God and Jesus Christ his Son. May we unite together our thought that thy cause may be advanced, the strongholds of evil torn down, and the gos- pel of Jesus Christ proclaimed with even greater power.
Hear us in our morning prayer. And now as we close our petition, we ask that the Spirit who has ever been striving with men and guiding their thoughts, may be with us. We are yet reminded that the best revela- tions of thyself have not been the revelations of flesh and blood, but have been the revelations of thy Spirit. Grant us the Spirit's guidance and power. We ask it in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AS A PART OF GENERAL EDUCATION
PROFESSOR GEORGE ALBERT COE, PH.D., NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, EVANSTON, ILLINOIS
The modern conception of religious education takes the form of an argument. True education, it says, must develop all the normal capacities of the mind; religion is one of these normal capacities; therefore true educa- tion includes education in religion. If, for any reason, the state does not impart religious training, then the home and the church must assume the whole task. This task is no mere appendix to general education, but an essen- tial part thereof. It is not a special or professional mat- ter which, like training in the fine arts, may be left to individual taste or ambition. Religious education must be provided for all children, and institutions that provide it for any children are organs of the general educational system.
This view is modern in the sense that a new awaken- ing to it is upon us; it is modern in the sense that the exclusion of religious instruction from the public schools has given it peculiar emphasis and peculiar form ; yet, in one form or another, it is as old as civilization. The theory that there can be any education that does not include religion ; the theory that looks upon our so-called secular schools as a scheme of general education, leaving religious training as a mere side issue, is so new as to be almost bizarre. If, therefore, any new idea is before us for our judgment, the question should be formulated as follows: What shall we think of the strange notion that men can be truly educated without reference to the devel- opment of their religious nature?
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It is well, however, to think through the old idea in order to see whether it is, in any full sense, a modern idea also. In the present state of educational philosophy and of religious thought, can we make good the assertion that sound general education must include religion ? If so, what shall we think of the education, commonly called general, that leaves religion out? What follows, also, with respect to the present relative isolation of religious edu- cation from our school system and our school methods ?
The central fact of the modern educational movement is recognition of the child as a determining factor in the whole educational scheme. The child is a living organism, a being that grows from within by assimilation, not from without by accretion. Therefore the laws of the child-mind yield laws for educating the child, laws as to method, and laws as to material. Education is not to press the child into any prearranged mold, but to bring out his normal powers in their own natural order.
Religious education has commonly proceeded from the opposite point of view, namely, from a fixed system of religion to which the child is to be shaped. If, then, religion is to find any place in a general scheme of edu- cation under modern conditions, some kind of settle- ment must be effected between these opposing points of view. If we start from the modern philosophy of educa- tion, our question is this : Is the human being essentially religious, or only adventitiously so ? Does religious nurture develop something already there in the child, or does it merely attach religion to the child, or the child to religion ? On the other hand, if we start from the standpoint of religion, our question is : Does not all edu- cation aim to fit the child for some goal or destiny; and, if so, how does religious education differ from any other except through its definition of the goal ?
That the child has a religious nature can be asserted with a degree of scientific positiveness that was never
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possible before the present day. First, every theory that makes religion a mere by-product of history has been almost universally abandoned. Religion has come up out of the mind of man as a natural response to uni- versal experience. There is debate as to the content, the utility, and the significance of this response, but none as to its naturalness. The psychology of the day finds that religion is as deeply rooted in human nature as any of the higher instincts or impulses that distinguish man from lower orders of life.
The idea that religion belongs to man as such has been reinforced in recent years by accumulating evidence that the development of the human individual runs paral- lel, in a general way, to the evolution of man. The indi- vidual is said to recapitulate the history of his race. It follows that the mighty power and pervasiveness of religion in general history are to be looked for in minia- ture in child-life.
Observation confirms this presumption. The kinder- garten, the highest outward expression of our knowledge of child-nature, is squarely built upon the religiousness of the child. Fröbel's whole plan of education revolved around the thought that God is a present reality within us and within nature about us, and that the end of edu- cation is to make us conscious of his presence. This was a philosophical idea, of course, but to Fröbel's eye, and according to the experience of kindergartners, the child freely, joyously responds to it.
The same observation has been made within the home circle. What is that wondrous reverence and sense of dependence with which little children look up to their parents, sometimes actually believing that the father is God, but the first stage of the feeling of absolute de- pendence which Schleiermacher declared to be the essence of religion? The appetite of children for fairy-tales, wonder-stories, and heroic legends reveals the very same
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impulse that once peopled the woodlands, the moun- tains, and the sea with supernatural beings, heard in the thunder the voice of the storm-god, beheld in the rising sun the very face of divinity, and traced our human pedigree back to demigods.
The evidence becomes piercingly luminous in the period of adolescence, when childhood culminates and pauses before settling into the fixed forms of manhood. Adolescence reveals in the blossom the seeds that were germinating through infancy and childhood. What dis- tinctly human quality-one not shared with the brutes- is more characteristic of adolescence than susceptibility to the ideal longings that culminate in religion ? Inter- fused with the hero-worship, the romanticism, the truth- and beauty-seeking, the self-consciousness of youth, is a reaching out after something more satisfying than all that our eyes see and our hands handle.
