LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
PRINCETON, N. J.
PRESENTED BY
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Fergusson, Edmund Morris
1864-1934. Church-school admi ni st rat il
Church-School Administration
BY E. MORRIS FERGUSSON, D.D
PILOTING THE SUNDAY SCHOOL. A Message to Super- intendents. Cloth, $1.35.
CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINIS- TRATION. A Manual for Pastor, Superintendent and Director.
Cloth, $1.75.
HOW TO RUN A LITTLE SUN- DAY SCHOOL. A Handbook of Sunday School Management
Cloth, $1.00.
V
vV
A
Church-School Administration
Fell '^i " 'i-^
c-rV>^
By
E. MORRIS ^FERGUSSON, D.D.
Author of "Haw to Run a Little Sunday-SchooV
New York
Chicago
Fleming H. Revell Company
London
AND
Edinburgh
Copyright, 1922, by i
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY i
IVinted in the United Statts of America
New York : 1 58 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. London : 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh : 75 Princes Street
To the memory of
EDMUND {i8gg-ig2d)
whose radiant life exemplified the ideals of religious education
Preface
FOR the practical superintendent, for the pastor and director seeking the best in methods of local religious education, for the student of church-school method, and for the teacher in need of a class text on church-school administration, this book is written. It embodies views, experiences and convictions gathered in thirty-six years of active Sunday-school work, field and local; and it aims withal to represent the latest viewpoints and stand- ards of our rapidly changing church-school situar tion, and to forecast the further changes which now impend.
I have tried not to forget the situation and needs in the little Sunday-school of the rural and frontier fields, whose workers constitute so large and signifi- cant a section of our .Sunday-school army. The principles laid down, and most of the precepts, are for them no less than for the worker in the church school of city size and departmental development. But for the specific study of little-school problems as such, the reader is referred to my earlier book, " How to Run a Little Sunday School."
The treatment starts with a general view of the steps needful in organizing the school for efficiency of operation. It closes with a review of those fea- tures of church-school life which minister to personaJ
7
8 PEEFACB
religion and lead to holiness of character and dedica- tion to Christlike service. Between these chapters the main topics with which the administrator must deal are duly considered and his practical problems discussed.
Most of the chapters open historically. I have nought to show how our present modes of work have grown out of those current in the last generation, and in the times before. I hope thus to enable such of my fellow-workers as still follow the old ways to see the path over into the new and the reasons why the new ways are better. Perhaps, also, some of those whose approach to religious education has been mod- em and academic may be strengthened in sympathy and respect for the conservative wing of our common host, through these glimpses at the progress of each specialty to its present stage of educational develop- ment. If the church-school worker of to-day matches his predecessors in faithfulness and eagerness for the best, he will do well.
I have been greatly helped by the criticisms of my Sunday-school friends who have read the manuscript in some of its earlier forms.
E. M. F.
Auburndale, Mass.
Contents
I. The Church School Organized , 17
1. Why Organize?
2. Organizing the Session
3. Organizing the Pupils
4. Organizing the Teachers
5. Organizing the Officers
6. Organizing Membership Increase
7. Organizing the Course of Study
8. Organizing the Music
9. Organizing the Calendar
10. Organizing the Finances
11. Organizing the School's Relations:
(a) With the Church
(b) Internally
(c) Denominationally
(d) Neighbourhood Assignments
IL The Official Staff . • . 35
1. The Distribution of Jurisdiction
2. Classes of Officers
3. Officers of the Church:
(a) The Pastor
(b) The Director of Religious Edu-
cation
(c) The Superintendent
4. Officers of the Council :
(a) The Chairman {b) The Clerk (c) The Treasurer
5. Officers of Graded Instruction
6. The Executive Staff:
(a) The Associate
(b) The Secretary
(c) The Chorister
(d) The Librarian
7. Assistant Officers
8. The Officer's Pay Assignments
10 CONTENTS
III. Divisions, Departments and Classes 53
1. The Teaching Organization : Early ffis-
tory
2. The One-Lesson-for-All Idea
3. Expanding the One-Room School:
(o) Start at the Beginning
(b) The Five-Class School
(c) The Ten-Class School
4. Groups in the Larger School
5. Departmental Differences
6. The Department Without a Room
7. Features of Departmental Organization:
(a) Children's Division
(b) Young People's Division
(c) Adult Division
8. Grades and Promotions :
(a) Yearly Grading
(b) Departmental Grading
(c) Promotions
9. Class Organization Assignments
IV. The Teaching Staff. ... 76
1. The Ungraded Teacher
2. Departmental Specialization:
(a) Primary Specialization
(b) In the Upper School (f) Consequences
3. Department Principals :
(a) In the Children's Division
(b) In the Upper School
4. Departmental Staffs
5. The Substitute Service:
(a) By Staff Organization
(b) By Understudies
(c) By Pupil-Teachers
(d) Regulations
6. Upper-Grade Teaching:
(a) Exacting Requirement's
(b) Compensating Advantages
(c) The Promotion Problem
(d) Short-Course Senior Classes
7. Wanted, a Vacancy:
(a) Establish the Case (&) Facilitate Acceptance
CONTENTS U
(c) Provide the Succession
(d) Arrange the Alternative & The Teachers' Meeting
Assignments
V. The Course of Study and Expression 97
1. The Problem of Lesson-Choosing;
(o) An Educational Task
(b) Lessons for Adult Convenience
(c) Lessons for Pupils' Needs
(d) Establishing the Dominant
Principle
2. Essentials of a Course of Study:
(a) A Tool for Character-Making
(b) A Course, Not a Field
(c) Features of a School Course
3. A Church-School Study Course:
(a) A Course in Religion
(b) A Course Given Under Diffi-
culties
(c) Correlations
(d) Expectations
4. Lesson Aims :
(a) Logical and Psychologic Aims (6) Aims of the Graded Lessons (c) Administrative Use of the Aim
5. The Course of Expression :
(a) Worship
(b) Expressive Activities
(c) Expressive Conduct
(d) Evangelism
6. Educational Projects
7. Building the Curriculum :
(a) Introduction of Graded Studies
(b) Selection of Course Material
(c) Allowable Teaching Freedom Assignments
VI. The School and the Homes . .124
I. Church Duty to the Home:
(a) Home the Great School o£ Re- ligion (fe) Religion Moved to the Church (c) Origin of the Home Department
12 CONTENTS
j
2. Home Service to the Church School: i
(a) The Self-Sufficient Home ]
(b) The First Step a Call for Serv- |
ice I
(c) A Scale of Home Cooperation '
3. A Home Program of Religious Educa-
tion: I
(a) A Wide Scope
(&) Goals, Not Standards I
4. Agencies for Reaching the Homes : !
(a) The Pastor as Preacher
(b) The Pastor as Visitor
(c) The Cradle Roll \
(d) The Home Department j
(e) The Organized Adult Class
(/) The Parents' Department i
5. Training for Parenthood : ]
(a) A Community Responsibility
(b) A Task for the Church School |
(c) A Field for New Endeavour I
6. The Department of the Home: I
(a) Elements of the Combination j
(b) Organization and Relationships j
(c) Program \ I Assignments
Vli, The Building and Equipment . .144
1. Begin Where You Are j
2. The Power of the Wall «
3. Makeshift Housing: '
(a) The Present Situation
(&) The Way Out ;
4. How to Plan a New Building: !
(a) Emancipation ,'
(b) Inherited Limitations i
(c) The Starting-Point ]
5. General Principles : '
(0) Unity {
(b) Efficiency i
(c) Economy
(d) _ Suggestion "
6. Provision for New Features : j
(a) Community Responsibility ',
(b) Professional Service ]
(c) Week-day Instruction |
(d) Visualization
(e) Play and Recreation
CONTENTS 13 j
7. Realization : 3
(a) Working Out the Ideal
(b) Winning a Verdict
(c) Specifications, Not Plans
(d) Estimates and Adjustments [
8. An Available Building Standard: \
(a) Origin ;
(b) Form 1
(c) Mode of Application ,'
9. A Glimpse of the Vision ' Assignments i
VIII. Training for Leadership Service . 170
1. The Master Task !
2. The Size of the Need :
(a) Vacancies and Losses j
(b) General Progress i
(c) Overtaking the Deficit j
(d) Completing the Course '
(e) A Going School ;
3. Undergraduate Training: ;
(a) From the Beginning '
(b) Junior Training '
(c) Intermediate and Senior Train- ■'.
ing
(d) Entrance Requirements Ful- i
4. The Training Curriculum : ']
(a) The One- Year Manual
(b) A Superseded Type j
(c) The Three -Year Standard j
Course '
(d) Preliminary Courses !
5. Supervised Substitution :
(a) No Premature Interruptions
(b) Lower-Grade Departmental As- !
signments i
(c) In the Upper-Grade Classes
(d) Other Opportunities i
6. The Training Department: ';
(a) Its Scope 1
(b) Its Leader '
(c) Its Members and Methods '
(d) Equipment
7. Training Outside the School : ,]
(a) Headquarters Leadership
U C50NTENTS
(b) The Community Training
School
(c) Summer Schools and Reading
Courses
8. The Workers' Conference
9. The Wider Outlook :
(a) In the School
(b) In the Church
(c) Life Service
(d) Reciprocity Assignments
IX. The Yearly Program . . , 197
1. The Annual Goal:
(a) Not Sessions but Years (6) When Shall the Year Begin? (c) A Goal for Every Work
2. Promotions :
(o) Remaking the Graded Roll
(b) The Policy of No Demotions
(c) Promotion Day Suggestions j
3. Appointments and Installations : <
(a) The Principle ' ^
(b) Method of Application ] (f) Installations
4. The General Officers' Year:
(a) When Shall This Begin?
(b) Elections and Appointments
(c) Installations ;
(d) Annual Reports \
5. The Annual Budget
6. The Festival Calendar: |
(a) Forestall Worry ]
(&) Departmentalize
(c) Use the Young Folks '
(d) Use the Graded Work ,
(e) Make the Music Count '
7. Picnics and Outings
8. The Ordering of Supplies
9. The Workers' Conference Calendar 10. Finding Time for All This:
(a) Fix a Routine
(b) The Seven Hours
(c) A Constructive Program Assignments
CONTENTS 15
X, The School's Religion . , . 226
1. A School of Religion :
(a) Education for Holiness (6) Education for Service (c) Graded Religion
2. Child Religion:
(a) Love and Obedience ' (b) Child- Lessons in Religion
(c) The Administrator's Part (rf) Junior Religion
3. The Religion of Youth :
(a) At the Place of Decision
(£>) Idealism
(c) Service as Religious Expression
4. The Religion of Later Adolescf^nce :
(a) Organization for Educational
Serv'ice
(b) Faith, Fellowship, Dedication
5. Adult Religious Education
6. The Religion of the School :
(a) The School's Need of Religion
(b) Religion as Personal Life
(c) Religion as Relationship
(d) Religion as Service
7. The Service of Worship :
(a) Significance of School Worship
(b) Magnifying the Worship Period
(c) The Reverent Opening of Wor-
ship
8. The Call to Confess Christ
9. Is Ours a Religious School? Assignments
Appendices 249
Bibliography 261
Index 265
THE CHURCH SCHOOL ORGANIZED
1. Why Organize?
Whatever service we may desire our church school to render, it must be organized if the service is to be rendered surely and well.
Poor organization shows in a dependence on the initiative of the leader. He thinks of everything, tells everybody what to do, announces or signals his ©rder for every act and performs most of the acts himself. In contrast, a well organized school has every act and function provided for. The school runs " like a machine," — except that its members are alive, intelligent and enthusiastic in taking the parts as- signed them, and the " machine " has the capacity for growth and self-direction.
Every step toward better organization releases for profitable service some force that previously was con- sumed in the task of running the machine. Of these forces the most valuable is the initiative of the leader. In an unorganized school this is all expended in the maintenance of routine. Such a school is said to be "in the ruts." Better organization releases this power and enables the leader to seek the higher life of the school.
The wise leader, therefore, will constantly study 17
18 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
the workings of his school, both those under his own hand and those already committed to others^ with a view to making every such working, as far as may be, automatic through organization.
2. Organizing the Session.
The first feature, ordinarily, to need organization is the order of service for the Sunday-school session. Steps to that end will be :
(a) Provision of separate assembly rooms, as soon as may be, for each of the departments of the Children's Division, and permission for these depart- ments to plan and hold separate services for the full time of the school's session. (Chapters III and VII.) Extension of this arrangement to any older class that desires to meet separately for all or part of the service time. The responsibility for results in such case should be left with the class.
(b) Division of the whole time into periods, each with its own plan and culmination, like an act in a drama. These will naturally be :
(i) The assembly period, from door-opening to the hour of beginning. The janitor must have a rule as to the opening of the doors and must be made re- sponsible for order until some appointee arrives to whom the leadership shall pass. For the assigned minutes of this period a sequence of steps must be established, leading up to the call to order.
(2) The period of worship, covering the first minutes of the session. (Chapter X.)
(3) The period of desk instruction. (Sec. 9 of this chapter.)
(4) The period of class instruction.
(5) The period of closing. The tendency to-day is to transfer this period to the separate class ses- sions, allowing each class to finish its work and ad-
ORGANIZATION 19
journ with a prayer, whether in its own room or on, the main floor. In some church schools the inter- mediate classes occupy the main floor, all others having separate rooms ; and the closing period is used by the department principal as his platform time. (Chapter III.)
(6) The period of dismissal, ending with the lock- ing of the doors.
(c) Provision of an order for each period of the program, with responsible conductors and partici- pants.
(d) Publication of these orders, by printing, post- ing or drilling from the platform, so that all will know and take their proper parts.
(e) Training of the various assistants to perform their parts in proper sequence, with observance of the time schedule and in a spirit of worship and con- sideration of the end in view. (Chapter II.)
3. Organizing the Pupils.
School children are of many ages and capacities. Each of these has its characteristic needs. While in- dividuals vary widely, it is possible to strike a de- pendable average for the capacity and need of a particular age, and on this average to base a particular method for the instruction and training of the group of pupils who may be assigned to the work of this age. This organizes the continuous nurture of the child into a series of steps or grades. Dividing the pupils thus, in order to the better meeting of their respective needs, is the first step in the grading of a school.
In the school of the home the nurture must remain continuous, expanding steadily with each child's ex- panding powers and needs. It will also be a different
20 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION"
nurture for each individual child. In the school of the community, however, or of the church, grade- grouping is necessary, in order to meet, at all stages of growth, those needs of all the pupils for which the particular school is responsible.
Punctuating the otherwise steady growth of the child's powers from infancy to maturity are certain times of transition from one stage to the next. Some of these, like teeth-cutting and puberty, are physi- ological and fairly constant for humanity generally. Others depend more or less on our social and educa- tional customs. It is manifestly desirable, in the in- terest of a unified education for each child, that the standard educational breaks and transitions of the community system and of the church system shall agree.
With the help of these transition epochs, a series of periods may be established for any school, by means of which all the pupils of any three or four years can be rationally grouped together for mass leadership in worship, instruction and activities. These will then be the departments of that school. The single-year groups within the departments will ordinarily consti- tute the grades. The advantages of a standard basis of grading and departmentalization are obvious. All week-day schools acknowledge the need of this or- ganizing of the pupils. The church schools, with equal need, are now rapidly falling into line.
The standard grades, departments and divisions, as recognized by the InternationJul Sunday-school Asso- ciation and the denominational agencies of religious education, are:
ORGANIZATION 21
Qiildren's Division :
Cradle Roll, birth to three years. Beginners, four and five. Primary, six, seven and eight. Junior, nine, ten and eleven.*
Young People's Division:
Intermediate, twelve, thirteen and fourteen. Senior, fifteen, sixteen and seventeen. Young People, eighteen to twenty-three or twenty- four.
Adult Division:
Adults, from twenty-four up ; including parents' classes and adult members of the Home De- partment.'
Steps to be taken in thus organizing the pupils will be:
(a) Without regard to classes, determine the proper grade of each pupil up to and including seven- teen years, recording this on a graded roll. This should, of course, be done with the cooperation of those who know the pupils well. Consider first age, then public school grade if available, then size, home conditions and other special characteristics of the case. The older the pupil, the greater the probability of error in following age alone.
•* The Junior Department was formerly recognized as consisting of four yearly grades, from nine to twelve. Many church schools are still so organized. The official steps in the transition from the four-year to the three-year basis have not yet all been taken ; nor has final action been taken on the names of the divisions as here given.
