USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > The Religious Education Association : proceedings of the first annual convention, Chicago, February 10-12, 1903 > Part 5
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Our question would always be: "Taking this child as it is today, what can I best do to call out its life to respond to the true and good and beautiful?" The
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object of the mother is not to get as much bread and meat as possible down the child, but to give it that by which it can grow. Teach the Bible, to be sure, and such particular parts of it as will fit the child's needs ; but use it as a means and not as an end. Teach whatever is the best food now for the pupil's good. In early years it may be fairy-stories with the morals left in, skilfully selected, to be sure, as Felix Adler in his Moral Instruc- tion of Children has wisely shown the way, in order to impress the thing to be taught. In youth the end may be reached by the stirring poems of Matthew Arnold and Browning, or essays of Emerson and Carlyle, or novels of George Eliot, as well as by the literature of the Bible.
5. We shall be led to respect the needs of chil- dren as distinct from those of adults. The curriculum of religious instruction has been devised by adults who have forgotten how it seems to be a child. The almost uniform methods and subject-matter for all ages of pupils testify to the fact. Ultimately there should be a cur- riculum for the Sunday school, as skilfully graded as for the day school. At any cost, the needs of children should be respected. Childhood is the arena in which the problems of race-development are to be fought out. With the help of John Fiske, we are coming to see as never before the meaning of the Master when he took a child and said: "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." The child comes freighted with the result of millenniums of race-experience. It is the essence of world-wisdom in germ, the God-life incarnate. It is our work as teachers, by all the skill we have, to bring into realiza- tion its latent possibilities.
II. Another conception which has been gaining ground and more and more influencing our ideals is the recognition of the worth of the individual. The time was, a few centuries ago, when the machinery of the
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social and institutional order had swallowed up the indi- vidual. Persons existed for kings and armies and the church. Education existed chiefly to fit men for the church and to prepare them for heaven. We still have remains of that conception in the songs, sermons, and customs which depreciate in the extreme the worth of this life-"a vale of tears"-and of the individual-"a worm of the dust." The old scheme was a mill in which to grind people through such a mold that they would fit the church or state or heaven.
Gradually men have fought their way to such a degree of emancipation as to come into possession of their own souls. The record of the struggle has given us the Reformation, at first an imperfect victory; for, as Davidson says, " Protestantism, after its first enthusiasm of negation was over, more and more belied its first principles and bowed down before authority." This movement gave us the enlightenment, the philosophies of Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Hegel. In an exagger- ated form it broke out in the French Revolution and through Rousseau. It is recorded in the establishment of democracies and republics. It speaks through the Declaration of Independence, strikes, and labor unions, and in the ethics of freedom and individualism and hedonism. The record of this movement has been expressed in the educational theories of those who have stood as the great exponents of education - Comenius, Pestalozzi, Herbart, Rosmini, Horace Mann, and espe-
cially in Fröbel. The recognition of individuals and individual needs has been, in fact, the dominant note in the message of the great educators. It is a chord to which "secular" education is more or less vitally responding. It represents one of the great needs in religious education.
What are its implications in respect to the problem of religious education ? It furnishes a new motive for
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religious work. The end is not far off in some remote sphere or other world. It is here and now-to do what we can to help and inspire and beautify these individual lives in which the seeds of truth may germinate and grow. Our work is like that of the gardener-to tend, and cultivate, and watch ; if it is a rose, to try to produce the most beautiful rose; if it is a lily, then make it a perfect lily.
It is through the enrichment that comes from differ- ent tastes and insights that our common grasp of truth and hold on life increase. Differentiation and variation are inseparably bound up with the growth-process. No two things are alike. Each individual is God's under- study, and he never repeats himself. When we catch the full significance of it, we shall break away from much of the uniformity that now hampers us. We expect people to profess the same beliefs, enjoy the same kind of serv- ices, study the same lessons and in the same way. We shall drop much of the prescribed work and perhaps follow topics instead of set lessons, many days or even months, if they represent the lines along which the per- sons we are instructing are growing normally. We shall, many times, be learners along with our pupils.
Not long since, in addressing some ministers on the treatment of doubt in young people, I made a plea for approaching them with sympathy, since doubt for this or that person may represent a necessary and normal step in his development. In the discussion following, an elderly man who had been a successful and revered teacher in a theological seminary, said : "I have learned when a young man is in doubt to approach him, not only with sympathy, but with a great deal of reverence, because I have found that the great things of life are working themselves out there." The end of education and of life is to realize to the fullest extent the divine life as it is coming to light in individual souls.
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III. Now that individualism is becoming a realized fact, now that each person can stand apart from and above the thraldom of society and the trammels of a material existence, what have we? Often a swaggering conceit, social irresponsibility, anarchism social and political, exaggerated individualism in ethics and religion. But these are the price we have had to pay for a great con- quest.
