CHAPTER XII. HOW MUCH CHILDREN KNOW, OR "THE POINT OF CONTACT" IN TEACHING. Point of Contact: SUGGESTED READINGS. THE POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. Du Bois. PEDAGOGICAL BIBLE SCHOOL. Hazlett. p. 116. A PRIMER OF TEACHING. Adams. TEACHER TRAINING. Roads. pp. 65-67. THE SEVEN LAWS OF TEACHING. Gregory. p. 67, pp. 50-59-67. Hall. THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. Rel. Ed. THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY. Gordy. pp. 288-293. The Point of Contact in Teaching. Hall, in Principles of This is the title of a delightful little book by Patterson Du Bois. In it he sums up most attractively a galaxy of fundamental points of Philosophy and Psychology, some of which will prove of inestimable assistance to most of us. What is first as cause may be last in discovery to the child. What is truly known must be known by experience. A child knows at first only the concrete. In all teaching, proceed from the Known to the Unknown. Therefore find the Point of Contact, that is, the Point of Interest, the Child's Life-plane, and make it the Point of Departure and Sympathy in all teaching. The great fault in our Sunday School teaching has been that we have not sought the child's penetrable point. We have approached him through adult ideas, upon an adult plane. Truly, we have spoken babytalk to him; but in our baby-talk we have spoken to him truths unsuited to babies. Let us analyze these concise rules a moment: (1) What is first as cause may be last in discovery to the Child. This means that the small child, as we have said be fore, is concrete, does not reason, literally does not think; it means that he does not see Cause and Effect; he does not see how this thing came about; nor does he see why he should not do that thing, nor what it will lead to in effect. In this rule is summed up in a nutshell much of the essential elements of sound teaching. As Du Bois says: "The Creation as recorded in the Bible comes historically before my birth; but logically my knowledge of the sun must begin with the light in my room; my study of the rock strata must begin with the stones in the garden path; of the water, with my morning bath; of the animals, with my pussy or the flies. It is a recognized philosophical principle that what is historically first may be logically last, and what is logically first may be historically last." (2) What is truly known must be known by experience. Du Bois treats the above as follows: "We can appeal to childhood from the general plane or ordinary range of experiences most characteristic of childhood. Says H. Courthope Bowen: 'What interests a child must be immediate and level to his thought. He cannot realize a far-off advantage; or, at any rate, he cannot feel it for long. Young and old, we all experience delight in discovering, or in being helped to see, connections between isolated facts-especially such as we have ourselves picked up.'' Manifestly the plane of experience, the germination of interest, the genesis of study, will be simple rather than complex, concrete rather than abstract. As Lange says: "The numerous concrete, fresh, and strong ideas gained in earliest youth are the best helps to apperception for all subsequent learning." But these germinal ideas have no affiliation with the "regular sequences" of theology; they will not be found in the local, political, or religious issues, or the imagery of Ezekiel, Haggai, Zechariah, Nehemiah, Nahum, Micah, or Habakkuk, or the complex rituals and regulations of the Mosaic era. Supposing the elders of the Jews did build and prosper through the prophesying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of Iddo-what is that to a babe who has no conception of space, time, organized society, or even of our commonest adult conventionalities? How near are the Ten Commandments to the plane of experience of a child who cannot count up to ten nor even above four? Du Bois tells the story of an older sister trying to answer the question of her little brother Robbie "Tell how sidewalks were made." To the high school girl the sidewalks were laid on the ground, so she began to explain the ground and its history first. To the child the ground was hidden under the sidewalks. His first experience with earth was not the underlying ground but the overlaying sidewalks. She had thought to begin with the real beginning of God's work, instead of that which was within the child's plane of experience the point of contact with the world as the child sees it. (3) The child at first knows only the concrete. This has been alluded to frequently before and needs only the merest reference here. It means that we must deal with things, with objects, pictures, those ideas that will cause the formation of mental images, products of the imagination. As we illustrated before, it is not dogs as a class, but his dog; not books in general, but the book; not principles in general, but a person living the principles. (4) In all teaching proceed from the known to the unknown. Some people never start from the known, but proceed from the unknown to the unknown and remain in the unknown all the time. They never get down to earth. Du Bois tells the story of the great kindergartner, Miss Harrison, dealing with a class of mission children, whose point of contact from the known to the unknown was a shoe box brought by one of the lads, which illustrates