* There is also a School Administration Division, including the general officers of the church school.
22 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
(b) By shifts and reorganizations, as opportunity offers, adjust the present class system of the school so that each class shall stand for one or more grades of boys or girls. In a school of 200 members or more, each class can stand for one grade only; but where the school is smaller pupils of two or even three grades may have to be taught in one class. Make transfers by invitation to those to be trans- ferred, from the pupils of the class to which they are to go; the teachers concerned having previously agreed to the arrangement. This smooths the trans- action. Such transfers should happen informally from time to time, until the closest possible harmony between the class system and the grade system has been secured.
(c) Fix the annual day of promotion. This is ordinarily the last Sunday in September, just before the opening of the graded lesson courses on the first Sunday in October.
(d) Advertise the grades in every possible way; thus arousing the pupils' ambition to prove them- selves woidiy of promotion by the faithful doing of this year's assigned work.
(e) Enlist all, especially the older pupils, in sup- port of this system, by showing them that in this way only can the grades be annually renewed and main- tained and each pupil given his fair share of what the school has to offer.
4. Organizing the Teachers.
The separation of the pupils into these grades and departments carries with it a like separation among the teachers, with the need of a principal teacher at the head of each department. Good work also will demand in most of the departments the organizing of a staff of assistants. No single operation in the or-
OEGANIZATION 23
ganizing of a church school does more to relieve the leader of detail than the placing of a department under the care of a competent principal and then dealing with those classes through this principal only.
From the time (about 1820) when the " infant Sunday school " was introduced in America, it has been the rule that the smaller children should be grouped into an " infant class " or " primary depart- ment," with a separate and permanent teacher, who usually handled in one class-group all or most of the ages now comprised in the Children's Division. This permanency of the primary teacher tended to her constant educational growth and gave her a standing above the teachers in the main room; because they moved along from year to year with the natural growth of their classes and so were unable to profit by the increase of teaching material for the use of successive classes or by experience in its use.
The modem church school extends this advantage to all the teachers, by attaching them to one depart- ment, sometimes to one yearly grade, and by provid- ing for the promotion of the pupils, singly or as a class, at the end of each year to the next higher grade, and at the end of each department period to the next higher department. The teacher in the latter case is assigned, ordinarily, to one of the new classes enter- ing from below.
5. Organizing the Officers.
Besides the pupils and the teachers with their prin- cipals, the church school needs certain officers for
24 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
service to the school as a whole. These, with the matters appropriate to their respective trusts, are now by the International standards of classification counted as the Division of School Administration, both in the local school and in the field work pertain- ing thereto.
In a well-organized church school each of these officers (Chapter II) has been assigned his precise responsibility and trained to the efficient performance of it. He has been given in his jurisdiction freedom to do the work in his own way and encouraged to originality and progress. The process of annual elec- tion or appointment has been so established that each officer responsible for the work of an officer below him is free, if he wishes, to nominate one of his own choice for the place; this choice being subject to con- firmation by those who must work with and under such nominee for the year. Such a system of reports, also, has been established that every work is exhibited in detail to those concerned, to be praised or censured as it may be found good or ill.
6. Organizing Membership Increase.
No feature of church-school work is more in need of good organization than the process by which new members are recruited, received, trained and in- spired with the school's ideals; and nowhere in the school is the need of good organization, ordinarily, more completely overlooked. Ten superintendents are concerned with the work of gaining new members for every one who gives a thought to what must be done after the new members enter the school.
OEGAMZATION 26
Instead, therefore, of spending one's whole effort on the launching of an elaborate membership contest, with no further or higher goal than a record of in- creased numbers, it is better to organize thus :
(o) Stimulate regular and punctual attendance, to get more and better work done for and by those already enrolled.
(b) Determine what should be the maximum size of each class and department, in order to make full use of present available resources in teachers, seats and room-space, without loss of efficiency through crowding and interruptions, and without disarranging the proper proportions of the departments and grades. This will show what vacancies there are to be filled by recruiting.
(c) Plan increases in the force of officers and teachers along with increases in the number of pupils. Plan also to train the new official recruits in the duties to which they are to be assigned.
(d) Establish a school register, with a system for receiving, enrolling and assigning each new pupil and for keeping his record up to date. The system should include a fixed procedure for following up irregular pupils and those who have left the school. Make it impossible to enter the school except through proper registry and assignment, and hard to get out except through orderly dismissal to another school.
(e) Build up the fellowship spirit of the school, so that all who ever attend will want to belong; and improve the teaching, so that all who belong will wish to continue receiving such good instruction.
(/) Make the recruiting of new members, where such can be received, part of the school's missionary service, in which all are urged to engage ; and, in ad- dition, conduct from time to time a systematic can- vass.
26 CHUECHSCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
7. Organizing the Course of Study.
The organizing of the pupils into grades, more or less closely represented by the classes, and the teach- ers into department faculties, opens the way for the corresponding organization of the materials of in- struction.
The American Sunday school, in the course of its evolution into the church school of to-day, passed for most of the denominations through a forty-year age (1872-1912) of lesson uniformity, during which time it was the accepted idea that the material for study should be the same for every class and age in the school, that this material should consist of a selected Bible passage some ten or twelve verses long, with a " golden text " and other accessories, and that the adaptation to the needs of the different ages should be secured by a more or less radical process of selection and adapted treatment for each department, age and class.
The long struggle for lesson gradation, in and out of the fellowship of those who stood together in sup- port of this principle, has now brought us to where all, apparently, concede the reasonableness of grading the material as well as the method of the lessons; though a large minority of the Sunday schools still use the uniform lesson supplies. It is hard to see how any one can accept the general principle of this chapter and not agree that the first step in organizing the studies of the school will be to give each depart- ment, and presumably also each yearly grade, its own lessons ; each course being chosen with an eye single to the spiritual and other needs of the pupils using it.
ORGANIZATION 27
and therefore chosen without reference to what other classes with other needs may be studying at the same time. (Chapter V.)
8. Organizing the Music.
Unorganized music in the church school is that which is chosen and given out by random and usually hasty selection, on the theory that we must sing some- thing, that it should always be lively and inspiring, that any playing by the pianist is mere filling-in, and that there is no connection between the educational and spiritual purpose of the school and the music that forms so conspicuous a feature of the sessions. On this theory, of course, any superintendent may be the school's musical leader ; and no organization is called i' for beyond a supply of hymn-books and some pro- vision for starting the tune.
When, however, we consider that religious educa- tion includes the nurture of emotions as well as of ideas, that music is part of the language of emotion, and that character is shaped and decision arrived at, in numberless instances, under the spell of musical influence, we see that apart from the idea-value of the words of our hymns, the emotional value of our church-school singing is an educational force that it is a sin to squander. The words have value chiefly in giving to the tune its intended emotional force; though, of course, they often carry their own message as well.
In organizing the music the leader will provide the school with a hymn-book edited in conformity with the educational conception of worship-music. He
28 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
will seek a chorister and an accompanist who accept this principle and arc competent to interpret the music to be used. He will then plan his programs of worship with a view to the use of every hymn and musical number in leading the school along some pur- posed line of emotional expression. Sometimes this will be lively and enthusiastic; at other times it will be prayerful, penitent, grateful, trustful, or sympa- thetic with the needs or the sorrows of others.
It is not easy to make choices like these, or to find choristers able to interpret and carry out such a pol- icy. But our professional training schools are begin- ning to send forth leaders able to follow the vision and show it to others; and as the courses given in community training schools on the ministry of music in religious education are multiplied, we may hope for an increase in local workers qualified to help the superintendent in the organizing of the music of the church school.
9. Organizing the Calendar.
In the days of uniform lesson procedure each su- perintendent was supplied with a ready-made calen- dar for his weekly and yearly platform work. There was always a " lesson for the day." This calendar also furnished each quarter a lesson on temperance and took note of Christmas, Easter and a few other occasions. Many of the older superintendents feel lost without this well-remembered guidance.
Now, however, with graded lessons in many if not all of the main-room classes, each leader must draft a calendar of his own. He must look ahead, plan for
OEGANIZATION 29
the due observance of such festivals as the school should celebrate and for whatever preparations these will call for, pay reasonable attention to the minor dates and special Sundays, and fill the dates not other- wise covered with topics of his own choosing; thus providing for every Sunday in the school's year an appropriate and helpful lesson for the day. Around this lesson, whether seasonal, churchly, evangelistic, missionary. Biblical or generally didactic, he may group his prayers, reading selection, story, brief talk, and one or two hymns ; thus securing for the school's main assembly that unity of sessional emphasis that was formerly supposed to be given by the uniform Bible lesson. (Chapter IX.)
Back of the public calendar of festivals and Sun- day services will be the manager's calendar of edu- cational enterprises to be undertaken, goals to be at- tained and responsibilities to be taken up and assigned or personally discharged, each in due season. Before the year begins, the executive must work out his projects, discuss them with his fellow-workers and fix plans of cooperation for making each a success. In the superintendent's note-book will then be re- corded the dates when the various steps in prepara- tion for each of these must be taken. The superin- tendent who sets apart some time each week for work on that which lies beyond next Sunday will come somewhere near the attainment of his yearly goal.
10. Organizing the Finances.
Good education costs money ; and it is worth pay- ing for. The easy way to finance a church school is
30 CHUECH SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
to do without any but the cheapest and most meager equipment and coin the interest of those engaged in the work to pay for it. In such a school the bare idea of paying money for a teacher's or a leader's service is regarded with horror as treason to the high principle of voltmtary service on which our Sunday- school traditions have been built. Nearly equal shock is felt if it is proposed to expend any but the merest dole on the attendance of one or more of the teachers at a summer school or other opportunity for intensive training.
A church school cannot afford to run on principles like these. The financial side of its life must be or- ganized as carefully as its lessons. By successive steps, educational and diplomatic, the leader must (a) enlarge its budget, economizing on outgo that is educationally unproductive and increasing outlay on that which will count, (b) convince the church that it cannot afford to let its school remain financially independent, and cause the annual school budget to be added to the general budget of the church, (c) in- terest his force, teachers and pupils, in increasing their regular or special contributions to direct local church support and the church-approved benevolent causes, so that the church officers may feel that their adoption of their own school was a good investment, and (d) set before each class and department and the school as a whole an inspiring set of choices for their giving service, so that the school's giving shall in all its aspects be an educational and a character-building feature of the work.
So organized, the income side of the school's life
OEGANIZATION 31
will prosper. Its outgo side must be organized with equal care. Each department and officer must be ready in season with his detailed estimate of expense for the year soon to begin. With the help of these a finance committee will draw up the annual budget. This fixed, the superintendent will notify each subor- ■dinate of the amount of his credit and how it is to be drawn on. The treasurer will apportion general bills to the accounts to which they should be charged, and from time to time he will report to the workers' council how the accounts stand. A rule for making payments from the treasury will be adopted and lived up to. In reporting for the year to the superintend- ent, each department head will be asked to state how much money was spent by his department during the year, and what the work got for it. If all drafts are made directly on the church treasury, these rudi- mentary rules of sound business practice must be even more carefully observed. -
11. Organizing the School's Relations, (a) With the Church. — No church school can afford to live its life alone. It must be actually, not nominally, a living part of the church it serves. Be- sides the financial connection just described, there must be an educational relationship. The church, through its highest governing authority, must assume responsibility for the school's work, by the appoint- ment of the superintendent or the director of relig- ious education who is to have charge of its adminis- tration for the year, and by a loving and practical interest in its work and needs. The best way for the
32 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
church to discharge this responsibility will be through a small, competent and active committee on educa- tion, constituting a " school board " for the parish.
(b) Internally, the relations of the workers must be established. The teachers having been separated into departments and divisions, they must also, with the officers and heads of the older classes, be united in a school body, the Workers' Council, whose monthly conferences will develop unity, zeal for progress and a sense of responsibility for the welfare of the school as a whole.
(c) Denominationally, the school must be trained in loyalty to the fellowship of school service for which its denominational board, society or agency of religious education stands. It must be led to give first consideration to the standards and programs of its duly constituted leaders in the body to which its church belongs. Whatever quotas or tasks are set before it should be accepted as a challenge and wher- ever possible met or exceeded.
(d) With equal fidelity should the church school acknowledge and discharge its neighbourhood obliga- tions to the fellowship of Christian schools in the township, county or other community unit of which it is a part. Its report should be furnished when called for by the secretary of the county association ; its fair share of the expense of the united work should be promptly met ; and at every convention its delegates should appear. Whether the school be large or small, needy or splendidly equipped, it can- not afford to neglect the gains of this relationship or the duty of rendering this service. By the firm es-
OEGANIZATION 33
tablishment of these local relations we begin that re- building of the undivided religious community with- out which the blessings of an adequate education in religion for American childhood and youth will be forever beyond our reach.
Assignments The numbers refer to the section numbers in the text.
If not yourself a superintendent, take a school of which you know something and answer as to that school, estimating or imagining where you cannot supply the facts.
1. Name a few symptoms of low-grade organ- ization that you have seen in a Sunday school.
2. Outline your school's service as usually con- ducted, giving the time when the periods begin and indicating briefly what is done in each period.
3. Write from memory, in one column, the list of standard grades and ages as here given; and along- side it show how the departments and grades are now arranged in your school.
4. Give reasons why a teacher should stay in the department when the class is promoted to the next department. (If you do not consider this a good rule, give also the reasons against it.)
5. Why, and how far, should an officer be free to work in his own way ?
6. Outline a plan of campaign for an increase of your school's membership, showing, in a few lines, the order of the steps to be taken.
7. In parallel columns, write the advantages of
34 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
uniformity in lesson material and the advantages of material chosen independently for each grade.
8. (i) What hymn-book is used in your school? When was it introduced? How does the supply of good copies compare with the need? (2) Name a few hymns recently sung in the school, from which you feel that a religious benefit was derived. What benefit ?
9. (i) Which festivals does your school observe? How do you observe Christmas? (2) W^hat gains do you notice from the Christmas observances? What costs, in time, attention, feelings and money? (3) Who carry the Christmas responsibility? How and when are they appointed? (4) Write, in a column, the dates of the Sundays for the next calendar quar- ter; and against these see how many appropriate topics you can set as the desk lesson topic in your school for that Sunday.
10. (i) Draw up, from memory and estimation, last year's budget of expense for your school; or sketch a budget covering all real needs for next year. In so doing, classify the expenditures in such a way that the school and the church can both see how far each feature of expense is justified by results. (2) Draft a by-law to govern the treasurer in making payments for school expense. (3) How are your school's expenses covered? (4) Describe your plans for benevolent giving. When and how are gifts made? To what objects? How far have classes and departments a say as to where their gifts shall go?
11. Of the four relationships named, which are well organized in your school ?
II
THE OFFICIAL STAFF
1. The Distribution of Jurisdiction.
The first task before the executive head of a church school is to secure a clear and detailed vision of what his school ought to be. To aid the student in gaining such a vision was the aim of Chapter I. Next in importance is the task of completely distrib- uting his own managerial jurisdiction.
A manager's jurisdiction is like an estate in the hands of an executor. At the outset of the trust it is all his own. By one act after another debts are settled, claims collected, properties liquidated, lega- cies paid and distributions effected, until at last the trust is wound up and the executor discharged. So the superintendent at the outset of his year may properly charge himself with full responsibility. Rapidly, however, he will arrange with one worker after another as to what that worker's special re- sponsibility is to be. When this process has been completed, the entire estate will have been dis- tributed, except that definite round of labour by which he, a worker among workers, shares tlie serv- ice of the cause.
When this task is well performed, not only does the school run smoothly (Chap. I, Sec. i), but every officer and teacher, and every pupil entrusted v'ith
35
36 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
any responsibility, has been given a strong motive for doing his own particular task faithfully and well. This chapter aims to study the official force of the church school with reference to the effective appli- cation of the principle of distributed jurisdiction. The teaching force, while not here excluded, will be more carefully studied in later chapters.
2. Classes of Officers.
No satisfactory entuneration of the officers of the church school can be made while we think of them as a single class over against the pupils and the teachers. Still less is it possible thus to discuss their functions and related responsibilities. Each officer has a work to do which is vitally related to the work of others ; and before we can profitably consider the work we must take account of the relations. The mo- ment we do this, we perceive that there are distinct classes of church-school officers and that we must consider each class in turn.
A classification of the officers needed in the well organized church school, if based on the nature of the relations sustained, will be as follows :
(a) Officers of the church in the church school.
(b) Officers of the board or council of the school.