At the same time, there has been growing side by side with individualism, perhaps a little in its wake, a fuller recognition of society as an organism. The devel- opment of the one is the condition of the other. A society exists only through its units. A social con- science can never arise apart from a sense of individual responsibility. One might easily trace the records in history and in contemporary life of the growing sense of "solidarity." The present Convention is a sufficient index of the importance we feel of finding our life through each other, of uniting our interests, out of our common thought to start an impulse whose force shall be felt throughout our national life. "No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself."
Through the appreciation of society as an organism there is opening up before us a perfected life which shall reflect in its interrelations and organized forms a grander future than before had seemed possible-larger, as the whole is larger than its parts; more beautiful, as a harmony is more beautiful than a single note; more stimulating, inasmuch as through it the lines for indi- vidual expression open in every direction; more inspir- ing, since each person feels the pulsing life of every other.
This conception must, likewise, bear fruit in religious education. Here again we shall find a new impulse for our work. The work of education is social and not selfish. Instead of whining about our eternal salvation
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and begging for blessings, we are to be up and active. Then our happiness and our salvation will take care of themselves. Our chief business today is to live beauti- fully and helpfully in this present world, trusting God for the future; to labor for a perfected personal and social life, believing that human genius and human con- science, in whatever sphere we find ourselves, working together with Him, can meet and master the problems of human destiny.
We shall change in some respects our preparation for religious work. We may be led to study more sociology and less theology, more psychology and less homiletics, and more ethics even if it sacrifices some Hebrew and Greek. We may hear more of social righteousness and less of personal salvation from our pulpits. We shall develop, conserve, and utilize more the social instincts in young people, rather than disparage and condemn them as making against religion. We shall make religious organizations reflect the community life, and become centers for the stimulation of a higher kind of social responsibility.
The business of religious education is to feel the cur- rents of life that are moving about us and to translate them into religion; to appreciate some of the vital forces in religion and to translate them into life. These three facts-the world and life as dynamic, the worth of the individual, and society as an organism-have developed into great world-conceptions. It will be well if they are incorporated into our methods and ideals of religious education.
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AS CONDITIONED BY MODERN PSYCHOLOGY AND PEDAGOGY
PROFESSOR JOHN DEWEY, PH.D.,
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS -
So far as I see, psychological theory at present sim- ply emphasizes and reinforces some general principles which accompany a practical movement that is already going on, deriving its main motives from general, con- siderations. Psychology has no peculiar gospel or rev- elation of its own to deliver. It may, however, serve to interpret and illuminate some aspects of what is already going on, and thereby assist it in directing itself.
I shall endeavor to present simply one principle which seems to me of help in this interpretation : the stress laid in modern psychological theory upon the principle of growth and of consequent successive expan- sions of experience on different levels. Since the mind is a growth, it passes through a series of stages, and only gradually attains to its majority. That the mind of the child is not identical with the mind of the adult is, of course, no new discovery. After a fashion, everybody has always known it; but for a long, long time the child was treated as if he were only an abbreviated adult, a little man or a little woman. His purposes, interests, and concerns were taken to be about those of the grown-up person, unlikenesses being emphasized only on the side of strength and power.
But the differences are in fact those of mental and emotional standpoint, and outlook, rather than of degree. If we assume that the quality of child and adult is the . same, and that the only difference is in quantity of capacity, it follows at once that the child is to be taught down to, or talked down to, from the standpoint of the
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adult. This has fixed the standard from which alto- gether too much of education and instruction has been carried on, in spiritual as well as in other matters.
But if the differences are those of quality, the whole problem is transfigured. It is no longer a question of fixing over ideas and beliefs of the grown person, until these are reduced to the lower level of childish appre- hension in thought. It is a question of surrounding the child with such conditions of growth that he may be led to appreciate and to grasp the full significance of his own round of experience, as that develops in living his own life. When the child is so regarded, his capacities in refer- ence to his own peculiar needs and aims are found to be quite parallel to those of the adult, if the needs and aims of the latter are measured by similar reference to adult concerns and responsibilities.
Unless the world is out of gear, the child must have the same kind of power to do what, as a child, he really needs to do, that the mature person has in his sphere of life. In a word, it is a question of bringing the child to appreciate the truly religious aspects of his own grow- ing life, not one of inoculating him externally with beliefs and emotions which adults happen to have found serviceable to themselves.
It cannot be denied that the platform of the views, idcas, and emotions of the grown person has been fre- quently assumed to supply the standard of the religious nature of the child. The habit of basing religious in- struction upon a formulated statement of the doctrines and beliefs of the church is a typical instance. Once admit the rightfulness of the standard, and it follows without argument that, since a catechism represents the wisdom and truth of the adult mind, the proper course is to give to the child at once the benefit of such adult experience. The only logical change is a possible reduction in size-a shorter catechism, and
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some concessions -not a great many-in the language used.
