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THE EDUCATION REQUIRED FOR SUNDAY SCHOOL

TEACHERS

THE SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHER-TRAINING ACCOMPLISHED BY THE SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION OF THE METHODIST

EPISCOPAL CHURCH

JESSE LYMAN HURLBUT, D.D.

SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH

It was not until after the Civil War that the movement for the training of teachers began to assume importance. A public school principal in Buffalo, Mr. J. E. Gilbert, established in 1865 a monthly paper containing lessons for the training of Sunday school teachers. About the same time, Dr. John H. Vincent began holding normal classes in Chicago; and in the year 1866 he was called from Chicago to New York, to take part in the supervision of the Sunday school work of his own church, and in 1868 he was made secretary of the Sunday School Union. He at once formed a normal committee, and planned courses of study for Sunday school teachers, in the Bible and in the work of teaching. Under his direction, institutes and conventions were held in many places, classes of teachers were established, and a regular course of lessons was instituted, and the first Chautauqua assembly was held in 1874, under the auspices and direction of the Sunday School Union of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

The Chautauqua normal course has been recognized from the beginning as the regular course for the training of teachers under the direction of the Methodist Episcopal Church, although the assembly soon became interdenominational and independent from the office of the Sunday School Union in New York. Circulars of information are sent, written examinations are given, and diplomas are conferred, while at the same time the same course is carried on from the Chautauqua office. The number of those who study the courses directly under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church is not now as great as it was, for the reason that the teacher-training has of late years been taken up by the various state Sunday school associations, with all their complete machinery for organization and local supervision. The aggregate circulation of the books prepared for the Chautauqua normal courses has averaged nearly fifteen thousand every year for at least fifteen years past.

The plan of this course of study is a simple one: To select only the

most important subjects, those that are essential to a knowledge of the Bible and the work of teaching; to prepare studies upon them that can be mastered without great difficulty, with outlines which may be placed upon the blackboard, and thereby appeal to the eye, and to arrange them in such a form as not to require a specialist or a scholar to teach them, for in the necessities of the work the instructors as well as the students in these classes must be "laymen " in every sense of the word. Only two books are assigned to each year; the first to be studied with examination if one is desired; the other to be read.

J. T. MCFARLAND, D.D.

SECRETARY OF THE SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH

As showing the present attempts and plans of the Sunday School Union in directing teacher-training, the following things may be noted:

I. A secretary for the Sunday School Union is appointed in each annual conference, representing it in all of its interests and particularly with a view to fostering Sunday school institutes and other meetings directed to teacher-training.

2. A bureau of special correspondence has been established in the home office, with a special superintendent in charge (Dr. O. S. Baketel), through which the union keeps in communication with the conference secretaries as well as with the pastors and superintendents.

3. The secretary of the Sunday School Union is issuing a booklet for the presiding elders and one also for pastors, in which he gives a list of the most valuable books belonging to the literature of teachertraining, particularly recommending nine books regarded as being of prime importance. The entire list embraces seventy-five books, and is intended to constitute a teachers' library. A strong effort is being made to introduce this library into the Sunday schools as a basis for any thoroughgoing work in the line of teacher-training.

4. In these same booklets is given an extensive list of topics relating to the Sunday school, adapted to use in making up programmes for Sunday school institutes and conventions, references being made, in connection with the topics, to the books of the above-named teachers' library.

5. Following these, a carefully prepared series of round table programmes will be issued, prepared distinctively for use in teachers' meetings of the local Sunday schools, such as the pastor or superintendent may use with the teachers of his school. These, also, will have references to the teachers' library, making it easy to find the best material on the subjects to be discussed. These programs will be

numbered and systematically arranged, beginning at the beginning of Sunday school discussion and carrying the teachers over the whole scope of Sunday school problems. It is felt that if this series of studies is pursued in the Sunday school it will secure excellent educational results.

6. Beyond this an extensive course of advanced Bible study is to be gotten out. Agreement has now been reached with the representatives of the Methodist Episcopal Church South and the Methodist Church of Canada to unite with the Methodist Episcopal Church in this matter. The course will cover three years, including the study of nine text-books and two or three hand-books of reference. One book will be taken each quarter, omitting the summer quarter. The books will be written by the ablest writers who can be secured in the world, without any reference to their denominational connections, and are intended to represent the assured results of the best scholarship of our time. But they will be written with reference to the average laity of the churches. It is intended that this course shall round out the training of teachers by giving them a more thorough knowledge of the Bible, and also that it shall open the way for all adults in the churches to study the Bible in a more connected and systematic way than the current weekly lessons make possible.

THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF THE PEDAGOGICAL TRAINING NECESSARY FOR SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHERS

PROFESSOR J. R. STREET, PH.D.