The philosophy of religion goes one step farther, and declares that analysis of human consciousness in its three phases-the true, the good, and the beautiful- reveals the idea of God as implicit in the whole of our conscious life.
Here religious education takes its stand. It declares, with all the authority of the history of the race, with all the authority of sound observation and analysis, that religion is an essential factor of the human personality, and that, therefore, a place must be found for religious education within general education.
We reach this conclusion from the pedagogical point of view. But there is also a religious point of view. The pedagogue says : "Bring out what is already in the child." Religion says : "Bring the child into obedience to the will of God." Apparently education is guided by what the child already is, whereas religion prescribes what he must become. Can we unite these two points of view ?
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The case is not different for religious education from what it is for education universally. The reason why schools exist at all is threefold : because children cannot remain children; because what happens to them during childhood affects their maturity for good or ill; and be- cause adults know which is the better life and can help children to attain it. What adults know of the good life does and must preside over all education whatsoever. The material put before the child is always selected, and it should be adapted not only to the child's spontaneous interests, but also to producing the kind of man we wish him to be.
At this point the educational reform has been some- what halting. Is the end of education knowledge, or culture, or power ? Is it intellectual or ethical ? Is it individual or social ? Just at present there is a flood-tide of sentiment that asserts that the end is neither knowl- edge, nor culture, nor power as such, nor anything else that is merely individual, but rather social adjustment and efficiency. This is a favorable moment for religion to lift up her voice and proclaim that within her hand is the final meaning of life, and that to her belongs, not only a place, but the supreme place, in determining the end of education.
The point of view of the-child-that-is and the point of view of the-man-he-should-become are reconciled through the insight that the later self is preformed in the earlier. It is possible to make education ethical because the child's nature is ethical; social because it is social. The ethical authority to which the child is taught to bow is already within the child himself. It is the same with religious education ; it is the same with specifically Chris- tian education. God has made us in his own image and likeness; he has formed us for himself, and there is a sense in which, as one of the Fathers said, the soul is naturally Christian.
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At this point religious thought transfigures the whole idea of education. The chief factor in the process is no longer the text-book; it is no longer the teacher; it is God who preforms the child for himself, plants within him the religious impulse, and grants to parents and teachers the privilege of co-operating to bring the child to a divine destiny. The time is not far behind us when men failed to connect the thought of childhood or the thought of education with the thought of God. They put education and religion in sharp antithesis, making one a human process, the other divine. Even today there is distrust of religious education lest it shall leave conversion and religious experience out of the account. But in reality infancy, childhood, and adolescence are themselves a divinely appointed school of personal reli- gion, a school in which the divine Spirit is prime mover and chief factor. Religion does not flow from the teacher to the child ; it is not given, or communicated, or impressed, merely from without; it is a vital impulse, and its source is the source of all light and life. In the normal unfolding of a child's soul we behold the work of the Logos who gives himself to every man coming into the world. When the Logos comes to a child, he comes to his own, and it is in the profoundest sense natural that the child should increasingly receive him as the powers of the personality enlarge.
The thought of God works a further transformation in our thought of education. For God's will compasses all the ends, his presence suffuses all the means, and his power works in all the processes of it. Accordingly, religious education is not a part of general education, it is general education. It is the whole of which our so-called secular education is only a part or a phase. Religious education alone takes account of the whole per- sonality, of all its powers, all its duties, all its possibili- ties, and of the ultimate reality of the environment. The
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special hours, places, and material employed in religious training do not stand for any mere department ; they repesent the inner meaning of education and of life in their totality.
Our practical problem, therefore, is greater than that of organizing a good Sunday school and promoting reli- gion in the home. The spirit of religion must be infused into the whole educational organism. Religion has not separated itself from general education, but public edu- cation has separated itself from the vine of which it is a branch. Yet not wholly, for there are leaders of public instruction who see that the end of education is one with the end of life, and that, though religious instruction be excluded from the schools, the spirit of religion should pervade the whole system. The time has not come, it is not very near, when the public school can resume the work of specific religious instruction. We must first learn more of Christian union. But we are needlessly squeamish regarding the limits of the moral and spiritual functions of our school system. The system exists as an expression of the ideals of our civilization. In the most democratic state there is no reason why ideals that are common to the people should not be expressed in the people's schools, even though some citizens should dis- approve. We shall never secure an ideal school system by consulting the citizen who has the fewest ideals. Why not assume that some principles of the spiritual life are already settled, and that these principles are to con- trol our schools? Why should not moral training be made to approach nearer and nearer to the fully unified ideal that is found in our religion ?
On the other hand, it behooves the home and the church, realizing that they are members of the general educational organism, to relate their work more closely to that of the public school, the high school, and the col- lege. Religious education is not peculiar in method, but
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only in its aim and in the material as determined by the aim. All the results of modern progress in educational philosophy, methods, and organization belong to the home and the church as much as to the state schools.