While this illustration is one of the most obvious, it hardly indicates the most serious aspect of the matter. This is found in assuming that the spiritual and emo- . tional experiences of the adult are the proper measures of all religious life; so that, if the child is to have any religious life at all, he must have it in terms of the same consciousness of sin, repentance, redemption, etc., which are familiar to the adult. So far as the profound sig- nificance of the idea of growth is ignored, there are foisted, or at least urged, upon the child copies of the spiritual relationships of the soul to God, modeled after adult thought and emotion. Yet the depth and validity of the consciousness of these realities frequently depend upon aspirations, struggles, and failures which, by the nature of the case, can come only to those who have entered upon the responsibilities of mature life.
To realize that the child reaches adequacy of religious experience only through a succession of expressions which parallel his own growth, is a return to the ideas of the New Testament: "When I was a child I spoke as a child; I understood -or looked at things - as a child; I thought -or reasoned about things-as a child." It is to return to the idea of Jesus, of the successive stages through which the seed passes into the blade and then into the ripening grain. Such differences are distinctions of kind or quality, not simply differences of capacity. Germinating seed, growing leaf, budding flower, are not miniature fruits reduced in bulk and size. The attaining of perfect fruitage depends upon not only allowing, but encouraging, the expanding life to pass through stages which are natural and necessary for it.
To attempt to force prematurely upon the child either the mature ideas or the spiritual emotions of the adult is to run the risk of a fundamental danger, that of
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forestalling future deeper experiences which might other- wise in their season become personal realities to him. We may make the child familiar with the form of the soul's great experiences of sin and of reconciliation and peace, of discord and harmony of the individual with the deepest forces of the universe, before there is anything in his own needs or relationships in life which makes it possible for him to interpret or to realize them.
So far as this happens, certain further defects or per- versions are almost sure to follow. First, the child may become, as it were, vulgarly blasé. The very familiarity with the outward form of these things may induce a cer- tain distaste for further contact with them. The mind is exhausted by an excessive early familiarity, and does not feel the need and possibility of further growth which always implies novelty and freshness -some experience which is uniquely new, and hitherto untraversed by the soul. Second, this excessive familiarity may breed, if not contempt, at least flippancy and irreverence. Third, this premature acquaintance with matters which are not really understood or vitally experienced is not without effect in promoting skepticism and crises of frightful doubt. It is a serious moment when an earnest soul wakes up to the fact that it has been passively accepting and reproducing ideas and feelings which it now recog- nizes are not a vital part of its own being. Losing its hold on the form in which the spiritual truths have been embodied, their very substance seems also to be slipping away. The person is plunged into doubt and bitterness regarding the reality of all things which lie beyond his senses, or regarding the very worth of life itself.
Doubtless the more sincere and serious persons find their way through, and come to some readjustment of the · fundamental conditions of life by which they re-attain a working spiritual faith. But even such persons are likely to carry with them scars from the struggles
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through which they have passed. They have undergone a shock and upheaval from which every youth ought, if possible, to be spared, and which the due observance of the conditions of growth would avoid. There is some danger that we shall come to regard as perfectly normal phenomena of adolescent life certain experiences which are in truth only symptoms of maladjustment resulting from the premature fixation of intellectual and emotional habits in the earlier years of childhood. Youth, as dis- tinct from childhood, is doubtless the critical time in spiritual experience; but it would be a calamity to exag- gerate the differences, and to fail to insist upon the more fundamental principle of continuity of develop- ment.
In other cases there does not seem to be enough fundamental seriousness; or else the youth lives in more distracting circumstances. So, after a brief period of doubt, he turns away, somewhat calloused, to live on the plane of superficial interests and excitements of the world about him. When none of these extreme evils result, yet something of the bloom of later experience is rubbed off; something of its richness is missed because the individual has been introduced to its form before he can possibly grasp its deeper significance. Many persons whose religious development has been comparatively uninterrupted, find themselves in the habit of taking for granted their own spiritual life. They are so thoroughly accustomed to certain forms, emotions, and even terms of expression, that their experience becomes convention- alized. Religion is a part of the ordinances and routine of the day rather than a source of inspiration and renew- ing of power. It becomes a matter of conformation rather than of transformation.