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY, SYRACUSE, NEW YORK

The immediate problem which religious education must set itself is the correction of the conditions and exigencies that have curtailed its life and rendered unsatisfactory its efforts. The immediate lines along which reform must proceeed are: The creation of a more healthy educational sentiment in the church itself, so that it may foster in every way possible the instructional as well as the propagandic nature of the school; the development of a curriculum or course of study which will be in harmony with educational principles and practices, and which will more adequately meet the demands of the religious nature of the learner, and satisfy the needs of the growing soul; and third, the development of a body of trained workers, who will ever move in harmony with the best principles of educational philosophy. Assuming, then, that the Sabbath school exists for the purpose of discipline as well as evangelization, I shall try to set forth, without lengthy discussion, some of the

things that may and ought to be done along the line of the third of these possible reforms, viz, a more adequate preparation of the teacher.

First, the teacher is not an independent unit of society. He must work in connection with the other social factors, and his problem is to correct the deficiencies of these other educational forces. The two factors with which the teacher of the Bible school must co-operate are the home and the church. He is not a substitute for either, but a co-partner. The three must labor for the same end, or confusion and failure may follow. There are three things that the teacher must know:

First, he must know the Bible or subject of instruction. No man can teach all that he knows, try he ever so hard. Therefore he must know more thoroughly than he can teach. He must know so thoroughly that he must teach. It implies that type of knowledge that awakens the instinctive impulse to tell; that gives birth to the spirit that made St. Paul cry, "Woe is me if I preach not." The teacher's tools are his knowledge, and if these be dull, how can he hope to do efficient work? So the professional training of the teacher must give him this comprehensive and soul-inspiring information and lead to know and appreciate all subject-matter that has direct bearing upon character-production.

The second thing that the teacher must know is the child, the learner. By this is not meant a speaking acquaintance, but a comprehension of human nature and its laws of development. Since the days of Comenius, pedagogy has declared that the child mind shall form the point of departIs there, then, in the religious world a new law entering, whose presence excuses the teacher from studying the nature of the growing boy or girl? Our function is to lift the child to a higher level of life. How can we possibly do so without a knowledge of the needs of the individual child? and how can we determine these needs without a knowledge of the mental and moral content of the child's mind?

The teacher must understand the physical basis of character and the relations existing between mind and body. In the past, we have been disposed to largely neglect the body. It has certainly not been considered the handmaiden of character. To-day, however, we know that character is conditioned upon the way in which we have trained our nervous system to respond to stimuli from without, and to express the higher and nobler dictates of conscience and reason. One may go even further, and declare that our whole emotional life receives its coloring from the body. Temperaments are corporeal rather than mental. Moods are the direct product of physical activities and conditions, while our conduct as an individual and the virtues and vices of life are

contingent upon the relations that obtain between these two sides of our being. The hygiene of the nervous system conditions moral hygiene.

Without a fair conception of the relation of mind and body, one cannot appreciate the conduct of another or become a positive agent in the production of right physical reactions. The mind is constantly exercising dominion over the body, driving it to all sorts of activity, transforming sensations, producing delusions and hallucinations, forcing the special senses to do its bidding, goading the muscles and paralyzing inhibition. Ideo-motor is the plan of human life, and this will explain the restlessness of youth, and the violent outbreaks that come like an avalanche upon a boy or girl. The body, on the other hand, makes mental life possible, or destroys it. Through fatigue, or disease, degeneration, or pathological conditions, it limits or largely obliterates mental action. Only as these facts are known and appreciated can the teacher put himself into sympathetic relations with others.

Again, the teacher should be familiar with the laws of mental life, such as attention, apperception, memory, association of ideas, imagination, interest, will, etc., in order that he may employ these laws in the furtherance of the child's growth. If the mind has a natural way of behaving itself, of getting at truth, then it is very patent that the teacher will do his best work by putting himself into harmony with mind and operating with, not against, psychic laws. It does not lie within the province of this paper to work out all these facts in detail. It seems sufficient to state that the teacher who does not understand the nature of attention, its kinds, and their pedagogic significance, the agencies that tend to secure it, likewise those that destroy, or render it impossible, is very likely to do the things that are antagonistic to the end he desires to accomplish.

Perhaps a word should be spoken in regard to will. We have been so accustomed to think of it as a distinct metaphysical entity, that we find it hard to realize that it is a confederacy built up in the individual life out of the instincts and the instinct feelings, emotions, and desires, and the ideas and ideals of life. The new pyschology has thrown a flood of light upon this complex hierarchy of our being, and I know of no other study in the whole realm of mind that will do so much to put the teacher into a helpful attitude as an intelligent grasp of will, its origin, nature, diseases, and relation to character. I do not see how any one can do the child adequate and intelligent service without such knowledge, for it is the express duty of the parent and teacher to help the child to get a will.

Again, the teacher should understand the nature and the function

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