(c) Officers of graded instruction — the principals of divisions and departments.
(d) The executive staff of the school.
(e) Assistant officers.
Let us follow this classification in our study.
THE OFFICIAL STAFF 87
3. Officers of the Church.
(a) The pastor, as executive head of the church, comes into the church school as ranking officer, with supervisory but not immediate jurisdiction, except as this may be expressly conferred. The fact of his being pastor gives him no specific function, unless it be that mentioned in Section 4, below. His gen- eral function is to oversee the conduct of the church school, advise with its leaders, represent its interests in pulpit and church councils and cooperate as ways open. It is just because this service from the pastor is so greatly needed and when wisely and heartily given counts for so much in the life and progress of the school that it ought not ordinarily to be limited by exclusive attention to the adult class or any other special field of service.
As spiritual leader of the congregation the pastor will from time to time need the use of the platform and other parts of the school mechanism in carrying out his plans for reaching the children and young people with special messages and invitations. These facilities can be thus used so as to strengthen and not diminish their educational value. For all such purposes the pastor's jurisdiction should be loyally conceded and full cooperation given.
(b) Next in rank, as a church officer in the school, will come the director of religious education.
More and more clearly to-day we realize that be- sides the intelligent layman's business training, adapted to the needs of the church-school enterprise, we need for the conduct of a real church school a technically trained educational executive who has
38 CHUBCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
specialized in the teaching of religion. If teachers of religion need training, how much more they who are to train and direct them! Few churches have yet realized this need sufficiently to employ such a worker; but that gives us no warrant for failing to call for the filling of this office as part of the church's task in the upbuilding of a modern church school.
The jurisdiction of the director is derived from the church and extends beyond the Sunday school to all features of church hfe which are or can be made educational. In some situations it may be best for him to take the superintendency for a season, until he has worked out its functions on an educational basis and prepared the office for transfer to one who is ready to administer it in sympathy with his plans. Usually, however, it is better for him to carry only those functions which are strictly educational, leav- ing general administration in the hands of a separate executive. Close and cordial collaboration between the two leaders will of course be essential.
(c) Third in this class will come the superin- tendent.
Whether in conjunction with a professional (in some cases a voluntary) director of education or carrying the whole responsibility alone, the super- intendent of the church school should derive his jurisdiction from the church which has entrusted its school for the year to his leadership. Only so can the church be led to accept its responsibility for the religious education of its children.
Full voice in the acceptance of their leader should be accorded to the board or council of the school,
THE OFFICIAL STAFF 39
after the church authorities have made their nomi- nation. The principles governing this arrangement are discussed under Section 7, below. The pastor, as go-between, can easily guide the two parties* choice to a harmonious outcome; but the formality of annual choice by the church and ratification by the teachers should be maintained.
4. Officers of the Council.
Every church school has or should have some form of legislative organization, by which the of- ficers and teachers — to whom should be added the presidents of the older organized classes — take part in the management of the school's affairs. The stated meeting of this body is now called the work- ers' conference; and the body itself we may call the workers' council. (Chap. VIII, Sec. 9). The of- ficers of this council constitute the second class of officers of the church school.
Three officers are called for by the work of this council. It must have a chairman, a clerk and a treasurer. Provision should also be made for a vice- chairman to fill the chair in the chairman's absence.
(a) The Chairman. — In the rules of one church (the Methodist Episcopal) it is provided that the pastor shall be chairman of the Sunday-school board, corresponding substantially to the workers' council. Quite apart from this prescription, there are good reasons for considering the adoption of this custom. Manager of proceedings at the meeting the superin- tendent certainly must be. But from which point can he do the most effective managing — from the
40 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
chair, or from a seat on the floor? Every pastor is a parliamentarian, famihar with the usage of his de- nominational body. He knows that it is contrary to rule for the chair to speak to a motion. If he should forget this, it can without disrespect be called to his attention. By a careful preparation of the docket, with notifications to participants, the superintendent can hold full control of proceedings; and being on the floor he can with propriety speak on every matter on which he has aught to say. The office of chair- man of the council, moreover, is an excellent school for the pastor, or for the senior deacon or elder who may be honoured with the vice-chairmanship,
(b) The Clerk. — It is usually assumed — surely without much reflection — that the secretary of the Sunday school is also clerk of the council. But if the body is to be educated to a sense of its co- responsibility with the superintendent for the welfare of the school, why should it not elect a clerk of its own ? Such an officer, chosen from its own number, can usually do it better service than can be had from the overworked secretary. He will also be immedi- ately responsible to the body that elected him. His duties will include good minutes, prompt notices of meetings and a well-kept roll.
(c) The Treasurer. — Chief among the council's functions, as the church school is ordinarily run, is the control of school funds. The treasurer of the church school, therefore, will derive his office from the council, in order that he may be fully respon- sible thereto. He will not be an officer of the church, like the superintendent, nor a nominee of the super-
THE OFFICIAL STAFF 41
intendent, like the secretary. He will be an officer of the council ; and he should be elected by that body from among its own number, that when a special meeting is hastily called he may be there.
Being treasurer of a school, where the educational value of the offerings far outweighs their monetary value, the treasurer should so keep his books and make his reports that the gifts of individuals, classes and departments shall have the highest possible edu- cational effect. The added labour of special-object accounting should never daunt him ; for by encourag- ing the support of these special objects we arouse interest, focus endeavour and build character.
The school is also a business. As such, its ac- counts should at all times be lucid, well posted and at hand for light on the financial standing of each department and budget item. Besides making regu- lar public reports of offerings received and for- warded, and official written reports to the council showing classified income and outgo, the treasurer should supply the superintendent with materials for a simplified executive financial record. A financial secretary should gather and record the weekly of- ferings under the treasurer's and the secretary's joint direction.
When the school is placed in charge of an active committee on education, as suggested in Chapter I, Section iia, th^re will be no need of an administra- tive fund separate from the general church treasury. The workers' council, however, under the lead of the educational director, will continue to direct the gath- ering and disposing of the school's benevolent funds;
42 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
and for the handling of these it will need a school treasurer.
5. Officers of Graded Instruction.
The principals or superintendents of instruction in the graded departments of the church school con- stitute the third class of officers. They exercise a dual responsibility, as managers and as head teachers of their departments. In the former capacity they are subordinate to the superintendent, in the latter to the director. They should be elected by the church board, on the nomination of the superintendent, the director and the pastor.
In a large school, or one where complete organi- zation is especially desirable, there is also need for divisional principals, in charge respectively of the children's, the young people's and the adult divisions. Architectural conditions may emphasize this need, the building requiring a separate handling of these larger units of school organization.
The duties of these officers are discussed in Chap- ter III.
6. The Executive Staff.
Dividing with the superintendent the executive re- sponsibility for the administration of the school as a whole are certain officers who with their chief con- stitute the executive staff. These form the fourth class of church-school officers. Like the members of the President's cabinet, they should be nominated by the chief executive and confirmed by his senate,
THE OFFICIAL STAFF 43
the workers' council, according to the principles of Section 7, below.
(a) The Associate. — In all church schools of one hundred members or more, and in smaller schools where possible, the associate superintendent should be a full-time officer and not the regular teacher of a class. He may be of mature years or a young man in training. In either case the superintendent should advise with him frequently on current issues, taking pains actually to associate him with the conduct and life of the school. Special provision for his training through courses of instruction and attendance on con- ventions and summer schools should also be given him.
One by one the duties of the executive office should be given the associate, to be discharged in his own way. In a large school there may be several asso- ciates under such training. These may be assigned from time to time to special offices as their abilities permit. The final test of an associate's grasp of af- fairs will be his ability to draw up a satisfactory docket of business for the monthly workers' confer- ence.
Some of the functions that the associate may per- form are :
(i) Participant in the service of worship and in- struction.
(2) Alternate as platform leader,
(3) Representative on the floor, to welcome visi- tors and late comers and to attend to personal mat- ters while the superintendent opens school on the appointed minute.
44 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
(4) Substitute teacher for older classes.
(5) Manager of the usher and doorkeeper service.
(6) Superintendent of classification of new pupils, where this is not in the hands of the director of edu- cation.
(7) Manager of the substitute service, so far as this is not in the hands of the department principals.
(b) The Secretary. — Next to the superintendent, the secretary is the most conspicuous and the most standardized officer of the church school. Much of his v\^ork, ordinarily, is inherited routine, the educa- tional and administrative reasons for vi^hich he might have trouble in explaining. Yet no officer's effi- ciency and intelligence are more vital to the school's success.
These are the functions v^^hich the secretary and his staff are expected to perform, with the objectives to be striven for in each case :
(i) Keeping of the school's roll and register, rep- resenting its interest in the personality of its mem- bers and accessions.
(2) Keeping of the school's weekly record and the summaries based thereon, thus providing for the measurement of the work and its results.
(3) Gathering of the weekly offerings for record and delivery to the treasurer.
(4) Making of weekly, quarterly and annual re- ports to the school, thus stimulating individual, class, departmental and general improvement.
(5) Making of comparative reports, thus stimulat- ing attendance, membership increase and giving.
(6) Managing the correspondence of the school, including orders for supplies, subscriptions to peri- odicals and statistical reports to denominational and association secretaries.
THE OFFICIAL STAFF 46
(7) Recording of the facts of the school's history, with report of the same on anniversary occasions,
(8) Custodian of records, blank forms and execu- tive supplies.
In a very small school one officer may essay to perform all these functions single-handed. It is ob- viously better, even in such a case, to divide the work with one or more assistants, each with his own specific duties. In larger schools there will be a secretarial staff, including a financial secretary, a biographical or birthday secretary and one or more general assistants. As an auxiliary staff, there will also be a secretary for each department and for each class above the primary classes.
It is the secretary's duty so to organize this staff that all departmental information and offerings shall come promptly to his desk, in shape for rapid han- dling, by a given minute of the session. It is equally his duty so to act that the operations of himself and his staff shall cause no distraction of class attention or interruption of departmental or general worship. His auxiliary staff will, of course, be officers of their respective departments or classes, but under his au- thority as to that part of their work which concerns him. A meeting of these auxiliaries should be called, at which he can explain their duties and secure hearty cooperation.
(c) The Chorister. — The chorister is leader of the ministry of music for the school. His function is not simply to lead the singing, but rather to make the music of the church school an integral part of its
46 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMIOTSTEATIOK
educational plan and its religious appeal. Hence his jurisdiction extends to the departments that meet separately; and while it would of course be unwise for him to interfere in the department principal's de- tails of plan, he should have general plans and sug- gestions for making the singing and hymn-memoriz- ing in these departments a part of the musical work of the school as a whole. Usually his constructive help, especially in preparation for festival work, will be welcome.
The pianist or organist will be the chorister's as- sistant and should therefore be entirely acceptable to him. Without sympathetic and capable accompany- ing no musical program, least of all an educational one, can be successfully carried out. But the pianist, in addition to the work of accompanying, will have direct service to render in the opening and closing selections, which may be made a contribution to the spiritual life of the school and also a vehicle for the advance presentation of melodies to be sung as hymn- tunes on a later Sunday.
Under modern conceptions of church-school wor- ship as part of the pupils' religious education,' all the platform work of the school, including the music, is part of the field of the director of religious educa- tion. He should join with the superintendent in the preparation of worship programs, in the correlation of these with the material of the graded courses and in the utilization of them in the make-up of festival programs. The work of the chorister will therefore
\ See the works of Professor Hartshome, especially Wor- ship in the Sunday School.
THE OFFICIAL STAFF 47
be indirectly under the director's supervision. The chorister's direct responsibility, however, will be to the superintendent as general conductor of the plat- form work.
(d) The Librarian. — While the modern graded church school has outgrown the kind of service that was formerly rendered by the typical Sunday-school librarian with his rapid-working devices for the cir- culation of light religious fiction, it needs good li- brary work more than ever.
The librarian may properly be a former teacher of good education, or a well-informed member of the community. He will strive for the gathering and constant increase of a collection of books needed by the school, and for the wise use of these when so gathered. He will have an efficient system for list- ing, handling and charging these books and for the following up of those that are not returned. He will print or post a catalogue and bulletins of accessions, and will make reports showing the service rendered.
The good church-school library will contain a de- partment of healthy juvenile fiction and missionary adventure for the eagerly reading juniors; historical and otherwise educational fiction, biographies of the heroes of the graded lesson courses, missionary biography, travel and description, social service and Bible information, for the intermediate and senior classes; books of spiritual power for adult readers and thoughtful young people; and the usual officers* and teachers' library of reference works and books on religious education and departmental and administra- tive method.
48 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
In many communities the full service of such a library can be secured from the public library of the community. In such case the librarian may act as chairman of the church-school library committee, and without a plant of his own can render an equally needed service of supervision, suggestion and stimu- lation.
As an educational officer, the librarian may also profitably act as custodian of the stocks of graded lesson material, relieving the secretary of this duty. In uniform lesson days the latter officer could handle the several lines of quarterly and monthly supplies with small thought of their educational content and value ; and the annual order for renewal was a simple matter. But under the conditions of the graded lesson system the making out of the lesson order sheet is a rather technical affair. It is for the director to specify what course each class is to receive; and it will then be the librarian's duty to see that full stocks of these supplies, quarter by quarter, are ready for distribution by the secretarial staff. The salvage thus made possible may amount in a large school to many dollars a year, to say nothing of the educational smoothness of operation thus secured. All teachers' lesson books not purchased by the teachers for per- sonal retention should bear the school's library label and be returned to the shelves at the end of the quarter.
7. Assistant Officers.
Responsibility implies freedom of choice. Every principal officer, therefore, should be free to nomi-
THE OFFICIAL STAFF 49
nate the assistants for whose work he is to be held responsible. But these assistants are to work with the whole church-school force for a year. The force, therefore, should be free to accept or reject the nomination. Efficiency further requires that the fellowship of the service shall not be marred by ill- feeling, such as might be caused by the rejection of a nomination publicly made.
The pastor, therefore, or in his stead some wise leader, should oversee and guide the process of of- ficial selection, so as to avert personal issues and secure, year after year, the most effective official combination that the resources of the community afford. To this end he will constantly exalt the work to be done and the results to be gained, rather than the honours of place and the rights of jurisdiction. The spirit of Christ will insure liberty and progress.
The principles here stated, if accepted as valid, should be embodied in the rules of the church school and given a general application. Application of them to the case of the superintendent has been made in Section 3c, above.
8. The Officer's Pay.
Whether church-school workers should be paid is being seriously discussed in some quarters and will soon be a living issue. But really, no worker of any kind ever works without pay. There can be no ac- tion on the part of a free agent without motivation. Brilliant projects are constantly coming to naught because the advocates have failed to make coopera- tion seem worth while. In industry and commerce,
50 CHTJECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
no less than in the voluntary enterprises of the church, production lags where motive is lacking. The manager pays high wages; but he may not yet have given each of his men an adequate motive for doing his best. Let not the church fall into indus- try's error.
It is clear to-day that money, the standard eco- nomic motive of endeavour, should be applied by the church to many services where the need and our ideals have outgrown the possibilities of marginal service by men and women whose living is gained in other ways. Even so, money cannot be the real mo- tive. Money will simply spell release from the ne- cessity of rendering service elsewhere. There must be spiritual pay for all our workers. For each sepa- rate officer, teacher and pupil, we must ask, What pay, oflfered to this individual, will move him first to accept our task and then to continue earnestly and faithfully to discharge it? He who can solve this riddle as often as it appears will be a great execu- tive.
The superintendent, therefore, must learn the art of challenge. He must know how to put a task to the busy man in such light that the man will want to try it. Then he must see that every cent of pay earned by that man is received by him ; and he must intuitively know in what sort of coin this man should be paid. Fellowship and an introduction to the young folks' set may be what the young student or stranger would prize. Quiet satisfaction in the do- ing of a good work pays some, public recognition others. Let the leader see that every worker gets his
THE OFFICIAL STAFF 61
pay and that he himself does not take too much. God pays with equal justice; and the honest super- intendent rejoices to follow the divine example.
Assignments
1. In what respect, and how, is a superintendent like the executor of an estate ?
2. Name the classes of officers of the church school. How does this classifying of the school officers help us in organizing the school ?
3a. What is the pastor's work as a church-school officer ?
3b. For what is the educational director respon- sible? If in your church there is one who might take this place, how could the church help him or her to learn more as to its duties and standards ?
3c. Why should the superintendent be directly re- sponsible to the church?
4a. "Resolved, that the pastor should be chair- man of the workers' conference." List the argu- ments for and against this proposition.