Accepting the principle of gradual development of religious knowledge and experience, I pass on to men- tion one practical conclusion : the necessity of studying
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carefully the whole record of the growth, in individual children during their youth, of instincts, wants, and interests from the religious point of view. If we are to adapt successfully our methods of dealing with the child to his current life experience, we have first to discover the facts relating to normal development. The prob- lem is a complicated one. Child-study has made a beginning, but only a beginning. Its successful prosecu- tion requires a prolonged and co-operative study. There are needed both a large inductive basis in facts, and the best working tools and methods of psychological theory. Child-psychology in the religious as in other aspects of experience will suffer a setback if it becomes separated from the control of the general psychology of which it is a part. It will also suffer a setback if there is too great haste in trying to draw at once some conclusion as to practice from every new set of facts discovered. For instance, while many of the data that have been secured regarding the phenomena of adolescence are very important in laying down base lines for further study, it would be a mistake to try immediately to extract from these facts a series of general principles regarding either the instruction or education of youth from the religious point of view. The material is still too scanty. It has not as yet been checked up by an extensive study of youth under all kinds of social and religious environ- ments. The negative and varying instances have been excluded rather than utilized. In many cases we do not know whether our facts are to be interpreted as causes or effects ; or, if they are effects, we do not know how far they are normal accompaniments of psychical growth, or more or less pathological results of external social conditions.
This word of caution, however, is not directed against the child-study in itself. Its purport is exactly the opposite : to indicate the necessity of more, and much
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more, of it. It will be necessary to carry on the investi- gation in a co-operative way. Only a large number of inquirers working at the same general question, under different circumstances, and from different points of view, can reach satisfactory results. If a Convention like this were to take steps to initiate and organize a movement for this sort of study, it would mark the dawn of a new day in religious education. Such a movement could provide the facts necessary for a positive basis of a constructive movement; and would at the same time obviate the danger of a one-sided, premature generaliza- tion from crude and uncertain facts.
I make no apology for concluding with a practical suggestion of this sort. The title of my address, "The Relation of Modern Psychology to Religious Education," conveys in and of itself a greater truth than can be expressed in any remarks that I might make. The title indicates that it is possible to approach the subject of religious instruction in the reverent spirit of science, making the same sort of study of this problem that is made of any other educational problem. If methods of teaching, principles of selecting and using subject-matter, in all supposedly secular branches of education, are being subjected to careful and systematic scientific study, how can those interested in religion-and who is not ?- justify neglect of the most fundamental of all educa- tional questions, the moral and religious?
PRESIDENT HENRY CHURCHILL KING, D.D., OBERLIN COLLEGE, OBERLIN, OHIO
The limits of this paper forbid any attempt to expound or to justify the psychological and pedagogical principles involved ; the attempt is rather to apply those principles as directly as possible to the problem of religious education. Moreover, even in the application
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of the psychological and pedagogical principles, though somewhat distinct periods in religious education must be recognized, I shall not aim to take up the question of the progressive adaptation to these periods, but confine the discussion to those great fundamental principles which have almost equal application in all periods. And even of those four principles which often seem to me the greatest inferences from modern psychology (though they are not absolutely exclusive one of another) - the complexity of life, the unity of man, the central impor- tance of will and action, and the conviction that the real is always concrete-the two first may be but very briefly treated. And yet, even the briefest paper on religious education ought not to fail to point out how greatly religion has suffered from failure clearly to recognize the complexity of life and the unity of the nature of man.
And, first, it concerns the religious teacher to see that psychology's emphasis upon the complexity of life, upon the relatedness of all, is a virtual denial of the possible separation of the sacred and the secular. The very consti- tution of the mind demands, for the sake of the higher interests themselves, that they do not receive exclusive attention. And the reaction certain to follow exclusive attention to any subject is only disastrous to the interests which it was sought thus exclusively to conserve. Human nature revenges itself for any lack of reasonable regard for the wide range of its interests. No ideal interest can conquer by simple negation, and no ideal interest has any- thing to gain by mere exclusiveness. For the denial of legitimate worldly interests only narrows the possible sphere of both morals and religion ; it makes the ethical and religious life, not more, but less significant. And the entire movement of which this Convention is a part roots, I suppose, in a similar conviction. Religion is life or neither is anything, it has been said; so that
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religious education cannot wisely be carried on as an isolated fragment.
Moreover, it is of peculiar moment to the religious teacher to take account of the unity of man. Because he ought to face the exact facts and to know and obey the laws of his divinely given nature, the religious teacher least of all can afford to ignore either the phys- ical or psychical conditions involved in the unity of human nature. On the physical side, he should not forget, for example, the effects of fatigue -that surplus nervous energy is the chief physical condition of self- control - nor the close connection of muscular activity. and will, nor the physical basis of habit. On the psy- chical side, the religious teacher needs to consider the possible helping or hindering influence of intellectual and emotional conditions. The moral dangers of intel- lectual vagueness and of strained and sham emotions may be taken as illustrations.
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