PRINCIPLES UNDERLYING THE SUNDAY SCHOOL

CURRICULUM

MR. PATTERSON DU BOIS

PHILADELPHIA

I raised my

Time being short, I took such a luncheon to-day as I thought would most quickly serve me best. It was an oyster stew. When the bowl was set before me, an initial taste revealed the need of salt. eyes, saw the salt in the distance, but gave no other sign. had the instinct to see my necessity, reached the needed article and set it before me. To myself I said, "I like your curriculum."

A stranger

It was only a second or two long, but it taught me to discern, to feel, and to act in response to my neighbor's needs. Scripture texts came to mind as a Christly sanction. We complain that our time is too short in Sunday school to teach much. This stranger gave me a life lesson in two seconds. It is our business to do the most possible in the time that we have. Here is a point for teacher-training as well as Sunday school teaching.

Last summer I visited the old village of Brading, in the Isle of Wight. Here is the ancient church where Leigh Richmond ministered a century and more ago. Here is the churchyard where, under a spreading tree, he held his class of little girls, to whom he taught the theology of those days, as well as Bible passages, catechisms, and hymns for memorizing. Death was a more important consideration to the Christian then than life was. The tombstones by which this class was surrounded served to create the desired atmosphere and to point the gloomy ideal. The children were actually made to memorize epitaphs. Little Jane's parents were irreligious and wicked. The tract which Leigh Richmond wrote, describing the child's progress toward a beautiful, unselfish Christian character, was famous in the past century. The last sickness and death of Jane at the age of about fourteen is touchingly told. It pictures her concern for her parents and associates, her serene faith, her supreme comfort in her hymns, her Bible, and the theological interpretations as she had taken them from her teacher's lips.

I asked myself whether the pendulum of our day had swung too far away from these almost hysterical manifestations of a past era. Have we pursued the rational and the so-called "practical" too hotly to the neglect of the emotional?

Again, suppose Jane had been born in a similar poverty in a great

twentieth-century city. She would be compelled to seek self-support, mingling with many persons of doubtful conduct, possibly serving employers with whom she would become tributary to or even principal in sharp practices in the struggle for existence. Would the purely theologico-sentimental curriculum of the old graveyard have so cultivated her moral discernment as to keep her as straight and serenely beautiful in character as she was in that remote village? Is not the stress of our industrial, commercial, and political life of to-day dulling what moral discrimination we think we have? I believe that the dishonorable defections of Christians who suppose that their ideals are high are due largely to want of training from childhood in concrete ethical discrimination. There is a larger place for this in the Sunday school curriculum than the mere casual side issues of the average teacher. And this means an important item in the teacher's training also.

But that Jane's intimacy with Bible texts and sacred songs was an infinite solace and delight to her in her last days cannot be doubted. Have we not in this also swung too far away from the memory treasures of our fathers? Notwithstanding the austerities of the indoctrination of that day, it is noteworthy that the Brading class was held in a beautiful spot outdoors, and that the surroundings were valued as accessory suggestion. Richmond himself claimed that there was value in the sweetness of nature, as well as in the solemnity of gravestones. If for these melancholy reminders of death we substitute the agencies and ideals of life, we have restored something of that effective method and applied it to a more Christlike purpose. We have made for life abundantly, instead of death superabundantly. Therefore let us have more of what might, by a kind of courtesy or liberal use of the term, be called a laboratory method. Let us not stop with the Bible, but, as Paul has said that all things are ours, draw on all resources books, nature, and human life in its manifold social complexity. Suppose your boys or girls were to report on incidents or cases involving ethical discrimination or religious attitude which they had witnessed or to which they were a party. Suppose, also, that the rights and wrongs, the advantages and disadvantages, growing out of such deeds and situations were referred back to Biblical cases or precepts, somewhat as a physician or lawyer goes to his library for precedents and authorities. We might then have a closer connection between the school and life. Even though without apparatus," we should have the laboratory idea.

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Then, too, we should have more of the missionary element. But we must not confine this to the contribution of money to Church "boards." If there are grave disclosures of vice in the city, and an

effort is making to root it out in spite of political protection, your boy and girl should see that the Church, as an institution, is taking a hand in the process of purification. He or she should not think missionary effort is confined to the distant and the invisible, or that the Church has no interest in the near and the immediate. "Forward movements" should concern our back alleys as well as Corea.

Lastly, let the curriculum be large, proceeding by wholes, offering as little temptation as possible to the teacher for petty homily or for breaking up a good story into insipid bits. Let it include the exemplary fascination of biography — of human character in the concrete.

This desultory discussion makes no pretense to the form of a curriculum. I have said nothing about the Bible as the supreme text-book, as the book of life and of lives, because I assume that we are already agreed upon that. I simply remind the curriculum-maker of five motifs - a proper affection, a moral discrimination, a memoriter treasury, a missionary conscience, and a broad view.

REV. F. N. PELOUBET, D.D.