4b. What are the duties of the clerk of the work- ers' council?
4c. How should the treasurer be chosen ? Whose needs should he study to serve? What constitutes efficient treasury service?
5. What two responsibilities does the depart- ment principal carry ?
6a. What is the situation in your school as to the associate superintendent? Which of the listed functions are or soon will be distributed to him or some other official ?
52 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
6b. (i) In your school, which of the listed secre- tarial functions are now being satisfactorily per- formed? (2) Name one or more improvements needed.
6c. (i) Outline a plan for making the music of your church school more of an educational force for religion. (2) If no capable chorister seems available, what can be done to supply musical leadership ?
6d. Duties and opportunities of the librarian.
7. (i) What assistant officers are now in service in your school? (2) What additional assistants are needed? (3) Draft a by-law to govern the annual election of the officers of the church school.
8. How may the superintendent get officers for the school, keep them from year to year and cause each to give of his best?
m
DIVISIONS, DEPARTMENTS AND CLASSES
1. The Teaching Organization: Early History.
From its beginning under Robert Raikes in 1780 the Sunday school has been organized by classes, each under a teacher. Originally it comprised only pupils old enough to learn to read and not too old to be will- ing to stay with the younger ones; that is, from six to fourteen. Classes for teaching adult illiterates to read the Bible were started in England and Wales about 181 1. The movement for adult and senior Bible classes thus begun was soon carried to Amer- ica, aroused much enthusiasm and was combined with the earlier movement for Sunday schools as originally conceived. Hence the odd name of " The Sunday and Adult School Union" (Philadelphia, 1817), which later became The American Sunday-school Union.
" Infant schools " for children below the reading age were started by experimenters in England before 1820. This new idea was likewise soon brought to America ; and the fashion of having an " infant school " as an adjunct to one's regular Simday school began to gain currency. As progress was made in the establishment of general education, the need of teaching new Sunday-school pupils to read before they could begin to use the Bible grew less; and so
53
54 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTKATION
the distinction between the infant school and the low- est classes of the Sunday school disappeared.
Between 1815 and 1830 the churches of America acquired the habit of maintaining a Sunday school as part of the local church organization. Such a school regularly consisted of the main-school classes, with an infant school below and the so-called Bible classes above ; each of these adjuncts, as we have seen, hav- ing originally been a separate enterprise. The infant school or infant class in the course of years became the primary class, embracing all the children from three to nine, ten or eleven, and sometimes those even older, and taught usually by one teacher, with assist- ants to maintain order as needed. A few progressive workers in the sixties had primary departments or- ganized by classes, with teachers who divided the work of instruction as well as that of management; but the establishment of the doctrine that all the school should study one lesson set back the movement for primary department organization.
2. The One-Lesson-for-AU Idea.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth it was the gen- erally accepted idea among Sunday-school workers in America that all classes in the Sunday school should study the same Bible lesson, each teacher adapting the treatment to the age and needs of his class. With the adoption in 1872 of a common Bible passage and specifications, to be used by all lesson publishers as the basis of their several treatments, the idea was extended to include uniformity among
DEPABTMENTS AND CLASSES 66
all Sunday schools on the same Sunday, as well as among all classes in the same school on that Sun- day. Around this idea of " the lesson for the day/* which all classes in all schools were to study, grew up during this long period a series of institutions of which it was the central and determinative factor. Among these institutions may be enumerated :
(o) The superintendent's review of the lesson from the desk, as an indispensable part of the closing
service.
(b) The presence of the primary class and the Bible classes in the main room for the opening serv- ice, that they might join in the responsive reading of the lesson for the day ; and also for the closing serv- ice, that they might have their lesson teachings uni- fied by hearing the superintendent's desk review.
(c) The weekly teachers' meeting or preparation class, for study of the next Sunday's lesson; with union classes where teachers from all departments of many schools might gain the benefit of lesson preparation under some celebrated leader.
(d) The weekly expository article on the current lesson in the religious and the secular press.
(e) The various systems of daily home Bible read- ings on the lessons, for individual or family use.
(/) The " Akron plan " of Sunday-school build- ing, allowing all departmental and class rooms, how- ever separable for part of the hour, to be thrown together, with every seat in view of the desk.
(g) The home department plan of enrolling home students of the Sunday-school lesson.
(h) The simple drill-book type of teacher-train- ing manual, to introduce the student to the work of adapting and teaching the uniform-lesson passage to a class of any age.
66 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
(i) The annual volume of lesson expositions for all teachers.
The foundation of this idea of one lesson for all was laid before the sympathetic study of childhood had revealed how widely and fundamentally the spiritual needs of one age differ from those of an- other. The methods of secular education as then generally followed were far behind the standards of to-day. The ideal of unity was understood by American Sunday-school leaders and followed un- flinchingly; the ideal of adaptation to observed need was known and followed by a few. So firm was the organization in support of unity, so strong were — and still are — the interests arrayed on its side, and so loyal was the fellowship of American, Canadian and British Sunday-school workers, that for long years the steadily rising advocacy of adapted (and therefore non-uniform) lessons made little headway.
The forces of the church school must understand this historical situation in order that they may be able to work together in sympathy and achieve united progress. The more fully a worker of to-day is committed to the modern program of gradation, the more carefully should he study the phenomena of that period of uniformity through which so many of his fellow-workers have come, and in which thou- sands of American Sunday schools still dwell.
3. Expanding the One-Room School.
(a) Start at the Beginning. — In studying the de- partmental organization of the church school, we may begin with the school of average city size, num-
DEPAETMENTS AND CLASSES 57
bering at least 150, with several rooms in addition to its main assembly room. Such a school is al- ready more or less divided departmentally. Our problem in such case is to bring the work into con- formity with the standards of departmental organi- zation as already given/
But the majority of American Sunday schools are not of this type. The average Sunday school in the United States, according to the statistics of 1918,* has but 121 members; while in seventeen states the average membership is less than a hundred. At least half the Sunday schools of North America are small schools, whose housing is a church or school- house of but one room. This hard condition must temper our dogmatic idealism as to the minimum essentials of graded efficiency, if our studies are to have practical value to a large section of the Ameri- can church-school constituency.
There is gain indeed for all workers in a progres- sive study of the problem of right departmental or- ganization. Beginning where the little Sunday school is forced to begin, with fifty members or even fewer in a single room, we may consider how the succes- sive departments should properly be formed, organ- ized and housed, as the school grows to the size with which we are especially concerned. So shall we test the soundness of our principles and the worth of our customs. Many so-called modem methods of or- ganization are merely devices for handling the crowd.
* Chapter I, Sec. 3.
* Report of the Fifteenth International Convention, statistical insert.
58 CHUKCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
(b) The Five-Class School. — A Sunday school of fifty members — we will not call it a church school until it has justified by its good work the more mod- em title — will probably have five classes. There will be the primary class for the children of eight and under, the junior class for those from nine to about twelve, the senior class for the older boys and girls from thirteen to sixteen or seventeen, the young peo- ple's class from about seventeen to about twenty- three or twenty-four, and the adult class of men and women. Seldom will these groups be well balanced in numbers; one neighbourhood will be singularly short of this age or sex, another of that. But these are the natural dividing lines for classes that are to represent in the small school the work of the de- partments of many classes in the large school. When for each of these classes we have found a permanent teacher for the ages represented and have adopted a system for promoting the pupils and re- taining the teachers, we have departmentalized our little school.
(c) The Ten-Class School. — With a growth to one hundred members there may be ten classes. These will properly be a beginners' class of children under six, a primary class of those from six to eight, a first junior class of boys and girls of nine and ten, a second junior class of boys and another of girls of eleven and twelve, a senior class of boys from thirteen to seventeen, a like class of girls, a young people's class, an adult class for men and an adult class for women. These age-limits will of course vary in different schools and may vary in the same
DEPABTMENTS AND CLASSES 59
school in different years; but the aim should be to restore them by transfers and promotions so as to keep each class as far as possible a permanent in- stitution, until the growth of the school calls for a closer structure/
In this school the three junior classes will consti- tute the junior department and should as soon as possible have a principal with no duty but to pro- mote the work of the department ; whether or not it is possible to give the department a separate room. The primary class will of course have been given its separate room at an earlier stage, and the beginners' class likewise; or at least the separation of a screened or curtained corner.
4. Groups in the Larger School.
Let us suppose that the growth in numbers con- tinues. The primary class, which usually grows faster than the older departments, will soon split into three year-groups of six, seven and eight years old, with boys and girls in each year-graded class. For these classes teachers will be found, the primary teacher becoming principal of the department. The older classes will likewise be split on age-lines as new teachers become available; and wherever pos- sible above the primary department there will be for each year a class of boys and one of girls.
Between the junior and the senior classes will de-
' See the author's " How to Run a Little Sunday School," pp. 49-53- It is of course possible, and in some cases may be advisable, to arrange the groups in a different way.
60 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
velop the intermediate department, in which will be grouped the classes formed to cover the ages from twelve to fourteen.'
The young people's class will naturally tend to divide on sex lines ; young men's and young women's classes being the customary thing where numbers make them possible. A sounder plan educationally will be to keep the young people together in one or more active classes dividing on age lines; the young people's department further developing
' The history of these names and ages is peculiar. When, about 1890, the pioneer graded workers were developing a department between the primary class and the main school, some called the pupils thus separated " intermediates," while others preferred to call them " juniors " ; all above these, to the adults, being seniors. This ambiguity became serious when the lesson publishers began to multiply graded lesson quarterlies on the uniform lessons. One house issued quarterlies for intermediate classes, meaning those from nine to twelve or thirteen, for junior classes, meaning those from thirteen to sixteen or seventeen, and for seniors, meaning those of eighteen and over. Other publishers used the names "junior" and "intermediate" in the opposite order. When the users of these helps met in county conventions, primary unions and summer schools, constant explanation was neces- sary as to what ages were meant. In 1904 the Committee on Education of the International Sunday-school Association arbitrated the matter. After ascertaining the extent of the divergent usages they drew up a standard set of names and ages : beginners 3-5, primary 6-8, junior 9-12, intermediate 13-16, senior 17-20, adult 21 up. This grouping was fixed with almost no experience to go by as to the best age-group- ings for the upper grades. It was nevertheless followed by the Lesson Committee and their advisers, 1909-1916, in grouping and naming the graded lesson courses. In 1917 the Sunday-school Council utilized the experience of later workers in establishing the present standard of names and ages, given on p. 21. Many schools, however, continue to use the older grouping, and many able junior workers op- pose the transfer of twelve-year-olds to the intermediate departxaeat.
DEPAETMENT8 AND CLASSES 61
through the organizing of a training class and other special classes for the study of special courses. The correlation of such a department with the young people's society of the church will naturally follow.
The adult division, begun by the separation of the men's and women's classes, will continue to grow by simple increase of these classes in numbers, until it becomes possible to form classes of parents on the lines of their children's ages. The home department when formed will constitute a part of this division, and should be closely affiliated with each of the main adult classes. In a large school there should be several classes of men and several of women, formed to represent younger, middle and older life- interests, problems and tastes ; each class being large enough to make a good social group and maintain a working organization.
5. Departmental Differences.
No two of the standard departments can be or- ganized in exactly the same way. Experience with one age-group is not a safe guide in work with any other group, older or younger. Each department must be run on laws of its own, based on a close, continuous and sympathetic study of the pupils con- cerned, of their teachers working with them under church-school conditions and of the reactions se- cured to the studies and methods so far used. The latest official standards may be presumed to be based on such study. If we find that they do not fit our children, we may properly deviate from them. But our customs and habits, our convenience, our ex-
62 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
perience with older pupils or with younger, — these are not good reasons for such deviation.
The standard plans of departmental management for the beginners', primary and junior departments imply for each department a separate assembly room, with provision of separate classrooms or at least curtained spaces for the primary and junior classes; each class having its table and circle of movable chairs of size to fit the bodies of the chil- dren concerned. With the advent of well-trained teachers, classes will naturally increase in size; and a modern school classroom, at least for each junior class, will become the standard plan of housing.' Each of these departments needs a principal trained in modem methods of children's church-school work, able to teach, lead and manage her department and to inspire and train her departmental fellow-workers.
Important divergences in method are called for by the rapid changes which mark the oncoming and development of adolescence. The one sure fact about any group of intermediates is that they are not to be handled in the junior way. The dividing line comes somewhere about the twelfth year. Over that line, with rare exceptions, no teacher should pass. Only so can the junior faculty and the intermediate faculty be separately built, each on a foundation of increas- ing experience with pupils of its own assigned ages. Laxity here means the virtual abandonment of the ideal of a well-graded school ; while firmness at the outset will make later insistence relatively easy.
Adolescence demands not only new lessons and a * Chapter VII, Sees. 6b, c, g.
DEPAETMENTS AND CLASSES 63
new method in teaching but a new principle of de- partmental organization. Control must now come more and more from the pupils and less and less from the school. To make room for this we must learn to think of the adult leaders of these depart- ments not as superintendents or principals in author- ity but as counselors or coaches, guiding and inspir- ing the boy and girl leaders and ever seeking not to check and limit but rather to develop initiative and enterprise, while holding up standards and encourag- ing to patience and a steady pursuit of the year's goal. By this radical shift we meet half-way the eager desire to be trusted with responsibility, make our church school a school of democracy, hold the older pupils with a new set of interests and ease the superintendent's load.*
In the adult division the control is entirely with the representatives of the adult members of the or- ganizations concerned. The teachers are included as equal factors in the administrative organization with the class presidents and other convenient rep- resentatives of the adult force. An adult council, with the usual officers, will unify and direct the work of the division; while an adult principal, if needed, may carry out the educational plans of the director of religious education.
6. The Department Without a Room. Thousands of church schools still lack even a
*In Appendix A is given the illuminating deliverance of the Sunday-school Council of Evangelical Denominations, 1917, as to a policy to be followed in developing thf church- school work of the young people's division.
64 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
separate junior assembly room, to say nothing of classrooms. Other thousands have only a makeshift arrangement for separating the beginners from the primary children. A vast number have no separate room at all. What can these schools do to gain the benefits of departmental organization?
Where one class covers the age-limits of a stand- ard department, as in the five-class school, the class is the department and its teacher is the department principal. Where there are two classes, one of the teachers may be appointed principal. With three or more classes in the departmental age-group, there is room for a principal in addition to the class teachers ; and the classes concerned may be grouped in a desig- nated space on the main-room floor.
No separate service of v^^orship will be possible in such a department, nor any drill in recitation and song. Brief notices may be given, by arrangement with the school superintendent, or slips handed to the teachers as they enter. Conferences with the teachers and drills with the classes may be held be- fore or after the school hour. The principal will keep the graded roll of the department and will watch the progress of each pupil quarter by quarter. A department which thus shows its need of a sepa- rate room and its will to overcome obstacles is on its way to getting the desired separation.
7. Features of Departmental Organization.
(a) Children's Division. — The cradle roll depart- ment belongs to the children's division as to all work done for the babies and their mothers in the school-
DEPAETMENTS AND CLASSES 65
irooms and by the division workers as such. The visitation of the mothers in their homes, with any >vork done for the babies directly there, properly comes under the jurisdiction of the home depart- ment and so is responsible to the leadership of the adult division ; but it may be left with the children's workers if they are best fitted or situated to do it well.
A " cradle-roll class " of three-year-olds, assem- bled in the beginners' room during the hour of morn- ing worship, or in a separate room at school time, is becoming a standard feature of well-graded church- school work. Providing for these very little children enables their mothers to attend service or join a mothers' class, while it relieves the beginners' teacher of many embarrassments. The children are amused and taught with simple plays and nursery conversa- tions based on lessons from pictures on blocks.
The beginners' department will seek the spirit of the nursery, the kindergarten and the home rather than that of the school. It will have a principal, a pianist and one or more assistants according to size. The pupils are properly grouped as four-year-olds and five-year-olds, or all ages together, for the open- ing " circle talk " and for the main lesson story. The graded course of story lessons, two years long, is usually taught to the whole department at once. At this age so little depends on logic and so much on atmosphere that the gain of departmental unity far outweighs any advantage to be secured by exact gradation of studies. Little memorizing is done ex- cept of short and simple texts like "Be ye kind,"
66 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
following one or more stories illustrating kindness, and of equally simple childhood hymns.
The primary department, like the beginners', takes no note of sex; the children being graded as six, seven and eight at their last birthday, with excep- tions as needed, and placed in classes, each of which should contain children of one grade only. Like the beginners' department, also, this department needs a principal with a staff of assistants; and it should also have a teacher for each class."