Existing organs and methods of religious training- the Sunday school, the young people's society, the junior and intermediate societies, the Young Men's Christian Associations, the catechism, the lesson systems and lesson-helps-arose, for the most part, in response to special needs, and were adopted with no clear conscious- ness of their possible place in a general scheme of educa- tion. This is not a matter of reproach at all. On the contrary, these things have all pursued the normal course of development, which consists first of all in doing the thing that is immediately needed, the theory being left for later working out. But when the theory has been worked out, then the organ that arose in an incidental way may attain to higher usefulness through understand- ing of its nature, laws, and relations.
This self-conscious, fully reflective step must now be taken. There is a great body of pedagogical philosophy that must be assimilated. There are principles of teach- ing that must be observed. There is knowledge of the child-mind that must be utilized. There are riches of knowledge in many directions that are waiting to be con- secrated to Christ in the service of children and young people.
We cannot longer neglect these things and remain guiltless. The light has dawned, and we must love light rather than darkness. Both the home and the church must rise to their privilege of being parts of the general V organism of education. They must realize that they are under as much obligation as the principal or the teachers v in a public school to study the child, to master the mate- rial and methods of education, and to acquire skill in the educational process. Vastly more time and vastly more
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money must be devoted to this service, and we must never regard either home or church as normally success- ful until it is no longer the exception but the rule for children to 'grow up Christians, and never to know them- selves as being otherwise.'
PROFESSOR EDWIN D. STARBUCK, PH.D.,
LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
We are here today because the world will not stand still. Each age has its new thought, its new ideas, and its new duties. Each generation must shape its prob- lems afresh. There is an educational ideal that belongs peculiarly to each age. There is no "new education" any more than there is a new poetry or a new music. Still, it is true of education as of poetry and music, that along with the changing modes of life and thought it takes on different coloring. It has been the purpose of education always to interpret the best life of the world anew to each generation; to bring each child into pos- session of the truest heart wisdom of the race; to beau- tify and enrich society through perfecting its individual units.
This has been a difficult task, especially in matters of religion. It has usually been under compulsion that religion has been forced to accept and utilize newer con- ceptions of astronomy, physics, biology, and history. It is safe to assert that a change in this respect has come about. Religious people are at last learning to look for the revelations of ever-widening truth as their chief busi- ness in life, rather than to guard and cherish some for- mula or custom. We appreciate as never before that, as ' our views of the world change and our ideas take on new shades of emphasis, religious education must re-form its methods and subject-matter.
I wish to mention three growing world-conceptions which have been gaining momentum in recent years, and
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are taking possession of human life; and which must be incorporated into our methods and ideals of religious education, as they have already been recognized rather extensively in secular education. They are these: the developmental conception of world-processes, the growth of individualism, and the recognition of society as an organism.
I. The growth conception. The universe seems to be in a process of becoming, of self-revelation. It flows. It is dynamic and not static. It seems to be moving on in obedience to a purpose, no one fully knows what. For a long time this truth has been accepted piecemeal. Men have readily believed that it was by this process of unfolding, of development, of evolution, that the worlds were made; that the continents and seas, mountains and valleys were formed ; that languages, governments, and institutions have taken shape. But while affirming the great truth, we have been inclined to make reservations; governments were given by God for the control of man ; man was created at a specific time and out of hand; the Bible was a definite "revelation" to man and ready- formed. But these idols have been shattered one by one. The facts of embryology, comparative anatomy, geology, biblical history, and criticism have conspired to compel mankind to stand face to face with the naked truth that growth is the method of life; that the divine Life as the reality of the universe is in a process of eter- nal change, transition, and self-revelation.
What, now, are some of the implications for religious education of the acceptance of the developmental point of view? A few of the central ones may be noted by way of illustration.
I. Religions grow. Religion is a part of life. It is not something tacked on, something which has come ab extra. It springs up within and out of life itself. We shall never be workers together with God in the largest
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way and truest sense as long as we keep the false distinc- tion between the world of nature and the world of grace.
2. Religious education is a part of education in its largest sense. The Sunday school is already happily borrowing from " secular " education, not only teachers, but methods and curriculum, in so far as they apply. The feeling of the unity of life must lead us to feel the weakness of the distinction between secular and religious education. The end of all education must center in the deepest and highest products of development - the spir- itual life.
3. The Bible is a product of world-development and a record of race-history. Its value is in leading people to feel the movement of spirit - the ebb and flow, the strife, pain, and victory -of a devout people, and to awaken in those of the present time the same stirring of soul and struggle and victory as are there set forth in bold perspective.
4. The end of Sunday-school and other religious in- struction is growth-growth of individuals and society. We have many substituted and less worthy ends in reli- gious education. In the Sunday school, for example, we want large classes, or we desire to make the Sunday school the feeder of the church, or we set before our- selves the purpose of trying to teach as much as possible of the Bible. If we would keep in mind that the end we have in view is the spiritual development of our children, these would fall away as mere rags and husks. We would look into the lives and hearts of our children, and inevi- tably be drawn to them with a sympathetic devotion which would make us wiser in ways and means of help- ing them than we are.
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