AUTHOR PELOUBET'S SELECT NOTES ON THE INTERNATIONAL SUNDAY SCHOOL LESSONS, AUBURNDALE, MASSACHUSETTS

In the light of as wide a study of published curricula, and of books on child-study, as broad an observation and experience, and as full a conference with educators as have come within my limits, I would lay down as scientifically correct the following principles:

First. It is an axiom that the curriculum must be adapted in both material and method to the varying stages of mental development and religious growth of the pupils. It was well said at our Philadelphia meeting, that "No one who has studied both the Bible and the child can believe that all parts of the Bible have an equally high culture value at every stage of development."

Second. A really scientific curriculum must take into account all the factors of the problem, and refuse to overemphasize any one factor at the expense of the others. There are several factors which are frequently ignored, or allowed too meager an influence; so that while the curricula are scientific in some directions, as in the psychology of the child, they are unscientific in not giving due weight to other essential elements in the actual working out of the problem.

Some neglected factors. The limit of time in the Sunday school, one half hour a week. It is absolutely impossible within that limit of time to utilize a curriculum for the entire religious education of the child,

without a miracle. Such a curriculum would be a wise educational measure, but not a wise Sunday school curriculum.

The kind of studies to which a Sunday school curriculum is limited. Literature, in some of its forms, and not the wider range of the dayschool curricula.

The changing nature of the Sunday school clientele. Only a small proportion of the pupils — not one fourth remain in the same school for a long period

say 10 to 15 years.

The great variation in the times and the rapidity of child development. Prof. Search finds that the progress of the brightest scholars is three and a half times as rapid as that of the duller ones.

The co-ordination of the Sunday school curriculum with the other means for the religious education of the child. In view of these and other neglected factors, certain great underlying principles emerge:

Third. The Sunday school curriculum cannot scientifically be modeled closely after the day school curriculum, nor draw its illustrations from it, except so far as literature in its broadest sense is concerned. To grade the Sunday school closely after the grammar school grades is pedagogically wrong; while the broader grades of primary, grammar, high, and collegiate may be right.

Fourth. The basis of the Sunday school curriculum should be confined to the Bible in all except some adult classes. A large proportion of the children will find in the short Sunday school half-hour their chief or their only opportunity of becoming acquainted with the greatest, richest, most life-giving literature in the world, which will open doors to many of the best things in life, that otherwise would be shut forever. For other things necessary to the religious education, other agencies must be found; while at the same time it must be remembered that true Bible study is not like the Nile, which flows two thousand miles through a desert without a tributary, but like the Amazon it drains the whole. continent of literature, history, nature, and life, for light and "point of contact."

Fifth. The Sunday school curriculum must be very flexible, or it will contravene the trend of educational science, and the efforts of educational experts in modifying the systems of our graded schools.

Sixth. The Sunday school curriculum will be most scientific, embody in the fullest degree all the factors involved, and accomplish its best work, by means of three or at most four departments, each of which may be subdivided into as many grades as numbers require and opportunity permits. I. Special short courses for the primary, up to about eight years of

age.

II. For the rest of the school, including all ages (with the exceptions noted below) Scripture selections, in broad sections, from story, biography, history, and literature, with the choicest spiritual masterpieces, in the general order of the Bible.

III. Provision must be made for the study of other parts of the Bible, church history, the great modern crusades of missions, and other subjects, by means of electives for the older classes.

The reasons are:

1. The selections for the main period include the larger part of the Bible, and emphasize those parts which have most points of contact with the children's daily life in home and school.

2. They furnish the most flexible of all curricula.

3. Belonging to literature and life, they are best adapted to the needs of all ages, to the apperception of the younger, and to the intellectual and spiritual depths of the older.

4. The peculiarity of life and literature is that each scholar, old or young, dull or bright, gets out of the same passage exactly as much as he has ability to receive, and the brightest loses nothing, whether he develops three and a half times or one and a half times as rapidly as his duller brother.

5. If the movement through the Bible is repeated two or three times in the course of the school life, very few need fail to gain some general knowledge of the whole Bible. That this principle sets forth the true scientific and pedagogical direction of progress is confirmed by the curricula prepared for the junior scholars by practical experts in childstudy; by the trend of the far-seeing and skillful Dr. Blakeslee in his later curricula; and by the persistent hold on the people and the progressive movement of the International Lesson System.

Those who confound the present International System as a synonym with an unmixed "Uniform Lesson " system for even the youngest, or as giving disconnected lessons without continuity, or as confining the lessons to the verses selected for printing, have simply failed to notice its actual working in the past or its present development.

It is hoped and believed that in addition to what has already been accomplished, electives for special advanced classes, for years in actual use as a part of the system, favored by two successive lesson committees, and unanimously by the Editorial Association, will be formally adopted at Toronto next June. This will permit a somewhat more perfect selection of the general lessons used by the vast majority of all Sunday schools, and their restriction to those Scripture portions adapted to all, without being subjected to the criticism of neglecting any portion