The junior department, being preeminently the de- partment of lesson study and habit formation, needs schoolroom housing and equipment, a well-trained principal with assistants, and a corps of teachers trained for junior work and kept to their task by regular transfers to younger classes as their pupils reach the promotion line. The department has a
* Here we meet the question whether the lessons for the department shall be taught separately to each grade, the three yearly courses being given simultaneously every year, or whether one lesson shall be taught to all three grades at once in a three-year cycle — the departmental plan. The les- son story, we must remember, properly takes, with its accom- panying treatment, less than half of the hour ; the remainder by either method being in the principal's hands. On the closely graded plan we need at least one teacher for each grade. On the departmental plan such teachers are still desirable; but all the work might be done by the principal, as in the old-fashioned primary class. In the small school the departmental plan fits the situation; though the closely graded supplies may be and often are successfully adapted to small-school use. In the larger school the departmental supplies are available if we prefer to work that way; but the closely graded method enables us to offer each year to each set of incoming six-year-olds the same three-year course in Its natural order. The problem should be settled by each school on its educational merits and in the light of its own needs, and the supplies ordered accordingly.
DEPAETMENTS AND CLASSES 67
work to do for these pre-adolescents that if well done will make later teaching and management far easier and if ill done or neglected can never be re- placed. The principal's desk work is of equal im- portance with the lesson work of the class teachers. One full hour a week is an altogether inadequate time- allowance for the religious instruction which children of these ages require. Not one minute of this time should be lost or reduced in teaching value by the needless presence of the department in the main room when it could be at work in its own assembly. Once a quarter is often enough for such a partici- pation, until we can transfer some of the junior les- sons to the week-day religious school.
(b) Young People's Division. — The rapid develop- ment of personal feeling as we cross the line of adolescence calls, as we have seen, for radical changes in our modes of treatment. The dropping out of the older pupils, so constant a factor in old- fashioned Sunday-school work, is simply the young folks' response to the way we meet the facts of their individual and social life. When the school work fits these facts, the big boys stay as cheerfully as the little ones.
This development of personal feeling leads to a heightened social feeling and accompanies an in- crease in the power of voluntary attention. The class group becomes a more important factor in our organization. The recitation period calls for more minutes of the school hour. Ambition for leader- ship and responsibility grows. For a few years there is a tendency to secretiveness : the pupil wants sym-
68 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
pathy with his problems and trials and light on the solution of them; but he is averse to questions or situations that call for self-revelation or draw public attention. People may notice him when he is put- ting through some successful feat : at other times he shuns pubUcity. A deep religious concern may mask itself back of a most discouraging appearance of in- difference, cynicism or rebellion.
Administratively, our answer to these facts will come first of all in a larger emphasis on class life. We will train and furnish to each class a wise and competent teacher, usually but not necessarily of the same sex. We will give each class wherever possible its own room, lengthen the period of class instruc- tion, allow some freedom as to lesson courses and more as to methods of following the course, encour- age selection of special objects of giving and service and provide for class organization as a means to ef- fective class activity.
For the management of the intermediate and senior departments, separately or together as condi- tions may determine, we will look to a council of class presidents, with the departmental or divisional counselor as adult guide and the pastor and super- intendent as privileged but not controlling ex-officio members. Teachers will assist in the departmental administration according to their capacity for ren- dering service. One may prove a good leader for girls* activities, another for those of the boys. One may lead in the dramatic or the musical activities of the departments, while another assists in the les- son handwork and a third keeps track of the memr
DEPAETMENTS AND CLASSES 69
orizing assignments in the several grades. There may be a missionary specialist and a leader in tem- perance activities. Frequently it will be better for one or more of these specialties to be in the hands of a supervisor for the department or the division of the school, with no class responsibility. The coun- selor will necessarily exercise headship over the adult functions thus provided for; but toward the pupils and the classes service, advice and coopera- tion will be the attitude rather than authority and' control. Increase in the pupils' capacity for respon- sibility and power to get results will be one measure of success for this division.
In the young people's department proper, eighteen to twenty- four, we meet the desire and the capacity for the sexes to work and play together ; and a mixed class for general Bible study may be our answer, with no distinction of sex in the training class and other special groups. We find also a keen sense of need for preparation for the coming responsibilities of life and a capacity for handling some adult trusts in church and community. A fit answer to these characteristics would be some plan by which the full responsibility for administering all the church's work for its young people of these and adjacent ages was turned over to its young people; the needed adult service to be supplied as the young people them- selves might seek it.
(c) Adult Division. — Childhood and youth being the formative periods for character and personal re- ligion, our school work for the adults must consider first of all their relation to our program for these
70 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMIKTSTEATION
earlier ages. Secondarily, it will cover the needs and possibilities of adult education for the sake of the men and women themselves and the various pieces of world-work they are doing. A third aim is found in the advances to be secured through adult educa- tion in the methods and standards of church, com- munity and civic life.
Full freedom for each class and department in this division is of course implied; all management being by way of advice, suggestion and invitation. A rep- resentative adult council, including the superin- tendent and the pastor, will be the natural organ of leadership; though a superintendent of adult in- struction and activities may be found useful, as the council's executive officer.
Permission for each adult class to meet in its own room for the entire hour should be cheerfully given. There are other and better ways of conserv- ing school unity than by demanding participation by all in a common weekly service of worship. If any class, however, wishes to be so included, it should be made welcome.
8. Grades and Promotions.
(a) Yearly Grading. — A grade (Latin, gradus, a step) is a period in the school life of a pupil, and in the collective life of the pupil-body. It implies standard age-limits, a set of studies and activities adapted to age and capacity, and promotion when the graded period is complete. This period, for the church school, is ordinarily one year, as in the public
DEPAETMENTS AND CLASSES 71
school; though the departmental method extends it to three years.
Whether the school niimber twenty or five hun- dred, it is equally desirable that each pupil of grow- ing years shall be rated as to the year of his graded standing in the school plan. In the large school there will be at least one class of boys and one of girls for each year. Where limits of number make the full set of classes impossible, one class may represent two or three grades ; but careful note should be kept of the grades thus combined. In the little school one class may hold all the boys and girls of junior age. Such a school will naturally grade on the three-year plan.
In the fully graded church school there is for each yearly grade a distinct lesson course, taught every year to the pupils who occupy that grade that year. Every pupil gets the full curriculum as planned for the pupils of his age ; and he gets it in the designed logical order. In thousands of American schools this system is at work and smoothly running.
(b) Departmaital Grading. — In the small school, and in the larger school where a simpler mechanism seems called for, it is possible under the three-year departmental classification to grade departmentally, three years at a time. The primary department will then be one grade three years long, the junior one, and so on. Qasses with this range of ages may then be formed from the primary department and moved unbroken up the graded scale, changing teachers every three years and getting a closely graded cur- riculum in its logical order. Or, we may promote
72 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
pupils each year, singly in a small school, by classes in a large one. The pupils will then get the three years of each departmental course in three different orders, this year's class i, 2, 3, next year's 2, 3, i, and that of the year after 3, i, 2.
By the whole-class departmental plan one-third of the pupils are liable to be a year younger than the central year of the grade and one-third a year older. This maladjustment will continue as to these pupils to the end of their stay in the school. By the an- nual-promotion departmental plan two-thirds of the pupils, as we have seen, will get their studies in an illogical order. The small school must accept one or the other of these alternatives, making up for the disadvantage by closer work with the individual pupils. The large school which for convenience or some other reason prefers to work departmentally should consider what its children under this plan will necessarily lose.
(c) Promotions. — Under any plan of departmental organization separations must necessarily take place between pupils and teacher. These being usually painful, the graded administration must at this point prepare for trouble. This, however, is not hard to do. When we rouse the pupil's ambition to go on to the next higher grade we have forestalled half the trouble. When we interest the teacher in the con- structive problems of his department and make him a member of a faculty of specialists we have met the other half. A bright, impressive Promotion Day service, with welcomes by each set of pupils to those coming up from the department below, will then
DEPAETMENTS AND CLASSES 73
carry us over the dead center and make the once dreaded separations a means of educational enthu- siasm.
9. Class Organization. •
The law of education through voluntary self-ac- tivity and the law of social education through group activities unite to call for class organization as a means to class activity. Each class, from the juniors up, should be challenged to be more than a mere group of learners around a teacher. They can and they should be a force, first for themselves and their teacher, then for their fellows of like age and sex in the commimity, then for the department and the school, then for the church and the neighbourhood and then for the world.
In order to be able to act together the class must have officers ; and to emphasize their unity of pur- pose they must have a name. To facilitate inter- school cooperation and to encourage maintenance of established standards, the adolescent classes may properly be registered at denominational or associa- tion headquarters. But emphasis should be placed on the vitality of the organization and its relation to the work to be done, rather than on its official regularity.
Adult classes have a definite standard of organi- zation, first formulated and promoted by the Inter- national Sunday-school Association, which requires five officers, including the teacher, and three commit- tees, as a prerequisite of official recognition by head- quarters authority. It is further provided that the committees in their work must cover membership.
74 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
social, devotional and missionary activities. For the classes of the young people's division no set form of organization is demanded ; but a president and secre- tary are clearly necessary, and a treasurer usually so. Definite duties for each office should be prescribed. Committees as a rule should be for specific tasks and may be discharged when these are accomplished.
In the junior department the classes may also have a very simple organization, to facilitate de- partmental and school work and train for the class activities of the intermediate department.
Assignments
1. (l) What ages were embraced in the original Sunday schools, and why? (2) Describe the intro- duction of adult and infant schools. (3) Describe the old-fashioned primary department.
2. (i) For what period did the doctrine prevail that all the school should study the same lesson? (2) How came all schools to study the same lesson together? (3) Mention a few institutions that grew up around the idea of lesson uniformity.
3. Why consider the special needs of the little Sunday school?
3a. Give a plan for a five-class Sunday school, with name and age-limits for each class.
3b. Expand this to fit a ten-class school.
4. How would you organize the departments in a church school of 250 members ?
5. ^ (i) A junior worker is to be principal of the new intermediate department. Caution him as to his junior experience, giving reasons, and direct him to the proper sources for his plans of organization and
DEPAETMENTS AND CLASSES 75
management. (2) A last-year junior teacher is sure that her dear boys require her continued service for one year longer; so she insists on being promoted with the class. Show her why you cannot grant the request. (3) Why should the principal of an adoles- cent department consider himself as first of all a counselor ?
6. Without a separate room, what can a junior superintendent do?
7. Selecting any two of the departments, give the salient features of the grading, leadership and han- dling of those departments.
7c. Aims of the teaching in the adult division.
8a. (i) What is a grade in a church school? (2) How would you keep track of the pupils' graded standing ?
8b. (i) When is departmental grading a neces- sity? (2) What two plans of handling promotions are possible in a school departmentally graded? (3) What are the educational advantages of grading by years rather than by three-year periods? (4) In a school where grading by years is possible, how are the children benefited by departmental grading?
8c. How may we forestall the reluctance of classes and teachers to separate when promotions make this necessary ?
9. ( I ) Give, in proper order, the steps to take in organizing a class in the young people's division. (2) What are the standard requirements for head- quarters recognition of an organized adult class?
IV
THE TEACHING STAFF
1. The Ungraded Teacher.
In the Sunday-school Hterature of the nineteenth century we find constantly held up the concept of " the Sunday-school teacher," his qualifications and duties, his proper methods of study and teaching, the rewards of his labour, without reference to any grade or age for which his teaching is to be utilized. In the Rev, John Todd's admirable treatise on " The Sabbath-school Teacher," for instance (1837), there is one chapter on " Infant Sabbath Schools," and the methods appropriate to that desirable but then by no means common adjunct to the Sunday school proper; and for the rest there is no hint that one teacher has any task different from that of any other. In Dr. H. Clay Trumbull's " Teaching and Teachers," (1884), which for years was the standard treatment of the subject, neither the primary teacher nor any other graded worker is once mentioned. The in- fluence of the uniform lesson idea is evident, in thus obliterating, so late as 1884, all distinctions of func- tion in the general task of teaching a class in the Sunday school.
2. Departmental Specialization.
(a) Primary Specialisation. — From the early days, nevertheless, the infant or primary teacher has held
76
THE TEACHING STAFF 77
her own as a specialist among the Sunday-school teachers. While the others were usually traveling with their unpromoted pupils over the whole floor of the " main room," — educational nomads — she, in her separate room, was constantly receiving the very lit- tle children and more or less regularly promoting those who had outgrown her instruction and the fel- lowship and discipline of her class. By force of these conditions, therefore, she was a graded teacher.
What followed? Just what follows when a tribe of nomads attains the agricultural stage of civiliza- tion. The primary teacher, working for the same ages year after year, amassed educational property and became the expert among her fellows. Amid a host of tutors, each interested solely in the problem of how to teach to his own group of permanent charges next Sunday's lesson, she alone was a teacher, interested in the broader task of wisely teaching all children of a certain age and eager for help on this her specialty. Hence the primary unions (1870 and later); the National Primary Union (1884), with its monthly bulletins for primary teach- ers ; the development of primary leaders ; the " Sum- mer School of Primary Methods" (1894); the tendency, shown at least as early as 1869, to give these workers the privilege of one or more special sessions at the National or International Convention. " To him that hath shall be given."
Before 1890 a few American workers were ex- perimenting with the " junior class " midway be- tween the primary department and the main room. By 1900 both the junior department and the begin-
78 CHTJECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
ners* department were recognized as standard units of gradation ; and fellowships were forming of per- manent workers in these departments.
(b) In the Upper School. — Slowly the principle of specialization was extended to the teachers of the intermediate and senior classes. Among these teach- ers it is still far from acceptance in the average Sunday school. But the number of upper-grade teachers who, singly or through the organizing of departments, have accepted a graded relation to a limited age rather than to a permanent group of pupils is steadily growing; and with it is growing the power and permanence of church-school educa- tion for the ages concerned.
To-day we seldom hear of " the Sunday-school teacher," except in reference to the department in which he specializes. The modern church school, by relating every teacher to his department through in- sistence on the annual promotion of pupils, secures for all its teachers those educational benefits formerly gained by the primary teachers alone. Whenever a teacher for personal reasons is allowed to go with the class to the next higher department, we revert to the nomadic stage of civilization and abandon the store of experience and teaching material gathered in work with the ages left behind; for nothing is more certain than that these same pupils cannot be taught for the next three years in the same way in which they have been taught for the last three.
(c) Consequences. — Where then are the old values of " the Sunday-school teacher," as eloquently set forth by Todd, Trumbull and a hundred others in
THE TEACHING STAFF 79
the books, journals, reports and hymn-books of days gone by? They are all here in the graded church school, alongside many other values with which the fathers did not reckon. But they have been dis- tributed. We no longer expect one worker to em- body so many excellences, discharge such varied re- sponsibilities and attack so impossible a task. We are therefore less frequently disappointed. We do not presume to better the beautiful service of those honoured saints who now and in our memories il- lustrate what a Sunday-school teacher may some- times be. But the average product of all our teach- ers is much more dependable; and the human wast- age through failure of the system to function has been sensibly reduced.
3. Department Principals.
(a) In the Children's Division. — For each of the three standard departments of this division there is needed a department superintendent or principal. A divisional principal may also be found or designated ; especially if among the workers is one qualified to guide and inspire the others, or one who will seek such power through attendance at the summer school or the weekly community training school.
The cradle roll department, not being charged with a task of instruction like those of the other three, is referred to a superintendent, whose duties involve visitation and correspondence. Where the three- year-olds are taught in a cradle-roll class on Sunday, the princlpalship of this service usually is with the beginners' department.
80 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMIOTSTKATION
Each principal is or should be in ftill charge of the class teachers of the department. Both the super- intendent as manager and the educational director as teacher-in-chief should aim to deal with these teachers only through their respective heads. The principal should be held responsible for the regular attendance and loyal service of each teacher, and for his success in lesson work, class activities and prep- arations for the pupils' annual promotion and par- ticipation in seasonal events. In finding substitutes and recruits for vacant places the superintendent and the principal will of course cooperate.
The good department principal is the friend and associate of each teacher. She coaches new teachers as to their tasks, particularly as to ways of making a success of the lesson teaching, the stories, hand- work, memory work and class activities. She holds meetings of the teachers for discussion of depart- ment problems and reports on the progress of the pupils. In some departments the principal meets separately the teachers of each of the three grades, discussing with them the stories for the following month. Such departmental supervision by a mature and qualified principal insures for each class a defi- nite standard of teaching and watch-care and so makes it wise to use young and inexperienced ap- prentice teachers where better are not yet available.