this idea. Therefore, find the point of contact, that is the Point of Interest, the Child's Life Plane, and make it the Point of Commencement and Sympathy in all teaching. The Plane of Experience. Stop and think for a moment in your teaching just what the Experience of your children has been. Are they city or country children? If city-bred, how much do they actually know of the country, and vice versa? What interests a child must be immediate and level to his thoughts. Imported material will not hold him. Political issues of the Divided Kingdom, Ritual of the Mosaic Law, even the details of the Ten Commandments for a child that cannot count above four, are somewhat above the children's plane of experience (!) We dare not select Holy Scripture, remote from a child's plane of experience, and then suppose that just because it is God's Word, God will work a miracle in order that it may be understood. The child may even have enjoyed memory work that it has not in the remotest degree comprehended, because of the verbal jingle bound up in it. How Much Children Know. Professor Hall, in a sweeping investigation of Boston school children, just after entering school (say from six up), found that 20 per cent. of these did not know that wooden things were made from trees; 47 per cent. never saw a pig; and over 13 per cent. did not know their cheek, forehead, or throat; 80 per cent. did not know what a beehive was; over 90 per cent. did not know their ribs; 81 per cent., their lungs; 80 per cent., their heart, and 70 per cent. their wrist; 21 per cent. did not know the difference between their right and left hands, and 35 per cent. had never been in the country in their lives. Most of them thought many animals were no larger than their pictures. Of 10,000 children in Berlin, on whom tests were made, he says that at the age of beginning school work, 40 per cent. of the boys and 60 per cent. of the girls had not heard of God, and about the same proportion, of Christ; 72 per cent. of boys and 28 per cent. of girls had heard Bible stories; only 53 per cent. of boys and 46 per cent. of girls had learned any prayers or hymns, etc., to a prolonged and detailed table. Dr. K. Lange examined children in the city schools of Paulen and the outlying districts and compared city and country children as follows: Out of 500 city children and 300 country children examined, 18 city and 42 country had seen the sun rise; about 80 per cent. of each had seen a shoemaker at work; 28 per cent. of city and 63 per cent. of country youngsters knew that bread came from grain; and finally only 50 per cent. of city and 49 per cent. of country children had ever been to Church. Still another examination was made in Kansas City, and the comparison then was between white and colored children. In matters relating to the human body, the white race averaged about 15 per cent. less as compared with an average of 70 or 80 per cent. of the Boston children, and the colored averaged about 5 per cent. less in knowledge. In matters of the country, Kansas City children were far behind the Boston ones, showing that even cities may differ. In few cases, if any, were the Kansas City children higher in knowledge. But this ignorance is not confined to small children. Dr. A. A. Butler, in an address before the Sunday School Federation in Boston in 1904, said: "Perhaps, however, someone is saying, 'the tens of thousands who receive the instruction of the private school and the university are better educated than the child of the average family.' Better intellectually? Yes. Better religiously? No, decidedly no. You remember that a few years ago the students of several colleges were examined on the Scripture references in Tennyson's Poems. That examination proved a lamentable ignorance in high places. It proved that 25 per cent. were ignorant of the 'daily manna,' and the 'crown of thorns'; that 33 per cent. had never heard of the 'smitten rock,' of the 'ladder of Jacob'; that 50 per cent. could tell nothing of the 'mark of Cain,' or of Esau, of Ruth, or the Angel of the Tomb; a whole 75 per cent. failed to understand a reference to 'St. Peter's sheet." "From the above statistics it seems not too much also to infer: (1) That there is next to nothing of pedagogic value, the knowledge of which is safe to assume at the outset of school-life,” says Professor Hill, "hence the need of objects and the danger of books and word-cram. Hence many of the best primary teachers in Germany spend from two to four, or even six months in talking of objects and drawing them before any beginning of what we till lately have regarded as primary school work. (2) The best preparation parents can give their children for good school training is to make them acquainted with natural objects, especially with the sights and sounds of the country, and to send them to good and hygienic, as distinct from the most fashionable, kindergartens. (3) Every teacher, on starting with a new class or in a new locality, to make sure that his efforts along some lines are not utterly lost, should undertake to explore carefully, section by section, children's minds with all the tact and ingenuity he can command and acquire, to determine exactly what is already known; and every normal school pupil should undertake work of the same kind as an essential part of his training. (4) The concepts that are most common in the children of a |