In the children's division, however, still more than in the upper grades, the class teacher does not do all the teaching. In the beginners' department the teach- ers are largely helpers, dividing with the principal the personal care of the little children. In the pri-
THE TEACHING STAFF 81
mary department the lesson stories are told and the drill work is done by the class teachers, while the principal does the work of seasonal teaching, leads in the songs, plays, prayers and giving service, and in fact is still as of old in large degree " the pri- mary teacher." In the junior department the desk work by the principal is of great significance as a habit-forming influence and a school of social re- lations; though here the class teaching holds a rela- tively larger place.
{b) In the Upper School. — Without a well-marked distinction between the intermediate, the senior and the young people's departments no systematic course of studies can be maintained by the church school, nor can a graded series of educational activities be undertaken. In most churches and communities, also, the adolescent pupils are connected with many other instructive, expressive and recreational organ- izations; and to correlate these into a unified re- ligious education for each boy and girl is not easy. The church school therefore needs for each of its three adolescent departments a principal, to handle well its own educational program, and to labour for bringing into relation with this all other educational opportunities which the principal's pupils do or might enjoy. A divisional superintendent for the young people's division as a whole is also highly de- sirable.
Toward the pupils, as we have seen,* the depart- ment principal acts as counselor, encouraging each individual to think of himself as the active and re- ' Chapter III, Sees. 5, 7.
82 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMIKESTRATION
sponsible agent in whatever is done, and doing him- self as little as possible. But toward teachers and other adult workers, and in the department whenever necessary, his authority as principal is complete. He may or may not have a separate room, which for the intermediate department is especially desirable. One principal may in some cases wisely have charge of the intermediate and senior departments together. In a small school a divisional superintendent can often furnish all the leadership required. Duties of the principal include :
(i) Maintenance of punctuality and order.
(2) Supervision of attendance records, with steps to secure regularity and increase.
(3) Supervision of class teaching. This is some- thing the old-line Simday-school superintendent sel- dom thought of attempting.
(4) Management of the departmental substitute service.
(5) Coaching of new and temporary teachers.
(6) .Stimulation of pupils in lesson study, supple- mental drill-work, pageant and exhibit work and the finishing of requirements for honorary promotion.
(7) Counselor service with class presidents and the departmental council.
(8) In a separate room, supervision of the wor- ship and desk service as conducted, for the most part, by pupil-leaders.
(9) Supervision of service and missionary activi- ties by classes and the department.
(10) Correlation of Boy Scout and kindred ac- tivities with the educational program of the depart- ment.
Full discharge of these responsibilities will nat-
THE TEACHING STAFF 83
urally call for a staff of departmental assistants and supervisors. Full correlation with the extra-de- partmental activities cannot be accomplished without help from the church through its church committee and its director of education. The superintendent should consider which of these functions can safely be neglected, and what responsibility he himself as- sumes if he decides that there is no need of a prin- cipal for each of these departments.
4. Departmental Staffs.
The average church school has too few specialized departmental workers. Just as the superintendent needs his cabinet, so does the principal need his staff. He should not rest until every necessary or facilitat- ing function is in the hands of a trained helper who does not also regularly teach a class. These special- ists, with the possible exception of the department secretary, are to be considered as teachers working in the staff rather than in the line.
Assuming that the three lower departments have rooms of their own, separate and sound-proof, with full session time except on festival occasions, the primary department will need its song leader and accompanist, its secretary and assistant secretary (where the department is large), and usually also its supervisors of the memory tasks included in the graded course and of those technical details of hand- work on which all teachers cannot be expected to specialize. The beginners' department will need less than this and the junior department more, including a librarian.
84 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
For the junior department, or the junior and in- termediate departments combined, a supervisor of map work has been found by some schools a valu- able assistance. Such a worker should have a geog- raphy room as workshop, with its equipment of maps, blackboard, sand table, work table and running water, and should receive one class after another for a short course on Bible geography, the teacher studying with the pupils and afterwards seeing to the completion by his class of the handwork undertaken. Such work as this should of course be done in the week-day school; but the church school that would teach the Bible vividly cannot afford to see it left imdone.
While the map teacher is thus engaged, the mem- ory supervisor may hang on the wall charts of the names of the Bible books and other drill matter, with lists of the passages each grade is expected to master for the quarter, and may conduct brief drills to stim- ulate and examine on the work thus advertised. Each specialist will in like manner magnify his as- signment, the principal organizing the efforts so as to secure a unified curriculum of supplemental instruc- tion.
5. The Substitute Service.
(a) By Staff Organization. — To be ever seeking substitutes for classes unexpectedly vacant is the penalty the superintendent must pay for poor organ- ization. If this were all, we might leave him to pay it till experience made him wise. But the class must pay the larger share, in discontinuous lesson service
THE TEACHING STAFF 85
weaker interest and lowered standards. Not the least of the gains of firm departmental organization is the better substitute service thereby made possible. Similarly, the reward to the department principal for training a staff of assisting specialists is the avail- ability of these as substitutes during the class lesson period. Each must be familiar with the lesson courses used in the department; and even on a sud- den call he can take up the thread of the quarter's teaching and carry it along. The staff worker, even if not fully occupied every Sunday, has a good rea- son for regular attendance and so is ready on call. When substituting, a pupil can be put in charge of class order for the brief periods when necessary staff work is to be done.
(b) By Understudies. — Where full departmental organization has not yet been established, and espe- cially in the upper classes, every teacher may be asked to secure a competent understudy or permanent substitute, preferably a member of the family or near neighbour. This friend is to study regularly the lesson followed by this class and may be enrolled in the home department and his work recorded and reported there. The school will supply his pupil's and teacher's books, to be returned to the library when the quarter's work is finished. As assistant teacher he will be asked to visit occasionally the class in session and to attend some of its week-day gather- ings. Some large Sunday schools, organized on the older lines, have found it possible to give such a backing to every teacher in the main room.
(c) By Pupil-Teachers. — V^Tiere the school has a
86 CHUECH'SCHOOL ADMIKISTEATION
fully developed training department, the furnishing of pupil-teachers as monthly observers and assist- ants in the lower departments and as weekly sub- stitutes in the upper classes will form a regular part of the three-year training course/
(d) Regulations. — Under any of these plans, or where all are combined, some such rules as these should be discussed, adopted, explained to all incom- ing teachers and enforced :
( 1 ) Every teacher is responsible for the filling of his place every Sunday. When obliged to be absent he must notify his principal or the officer in charge and do his part in providing for his substitute. Where an emergency makes notice impossible, an ex- planation is expected.
(2) Where a teacher's absences average one a month, he is expected to find and provide a compe- tent understudy. (If all teachers are to be so re- quired, change wording to read, " Every teacher is expected," etc.)
(3) Understudies who have registered with the secretary and been approved by the superintendent and principal will be counted as assistant teachers on the roll of the workers' conference. They are in- vited to unite with the home department, pursuing their class lessons as their allotted home study.
(4) Substitute service includes not merely attend- ance and the teaching of a lesson but the maintenance without break of the regular teacher's lesson plan for the quarter.
(5) Where full substitute service has been pro- vided for the class, whether by stafif teaching or supply from the training department, after previous notice of intended absence, or by the sending of a
* See Chapter VIII, 5.
THE TEACHING STAPF 87
registered understudy prepared to teach the lesson, the absent teacher will be credited with attendance; provided, that on notice and staff supply only one Sunday per month will be so credited.
In schools where the classes still look directly to the superintendent for their leadership, the manage- ment of the substitute service should be specialized in the hands of the associate superintendent. He should then organize a substitute corps, providing each member with the helps needed in the grades he is especially to cover.
6. Upper- Grade Teaching.
(a) Exacting Requirements. — In the senior and young people's classes, with their closer organization, wider outlook and more advanced studies, the task of successfully holding, teaching and inspiring the pupils is more difficult and the teaching places are correspondingly harder to fill. A like patience and sympathy is required as with the work in the lower grades, equal skill in the technique of teaching, equal experience and insight into the peculiarities of the ages dealt with, and a much wider range of culture and general and Biblical knowledge. There is also usually less cooperation from the department prin- cipal. Each class lives largely to itself and the teacher must meet his problems alone.
(b) Compensating Advantages. — Fortunately for the church-school enterprise, the rewards of appre- ciation and pupil-friendship earned by the devoted and successful upper-grade teacher are proportion- ately great. The young people can and do express
88 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
themselves. In a few years of continuous and prop- erly organized work, graduates of the class will in church and community be carrying on its ideals and practicing its lessons; and one by one the honours will return to him who has fitted them for service. But apart from these future expectations, the teach- ing of any such class brings each week its sufficient reward. It is hard to induce a busy and able busi- ness or professional man to consider the taking of such a class; but once he is led to try, three weeks generally settles the matter for a term of years.
Nothing but the lesson teaching should be expected of the upper-grade teacher. He will indeed wish to interest himself in the life of his students ; but all routine responsibilities should be put up to the class officers. If all classes from the juniors up have for some years been organized and at work, a senior class will not only run itself but with the guidance of the department counselor may be left to work out its own social and altruistic program; the teacher aiding as his time and inclination may allow.
Where a new teacher is needed for a senior or young people's class, the leaders of the school may properly decide who is qualified for such a service; but the work of getting the teacher should be put up to the class itself. An appeal from a delegation of earnest youth, backed by the superintendent, is hard to resist. After such action, moreover, the class is committed to a policy of loyalty in following the teacher's lesson plans.
(c) The Promotion Problem. — Difficult as it may be to secure promotions on the regular age-lines in
THE TEACHING STAFF 88
these upper grades, it is clear that if the group of young people now forming the class is allowed to hold together indefinitely, we shall erelong have a small and diminishing adult class where our bright young people's class was a few years ago. Some city schools have, on the women's side at least, a collec- tion of such left-over classes, without vitaUty enough to develop programs or school spirit enough to be willing to merge for the good of the work as a whole. Many a fine teacher has dropped out of the school faculty when the class " died at the top." Some strategic senior and young people's classes, also, are in the hands of willing and pious but untrained teach- ers whose powers no longer fit their pupils' needs, and who hold their dwindling circles by sheer power of affection and loyalty, without making progress in studies or in Christian training.
This indeed is but half of the problem. The other half is felt below. The objection most frequently raised against the promotion of a pupil or a class out of the hands of a fairly successful teacher is, " What is to become of them, with nowhere but the Bible class to go, unless they are put into that class of older girls (or boys) that has held together for so long?" Provide a series of fairly steady upper- grade classes, maintained at about the same places year after year, with membership reasonably flexible, and this objection is answered.
As to the teachers, the potent remedy for these unfortunate conditions is the placing of all teaching appointments strictly on an annual basis. As to the pupils, equal relief will come if we can clear our
90 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMIJSTISTEATION
promotion system of associations with the methods of promoting the Httle children and can introduce asso- ciations with high-school and college occasions. On Promotion Day handle the older promotions first, or use two Sundays, one for the children's promotions and another for those of the upper school. Make the latter as dignified as the exercises of a college commencement, and draw on the wisdom of the graduates for a few essays based on recent lines of lesson study. At suitable times earlier in the year, take time to show the upper classes the arguments for the strict promotion policy.'
Then, if by workers' council action it is made the school law that every teacher every year shall be ap- pointed to that place where, in the judgment of the school leadership, he can do his best work for the school, and if the solemn reading of these appoint- ments by the pastor, with subsequent installations, can be made an annual feature of the school's pro-
' Such as these : While for next year no great harm might be done by our letting you last-grade young men and women stay unpromoted, in a few years grave injustice would be done to the rights of the younger pupils coming on. What would happen to college life if the graduates selfishly stayed around, hanging on to their accustomed offices and priv- ileges? They have had their fair turn; let them now move on, so as to keep the educational system in at least as effective condition as when they entered. You know your respective grades in our system; if you feel that you prop- erly belong in the grade below, we will consider the question of demoting you a 3'ear or two. But if you belong where you are now, the greatest good to the greatest number requires that you help us to keep these places ready for those who are due to come up from below. The leaders in the classes to which j'ou are to go next year are already making plans for some interesting advances; and they count on your help in putting these plans over.
THE TEACHING STAFF 91
(notion system, we may be able to relieve various situations, while giving to each class its best possible teacher and aiding our faithful but ill-placed work- ers without loss of face to find their post of largest service/
(d) Short-Course Senior Classes. — Wherever an interest can be aroused in the choice of lesson courses by the older classes, to the end of acquiring some definite knowledge or skill, and teachers competent to present such courses can be found, it becomes possible to deal with the department or division as the fixed and permanent unit ; the class being organ- ized around the course which it is to pursue. The training class of young people meeting at the school hour is a familiar example of this plan. Numerous interesting and profitable electives await the study of such pupil-groups. The International Lesson Committee has prepared outlines of Bible, missionary and social service studies on these lines. To facili- tate the use of this and like material, the habit of forming short-term classes for special studies should be cultivated.
7. Wanted, a Vacancy.
No church-school faculty can be efficient if it con- tains even one member who refuses to accept the leader's ideals or to conform to his methods. Where a group of such stand together in opposition, the difficulties are increased. Where one such antago- nist or indifferentist occupies a leading position in the school and has powerful church connections, the way ' See Chapter VIII, 3.
92 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
for harmonious educational advance seems blocked indeed. In such case, what can the superintendent do?
(a) Establish the Case. — First of all, the issue must be lifted clear of all personality. The teacher's right to a poor opinion of the superintendent is as good as the superintendent's right to a poor opinion of the teacher. Have a definite standard of per- formance, low and reasonable enough for any faith- ful worker to reach. Put this in writing, present it to the workers' council and have it considered and voted into law. Advertise it from time to time, so that all may have it in mind. Then see that fair and pertinent records of performance are kept and reg- ularly published to the school, so that each worker's work may be rated as above or below the standard. If on this showing any worker's standing is below par, there is no personality in the calling of such worker to an accounting, in the interest of a better performance for the school.
(b) Facilitate Acceptance. — Expect the best of every one. Having set up a standard, give the un- satisfactory worker every possible chance to reach it. Stimulate him to new efforts; send him to some convention or summer school ; lend him a book or article ; explain your plans and the reasons why they appeal to you; show the results of such service as he has been giving. If these have the least effect, let him have full credit for every advance, with no reference to what has been. The finest possible so- lution of the situation will be to find a new worker inside the old one.
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(c) Provide the Succession. — The work will prob- ably in any event be the better for the presence of a young, ambitious and studious assistant by the side of the worker in question. At any rate, find and have in training some one who when the vacancy comes will be ready to fill it. More than one suck case has been " settled out of court " by the older worker seeing the situation from the higher view- point and presenting his resignation.
(d) Arrange the Alternative. — Nobody enjoys be- ing pushed off or shoved aside. Much useful service has been lost to the Sunday school for lack of a study of what the retiring worker could do. The various secretarial and staff positions in the modern church school offer many special lines of usefulness that can be prepared for occupancy by the one who for no reason discreditable to him is no longer ef- ficient where he is now. Has the school a birthday secretary ? Is Bible memorizing being given its right- ful place? Could we not systematize our visitation of absentees or the distribution of papers and flowers? Has the home department all the visitors it can use? In making his final move in the matter positive rather than negative, the superintendent is building efficiency as well as good-will.
8. The Teachers' Meeting.
With the uniform lesson has gone, of course, the weekly " teachers' meeting " for lesson preparation. But the need for meetings of the teachers has grown with the growing complexity of our educational task. Besides the teachers and their principals and
94 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
departmental staffs, the general officers and the presidents of the older classes should also be ejti- rolled. The whole company of workers should then be firmly organized into a workers' council and called to meet statedly in conference. Monthly meetings are more likely to be successful and well attended than those held less often.
As suggested in Chapter II, this meeting should be well moderated, and the hour of its closing should be as fixed as that for which it is called. The pas- tor is the appropriate presiding officer, with the superintendent at his right hand to guide the pro- ceedings and explain matters as they arise. Time should be set apart for real devotions and also for conference on the spiritual and missionary side of the school work. Business should come up in the form of brief and clear reports, with definite recom- mendations to be settled by the meeting after need- ful discussion. General discussions and digressions should be ruled out of order, unless on a practical proposition which is to come to a vote.'
The closing period of the conference should be given to general study, with a paper by one of the members, or occasionally an address by a visiting speaker. Sometimes the meeting may gather around the supper table, the docket being taken up as soon as quiet can be secured. Sometimes this supper meeting may precede the church prayer-meeting.
' In the interest of brisk procedure, it will be well to enact this by-law: "Whenever discussion arises with no motion before the meeting, any member may move that we return to the docket ; and such motion shall be put without debate."
THE TEACHING STAFF 95
The stated night of meeting should be adhered to except for reasons of unusual force.
Where the superintendent really associates his teachers with him in carrying the responsibilities of school administration, by maintaining thus a real legislature for determining jointly the policies of the school, the difficulty of interesting teachers in the business problems of the school and getting them out to the workers' conference will seldom appear.
Assignments
1. How does the old conception of the Sunday- school teacher differ from the way in which we think of Sunday-school teachers to-day?
2. What is your own view as to the value of the new plan as contrasted with the old? Have we lost or gained ? In what ways ?
3a. (i) Outline two duties of the department principal in the children's division. (2) If the home department should claim jurisdiction over the cradle roll, how would you settle the issue?
3b. Name one or two weaknesses in the upper- school work of your church school that might be strengthened if you had competent principals for the intermediate, senior, young people's and adult de- partments.
4. (i) What staff workers are needed in the junior department of a city-size church school? (2) Would you classify these workers as officers or teach- ers? Why?
5. ( I ) What is the penalty of a poorly organized service of substitute teaching? (2) How does the building up of a departmental staff help to solve the
96 CHUECH-8CHOOL ADMINISTRATION
substitute problem? (3) How does your school now handle this problem ?
6a. Why is upper-grade teaching an exacting service?
6b. Why then do busy men and women take such classes ?
6c. (i) What steps may be taken to establish and maintain annual promotions in the upper grades? (2) What good results will follow?
6d. Explain the short-course plan of handling the senior and young people's departments.
7a. In removing an undesirable worker, how may the issue be made impersonal ?
7b. What will be the best possible solution ?
7c. How prepare for the step to follow removal?
7d. What shall we do with the one removed?
8. Draft a docket for the next meeting of your workers' council, with a topic for essay and dis- cussion.
THE COURSE OF STUDY AND EXPRESSION
1. The Problem of Lesson-Choosing.
(a) An Educational Task. — Part of the work of organizing a church school, as we saw in Chapter I, is to determine what shall be the lessons studied in the departments and classes. This is a problem for joint solution by the parties concerned. Unity of administration, however, requires that the leader, after full consultation, shall embody the wishes and needs of these parties in a comprehensive plan of studies for the whole school.
This task is essentially educational. Guidance of the school in its choice of studies is the educational director's most significant function. Where there is no director of education, the superintendent must meet and consciously settle with his fellow-workers the problem of what lessons his school is to study, or confess that the school is running without educational direction. To let the secretary, without instructions, order the lesson supplies as a piece of mere business routine is to make such a confession.
(b) Lessons for Adult Convenience. — For forty years, as we have seen,' the great majority of Ameri- can Sunday schools placed this problem unreservedly in the hands of the International Lesson Committee.
' Chapters I, 7 ; III, 2. 97
98 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
It was a great convenience to be thus relieved. The school did indeed choose vi^hat publisher's helps they would use and how far they would provide their di- visions and departments with graded adaptations of the uniform Bible lesson selection. Here and there, also, they found room for supplemental lesson mate- rial. But over the choice of regular lesson ma- terial they exercised no control.
Unused for so long, the function of lesson choosing atrophied in the average Sunday school's organism. Many superintendents do not yet comprehend its im- portance, or the principles embodied in its proper exercise.
The uniform lessons have been popular largely be- cause they minister to adult convenience. Not only superintendents but pastors, teachers, adult Bible stu- dents, parents of several children, traveling men, readers of religious and secular papers, managers of conventions and union religious meetings, lesson-help publishers, — the gain to these from the policy of hav- ing one Bible lesson for all schools and all classes was and is incontestable. If lessons are to be chosen for the convenience of those who handle and teach them, uniformity has a strong case.
(c) Lessons for Pupils' Needs. — But in education the teacher's convenience yields place to the pupil's need. This is indeed a fundamental law of God's kingdom. Whether the alternative be the divinely instituted Sabbath, or the gift dedicated to the altar^ or merely the convenience of some servant of the kingdom, institutions and dignitaries come second, while human need comes first. To deny that prin-
STUDY AND EXPEESSION 99
ciple or obstruct its free operation is to challenge the authority and the wisdom of Jesus Christ.
It is therefore our duty to choose for our school not the lessons that will be most convenient for us, but those that give greatest promise of meeting the spiritual needs of our children and youth. To per- form this duty we must learn what our children's needs are. " The need of the child is the law of the school." In a humbly scientific spirit, divesting our- selves of dogma and pretense, let us study our chil- dren, marking their unforced responses to what we have heretofore presented, noting failure as well as success, and drawing on the stores of observation gained by the thousands of patient workers who have gone this way before.
Candidly so studying, we shall soon see :
( 1 ) Whatever these children do need, it is certain that they do not all need the same lessons. Uni- formity of lesson material means sacrifice of graded adaptation to the needs of the several ages. Each course must be entirely independent of every other course, or it cannot be chosen to fit need.
(2) Adapted sequence of successive lessons is as vital as adapted choice of material for the lessons one by one. The pupil's mind and life advance by suc- cessive steps. The material on which our lessons for each of these steps are based must be related in the plane of the child's life and growth. He has needs for this quarter as well as for next Sunday. When, therefore, the " improved uniform lessons " aim " to provide for teachers in every department a thoroughly teachable lesson," the aim falls short of the need. The quarter's lessons are chosen on a plane of adult Scriptural sequence. From ao.y (mt
100 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
of these weekly lessons a " thoroughly teachable " primary lesson might conceivably be drawn. But by no human power can thirteen consecutive lessons be so drawn and the quarterly course thus formed be a well-adapted course for little children. To call such lessons graded lessons is an utter misnomer.
(3) For any age of childhood or youth, to deter- mine what are the average religious needs of Ameri- can pupils, and to arrange a course of studies to fit those needs, is an educational task of great complex- ity. No one solution can be thought of as final. It may well be attempted by various groups, and by the same group again and again.
(d) Establishing the Dominant Principle. — In choosing printed lessons for the individual school, as in framing the course before publication, the issue must be met and settled as to whether the need of the pupil is to be the dominant or only the secondary consideration.
No man can serve two masters, or observe two dominant principles at the same time. One must lead and the other follow. Uniform lessons may be (and usually are) graded as far as possible under the dominant principle of uniformity. Graded lessons may be approximated to each other, by ingenious ar- rangement of topics, use of seasonal lessons at Christ- mas, etc., so as to get as much uniformity as is pos- sible under the principle that every course is chosen first of all to meet the needs of children of a particu- lar age or type. But in every imaginable case the lessons are dominated by one principle or the other. If uniformity dominates, they are not graded. If adaptation dominates, the^ are not uniform. "Graded
STUDY AND EXPEESSION 101
uniform lessons," therefore, are an impossibility, be- cause the two terms contradict each other.
Not less hopeless is the effort, frequently made, to maintain the dominance of adaptation to need while exalting some other principle in the selection of mate- rial. Some lesson-makers, genuinely anxious to meet the pupil-need in every age, are nevertheless deter- mined to emphasize in every grade a certain set of doctrines. Others are equally concerned to magnify the ritual and symbolism and nomenclature of their church. Others, again, are devoted to missions or some other sacred cause. But need is a jealous mis- tress. If the child is to come first, not only must dogma and rite and cause come second, but we must cease to give this predilection of ours any considera- tion whatever until the child's need has been fully sei'ved. Then, indeed, we may supplement our work with what we count important ; and it may be that it will be made richer and better thereby.
If the leader has settled in his mind that his school's outfit of lesson helps must serve the needs of his pupils first of all, it will not be hard to deter- mine as to the samples of any recommended series whether or not in the making of these lessons this has been the dominating principle.
2. Essentials of a Course of Study.
(a) A Tool for Character-Making. — For every school there must be a course of study. We go to school to learn, that we may know, feel, do and be that which, without such learning, would be beyond us. Material, therefore, must be so chosen, arranged
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and used that what goes in as learning shall come out as life. Our curriculum is to control conduct, im- part culture and fix character. These are the highest human values known to man ; and the curriculimi of the school is the instrument with which the workmen are to shape them. Why should we be surprised to find the instrument complex and the task of making it a baffling problem ?
Proposals for an easy solution of the problem will be many. But the only way to make this problem easy is to dodge the difficulties of which it is com- posed. The uniform lesson system did this monu- mentally. Various plans of partial uniformity have sought the same end in lesser degree. They do not solve the problem. No course, no school.
(b) A Course, Not a Field. — Traversing a field and pursuing a course are two different things. By the uniform lesson method all departments traverse together the great field of the Bible in an eight-year cycle and then begin again on a fresh cycle, newly planned. This is not the method of a school; and lessons so planned do not constitute a course of study.
(r) Features of a School Course. — In any mod- ern school system covering all ages, the course will naturally embody these features :
( 1 ) It will be divided into convenient units, each of which is adapted to the average needs of a par- ticular age or type. The usual unit is one year.
(2) It will therefore be fixed, remaining the same from year to year, except as improved in the light of experience. Each successive set of pupils, as it
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travels up the course, will receive in each year the studies provided for that year.
(3) The studies of each year will presuppose mastery of those that have gone before and will lay the foundation for those that are to come after.
(4) There will, therefore, be a logical order of studies, which cannot be disarranged without confu- sion and educational loss.
(5) There will be as many distinct year-courses as there are years in the pupil's school life. If he enters at four and leaves at twenty, seventeen yearly courses will be needed to keep every class supplied with a fresh course each year.
(6) The older the class, the greater the need for freedom of choice in studies. Pupils and classes averaging eighteen and older will be made responsible for electing their own studies; and a range of such studies will be provided for their use.
3. A Church-School Study Course.
In addition to these necessary characteristics, ex- emplified in our American system of general educa- tion, a course of studies for use in American church schools must embody some additional features, corre- sponding to its special aims and to the conditions under which it is to be used.
(a) A Course in Religion. — The general Ameri- can school course may contain lessons on anything and everything except religion. Whatever ap- proaches that forbidden field must be denatured of the religious element before being used. Morals may be taught, — on a utilitarian basis, as the greatest good to the greatest number. The Bible may come in, — as literature or good morals or inspiring biography; never as the basis of faith or the message of salva-
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tion. History, geography, literature and language may bring many contacts with the various religions of mankind, including our own ; but the school's atti- tude toward all must be negative and impartial. To supply the deep human need for religious feeling as a motive for action and a unifier of personal and social life, patriotism is invoked, like the emperor- worship of ancient Rome. That came in to fill the void left by the death of the old faiths ; this comes to meet the conditions imposed on our schools by the American Constitution.
It is idle to quarrel with this condition. It marks a necessary stage in our national growth. The arti- ficiality of it is constantly and happily exemplified in the real religious teaching that many a devoted school teacher finds ways of imparting, as she meets some soul-need that only religion can fill. In many com- munities, also, common consent sanctions the inclu- sion of a certain amount of worship and religious teaching in the work of the public school. These ex- ceptions merely emphasize the American rule.
Over against mathematics, literature, science, art and vocational studies, therefore, stands religion, as the one great body of subject-matter to be presented in the curriculum of the church school. Whoever counts religion an important element in life will do what in him lies to make every church school an effective teacher of religion ; for if that fails, Amer- ica can count on no other agency to save her from control in a few years by the votes and the leadership of a religiously illiterate generation.
(b) A Course Given Under Difficulties. — la
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framing a course for use by church schools, the limitations under which they ordinarily run must be allowed for :
( 1 ) The class in religion has but one recitation a week.
(2) The teacher is one who does something else for a living and gives to this service only marginal time. No amount of conscientiousness and good-will can wipe out the distinction between professional and amateur. Teaching is a profession.
(3) An increasing, but still a low proportion of these teachers have had either mental furnishing for their general task of Bible teaching or training for the work of their respective departments.
(4) The superintendence under which these teachers work is with occasional exceptions as unpro- fessional and untrained as the average of the force superintended.
(5) The housing and equipment is ordinarily far below present standards of educational efficiency.
(6) A large proportion of church schools are small in numbers and hence unable to carry out the standard plans of exact yearly gradation. They can, however, modify these plans to fit their needs and adapt standard courses to their small-school condi- tions. Course material directly adapted to these needs should be provided for their special use.
(c) Correlations. — Offsetting the absurdly inade- quate recitation allowance of one a week (when every major school study in primary and grammar grades has five), the church ordinarily provides various other meetings of religious-educational value. Such are the pulpit services, the young people's meeting, the guild, band, league or troop meeting for worship^
106 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
fellowship, study, recreation or service. Most grow- ing boys or girls belong to some one of these organi- zations and so have, in addition to their church-school hour, another hour of more or less value for educa- tion in religion.
Not one of these except the pulpit service pretends to cover all the growing ages. Each represents a certain period in life. The more closely this is de™ fined, and the more firmly the accepted age-limits are enforced, the better is the organization's chance of success and permanence, A young people's society whose membership takes in juniors and intermediates below and retains in active relations mature Chris- tians above is not likely to do much for the religious education of the real young people of the congrega- tion.
The church school, representing as it does all ages, and having for these ages a definite course of study, may rightly consider itself the vertebral structure with which each of these organizations is to be corre- lated, in order to the successful inclusion of all in a unified parish system of religious education for each pupil. The superintendent may, and the director must, take the lead in this difficult and diplomatic work. Steps in correlation will include :
(i) Adoption by each organization of the age- limit principle.
(2) Adjustment of these age-limits to those of the standard departments of the church school.
(3) Unification of management and control for all the church's work for the children and youth of each separate period.
STUDY AND EXPRESSION 107
(4) Through this unified management, unification of studies, activities and worship, so that all the Sun- day and week-day work of the pupil shall be part of a common educational plan.
(5) Removal of whatever overlaps and repeats.
(6) Provision for those types of pupil who have not heretofore been drawn into the auxiliary activi- ties for children of their age.
(7) Completion of whatever is lacking in the series of auxiliary agencies.
(8) Re-study of the whole curriculum as in- stalled, to make it, as far as it goes, an educational unity.
(d) Expectations. — With the incoming of the practice of establishing Protestant schools for week- day religious instruction, in vacation time or through- out the school year, the limitations of our present church-school system may be met and fully over- come. A system of religious schools paralleling the system of public education will give to religion the educational emphasis that is its due.
Such a development will, of course, imply great changes in the plans of the church school, especially as to its curriculum. Relieved of its responsibility for information-teaching and drill- work, and with pupils trained in Bible language, religious music and missionary lore, the church school can make its ses- sion a time of devout worship, intimate instruction in religion and Christian ethics, training for church service and the inculcation of denominational ideals.
4. Lesson Aims.
Every course of study was planned to accomplish
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some result. It therefore has an aim. No one can successfully teach or administer a course who does not both comprehend and share the aim that is em- bodied in the topics and selections.
(a) Logical and Psychologic Aims. — All lesson aims are either logical or psychologic; that is, they have to do either with the matter or with the pupil. If our interest in the thing taught is greater than our interest in the person taught, our aim in lesson-choos- ing will be logical, — relating to words. If we care for the person more than for the matter, our aim will be psychologic, — relating to soul. Again the alterna- tive is absolute. Most teachers care for both matter and soul ; but the way they teach soon shows which is to them the dominating factor.
Nearly all education, up to a comparatively recent time, has had a logical aim. Studies have been as- signed because they were judged to be of intrinsic importance. The most precious verses in the Bible for the Jew were the " Hear, O Israel " of Deuteron- omy; hence they were assigned for the Jewish child to memorize. Whether or not they met his needs was a secondary consideration. They were good words to learn.
" The new education," as it is frequently called, follows the psychologic aim. It denies that matter has any intrinsic teaching value whatever. Its sole value, in this view, is in relation to the need of him who learns it. If the words in which it is expressed are not understood by the learner, it is not teaching matter at all. All modern educational science is based on this view.
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When, therefore, we plan a course designed to cover the whole Bible in a given number of years, we have a logical aim ; because our choice is based on our judgment of the value of the Bible. In this judg- ment we are not mistaken. The new education does not require us to alter by a jot our estimate of Bible values. But it does require us to keep free from dogmatic presuppositions as to what must be best for the child to study, that in all our lesson choices we may be guided by his needs alone.
(b) Aims of the Graded Lessons. — In a properly constructed graded lesson course covering one year the aim is primarily psychologic, — to furnish for that specified year of the average pupil's life the lesson material it most needs. Adjustment must also be had to the aims of other years, that the material of all the years may hang logically together. The whole series will then have a general aim, to the meeting of which every course will contribute its share.
The original use of the aim, whether for the single lesson, the quarter, the year, the group of years or the series, is to guide in the wise selection and arrange- ment of the lesson material and the wording of the topics. The International Graded Lessons were drafted by a company of practical Sunday-school workers, including several specialists of note. They first agreed on what the children or youth of a given age need at that stage of their religious education. Next they considered the bodies of material that seemed to promise, if properly presented, a meeting of such needs. They then formulated the aims of tiie year's course. The lessons were then chosen to
110 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
fit these aims, and the course when complete was criticized, recast and perfected in the hght of its aim, with experiments in actual classes to determine how far both aim and lessons were effective for results.
Inasmuch, however, as these course-outlines were afterwards revised from the logical viewpoint, first by the Lesson Committee for whose use they were made, then by the denominational editors and com- mittees and then by the lesson writers, the faithful- ness of the original lesson-makers to their stated aims does not always appear. The International Graded Lessons as printed show in many places a compro- mise between two ideals. The substitute material in- troduced by authority, sometimes displacing a whole quarter or half-year of the original outline, and in many cases changing the topic and emphasis of the individual lesson, cannot be called a sincerely psycho- logic effort to compass the avowed yearly aim. But taking the series as a whole, the published courses, especially those which have followed closely the In- ternational outline, do substantially embody the aims they profess.
In the other graded lesson courses listed in Ap- pendix B, the same effort to formulate and then follow an aim may be seen. The independent courses claim to be free from the need of trimming the uni- versal psychologic aim to fit the dogmatic require- ments of many denominations and types of thought. The courses prepared for and by particular churches for their own schools show decided logical leanings in the direction of the bodies of material they feel the need of imparting. All modern courses, however^ i»
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comparison with their own predecessors, show prog- ress in the direction of the pure psychologic ideal.
(c) Administrative Use of the Aim. — To the church-school administrator the several aims of the courses studied in his school are guides indicating what results are to be looked for in the pupils and classes. Though stated broadly, any one who knows and understands children can translate their general terms into the every-day life of the boys and girls of his field and can ask, as to each age in turn. Are these aims being realized as our pupils study and practice this course? If not, at what point do our efforts fail, and by what steps can they be made more resultful? As the conductor of the orchestra studies not only the scores of his several sets of players but the marks of expression by which the composer indicated his plan as to the interpretation of his composition, so must the church-school leader study not merely the topics and passages assigned for study in the different grades but also the spiritual aims which are to be realized if the studying is to be successful.
5. The Course of Expression.
Not more than half of the school's lesson problem has been solved when a satisfactory series of graded studies has been selected and introduced. With all its difficulties, too, this is the easy half. Far more complex and unexplored is the problem of giving to every pupil, along the line of his studies and in accord with his developing capacities, an outlet of religious expression.
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No lesson is learned until it has come out as well as gone in. It is that which comes out of the man that defiles or ennobles him. We learn something. The knowledge fires us to feeling ; and feeling moves us to action. Yesterday it was a lesson in a book. This morning it was a teaching that stirred our hearts. To-night it is a deed well done. We can never be the same again. The lesson has helped to shape our character, because by an act of voluntary expression we have made it a piece of our life. Nothing that does not complete this round should be called teaching.
(o) Worship. — In the teaching of religion the simplest and most universal act of expression is wor- ship, the recognition of the presence and power of God. If our lessons in every grade are essentially lessons in religion, they will lead naturally to expres- sion, individually and in groups, in acts of conscious approach to God. Prayer, gifts, the daily reading of God's message to mankind, attendance on the serv- ices of the church, service to others in His name, may be idle forms or reflex impulses; or they may be made by good teaching the true and hearty expression of reverence, faith, gratitude, penitence and aspira- tion.
The worship service of the church school, there- fore, or of any of its departmental assemblies, is a vital part of its course of instruction. So also is that training of the devotional life which should be the concern of each teacher and parent. By establishing in the pupil habits of private and public worship we have not made him religious; but we have provided
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an outlet for the normal expression of the religion that has been and is to be taught in our lesson series.
{b) Expressive Activities. — The dramatic impulse is strong in little children. Whenever an experience has been set before their imagination through a song, a story, a picture or the example of their elders, they seek to live it out in play. The creative impulse like- wise moves them to draw, colour or embellish pic- tures, or to model, cut or construct something that shall carry on the thought and embody the ideal set before them in the lesson story. By adding to our teaching plan some such activity to draw out the chil- dren's minds and muscles we help them, so far, to live their lesson and make it their own. Hence the play lessons of the beginners' department and the va- rious forms of handwork in the graded primary and junior courses. In themselves these activities mean nothing for religious teaching ; and they can easily be mishandled and overdone. But as means for com- pleting our lessons in religion they have the highest spiritual value.
Year by year, as the children grow, the expressive handwork must be made not only more difficult but more logically related to the lesson it is designed to express. The map or plan must be needed to eluci- date the text. Instead of a picture we may have a list of names or a diagram, or perhaps a story worked out and illustrated by the class, each pupil making his share. As adolescence approaches, altruism must enter. A class that would not care to finish an illu- minated hymn or a " Life of David " for itself, or even for the school's Christmas exhibition, might do
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so eagerly if the books when finished were to amuse the sick children at the hospital or be packed in the box for the missionary. Even with these induce- ments, however, interest in handwork and its value as expressive activity is with difficulty carried beyond the junior years.
(c) Expressive Conduct. — More difficult but of far deeper significance is the task of securing lesson expression in the pupil's daily life. The traditional Sunday-school lesson has always had its moralizing "application." But (i) the successive applications have had no sequence, so that one might follow up another; (2) they have seldom been specific?; (3) the conduct encouraged has been but slightly related to the narrative of the lesson, if the lesson has had any narrative; (4) circumstances to call for such conduct may not present themselves until long after the im- pression has passed away; (5) emotion is not evoked to stir and sustain the will ; (6) the reinforcement of group action is seldom called into play; (7) slight at- tempt has been made to follow up the suggested ap- plication by questioning, drill or encouragement to continued endeavour. We have not taken our appli- cations seriously.
Reversing these neglects, and planning our pupils' responses in conduct in the same way that we would plan handwork or pageantry, we may sometimes se- cure obedience, kindness, fair play, or whatever vir- tue the lesson exemplifies, with as definite a success as in the simpler and more material realm.
As this is a matter to be handled by each teacher with his class in his own way, the principal or super-
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intendent can seldom do more than to bring up in conference and personal discussion the need of secur- ing control of conduct as the outcome of lesson im- pressions. A teacher who thus seems to be succeed- ing in realizing the lesson aims for the year should report the work, with illustrations, in the monthly workers' conference.
(d) Evangelism. — As the highest and most fun- damental result of our teaching is the winning of our pupils to personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and acceptance of Him as Saviour, so the most significant expressive conduct on their part will be the voluntary act of public confession. How and under what con- ditions this is to be registered is determined by the usages of the various religious bodies. Whether or not the school shall observe a " Decision Day," or, far better, a day for the declaration of decisions quietly and personally made, it is surely wise to lead the school in its worship and in the counsels of its teaching body to an attitude of deepened spiritual earnestness and realization of the claims of Christ on our life's fullest devotion. Advantage may also be taken of seasons favourable to decision ; and the hesi- tancy of adolescence to make itself conspicuous may be met by seeking for mass action by classes and groups, provided the individuality of each confession is duly assured.
Educationally, it is essential that the act of confes- sion shall be :
(i) Voluntary and free, and as far as possible spontaneous.
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(2) Intelligent, according to the pupil's years and mental capacity.
(3) Rational, an outgrowth of lessons and ex- pressive conduct leading in that direction.
(4) Emotional, springing from a heart touched with love, gratitude and devotion.
(5) Practical, in relation to a definite course of conduct embodying loyalty to Christ and the church.
In the case of pupils in middle and later adoles- cence (from fifteen onward), and in earlier cases where possible, the confession should also be clearly
(6) Final, a life-decision consciously so made, and sealed with acceptance of the sacramental vow.
In a church whose society, group and class activi- ties have been even approximately correlated, the newly avowed Christians can easily find fields for ex- ercise, expression and service. The organized class activities, being under the supervision of the class teacher, are well fitted to play this essential part in the church's evangelistic program. In addition to all class, departmental and school instruction, the pastor's catechetical class, either before or after bap- tism or confirmation, is a wholesome influence and should wherever possible form part of the plan.
6. Educational Projects.
If the church school is to build character and im- part religious experience, its studies and its activities must be correlated far more closely than they are usually correlated now. There are two ways, and only two, for securing this correlation. One is by the method of expressive activity just described. We first plan lessons and then plan activities to flow from
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them. This plan, as we have seen, is only partially successful. The activities of the societies, clubs and bands it does not touch at all.
The other method works in the opposite direction. It begins with the activities and plans for lessons to fit the needs thus brought to light. It starts with a proj- ect, real or imaginary, on which teacher and class joyously embark together. By skillful leading the class soon discovers its ignorance and inability to pro- ceed; so it betakes itself to study, masters the diffi- culty, starts afresh with a broader view, and soon encounters another problem larger than before. So proceeding, the year's end finds the class with the project carried out, a large body of information se- cured and well organized in the brain, interest in studies and class life broadened and strengthened, and character shaped through experiences encoun- tered on the way.
No religious lessons in project form have yet been issued ; and it is hard to see how any standard course could be drafted on this principle, so essential is it that the project shall fit the concrete situation of teacher and class in the community, as well as aver- age spiritual needs. For the present, project-teach- ing in the church school is a fascinating possibility, with promise of unusual results for religious culture when we are able to meet its pedagogic requirements. A competent teacher, familiar with project methods in general education, might well be given freedom for a year from all lesson restrictions and encouraged thus to do pioneer work for the pupils, the school and the profession.
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7. Building the Curriculum.
(a) Introduction of Graded Studies. — No pub- lished lesson course of graded studies comes to the church school ready-made. It consists of standard units which must be selected, adjusted to the local situation and introduced step by step as the way is made ready. Intelligent educational leadership is in- dispensable. Schools that " introduce the graded les- sons " as if they were simply a rival set of uniform- lesson quarterlies generally throw them out in disgust six months later. So would one deal with his new automobile, if it were " introduced " in any such way.
In changing from uniform lessons to the graded lesson system, the following considerations should be kept in mind:
( 1 ) Introduction should be from below. The be- ginners' class is presumably using graded stories al- ready, as the present Lesson Committee enjoins. First in the primary department, then among the ju- niors, let the lessons come in; each departmental in- troduction being handled as a separate enterprise. When success so far is in sight, introduce in the intermediate classes, and in the higher classes as each is ready for the new work.
(2) The most serious difficulties come at the be- ginning ; because each course presupposes familiarity with the courses which come before. Hence the de- sirability of holding back the intermediate lessons until one class of juniors has been graduated into the intermediate department. Each year of graded teaching makes the work easier for the next year.
(3) The lesson year begins on the first Sunday of October. That is, therefore, the time to start, begin- nings with Lesson i in each course used. If neces-
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sary to begin on January i, start the primary courses with Lesson 14, since with the little children much is made of the seasons, and the lessons must come on the Sundays for which they have been planned. In the junior and higher courses the start may be made with Lesson i at any time, though it is always prefer- able to begin at the opening of the school year.
(4) In the graded courses the lessons run by themes, sections, quarters and years. No lesson stands by itself as under the old plan. Teachers must, therefore, study by quarters and sections as well as by single lessons, and must know their whole course before they can properly teach the first lesson. The pupil's book or folder must be made up as speci- fied, that it may be shown as a sample of the hand- work desired. At least a month's start is needed for this advance preparation.
(5) In giving out this advance material, the teacher should be directed to read the pupil's book with the eyes and heart of a pupil, then the teacher's book, mastering the " foreword " and other general explanations, noting the aims of the course, studying the Bible references, working out the handwork, and planning what expressive work the class shall be asked to do.
(6) For each class that is to begin a graded course, determine the class age-year, and use the course specified for that year.
(7) The simplest plan of introduction is to start all classes in the department on the first year lessons for that department. The second year the new classes take the first year's lessons, while the classes of the second and third years take the second year's lessons and those who were third-year pupils last year are promoted and get the first year's lessons in the next higher department. By the third year all three grades in each department are getting the proper lessons; and thereafter each child gets the
120 CHUECH-8CH00L ADMINTSTEATIOH
whole course as he passes from one grade and depart- ment to the next.
(b) Selection of Course Material. — In selecting its lesson supplies, the church school will, of course, use those issued by its own denominational supply house, unless cause for other choice is clearly shown. Nearly every denomination publishes text-books on the International graded lessons or its own church courses. The independent graded courses are of high educational merit, some directors preferring them to the International issues.
To mix courses, taking one year's work from one series and another from another, is seldom wise, un- less the school is under a trained educational leader, able to cope with the difficulties thus brought in. The aims of the different series are not identical, and a year's course in one does not necessarily lead up to the next year's course in another.
Each department principal should keep a graded roll, showing the pupils arranged by classes, with each pupil's year-grade noted. The standard is, from the juniors up, at least one class of boys and one of girls for each grade. Before Promotion Day this roll will be made up for the new graded year. If the standard is reached, the determination of the courses and the preparation of the order-sheet will be a simple matter. Where the school is too small to make this possible, two or more grades will be repre- sented in one class ; and the course to be followed will be that of the average year-age of the group thus formed. In case of doubt it is better to select the
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younger course, giving extra work to the brighter or more advanced pupils. If by mistake an older course is assigned, it may take several years to make the cor- rection, as the class must proceed each year to the course next in order.
(c) Allowable Teaching Freedom. — When the course is once chosen, each teacher should loyally strive to learn and teach the lessons thus assigned. The aims printed in the teacher's book indicate the general objective for the year. To cover the ground of the lessons, imparting their information-content and securing the specified handwork, memory work, honour work and other assignments, is a secondary objective, to be reached so far as it contributes to the gaining of the primary objective in character-culture and spiritual development, or does not detract tliere- from. The teacher, therefore, must be left free to determine how much of this lesson content he will undertake to embody in his quarterly lesson plan.
Trained teachers, and those who have had experi- ence in the course with one or more previous classes, may be allowed also considerable freedom in the ar- rangement of their quarterly course. Some lessons may for this class be worth two or even three Sun- days' study. Wherever a project is undertaken, even so simple a one as the making of a class biography of the main hero studied, some lessons will have to be sacrificed in order to make room for others. It is far better to determine such rearrangements in advance than merely to fall behind and end the quarter with the last few lessons unreached. But as the daily home readings on each lesson form an important part
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of the character-training provided, and as the interest in these depends largely on their relation to the cur- rent lesson, the teacher who deviates from the quar- terly calendar should provide reading assignments to correspond v^ith the revised plan.
Assignments I a. Who should settle what lessons the church school shall study? Why?
lb. Who benefit by uniformity in lesson material'?
id. Why are graded uniform lessons impossible?
2a. ( I ) Is it possible to simplify the " closely graded" system? How? (2) What do we lose in so doing ?
2c. Name some of the features that must be em- bodied in a course of study in any school.
3a. The lessons of a church school must consti- tute a course in religion. Is this a religious necessity or an educational necessity? Why?
3b. List some of the difficulties under which re- ligion is now taught in the average church school.
3c. (i) Why is it needful to correlate the work of troops, societies, etc., with the work for the corre- sponding ages in the church school? (2) Name some of the steps to be taken in so doing.
4a. Explain the difference between a logical aim for a lesson and a psychologic aim.
4b. (i) What part did the yearly aims have in the making of the graded lesson series? (2) How have logical and psychologic aims become mingled in the publication of most of the graded courses ?
4c. How should the director, superintendent or principal use the lesson aims?
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5. Why must instruction come out as well as go in? Illustrate.
5a. Why and how is the school's worship a neces- sary part of its educational plan ?
5b. Describe one or two types of expressive activ- ity used in connection with graded lessons.
5c. Why are our lesson applications to conduct so seldom taken seriously ?
5d. (i) How would you lead up to a time for seeking Christian decisions? (2) If evangelism is to be educational, as it should be, what qualities must the decisions show? (3) How may tiiey be fol- lowed up ?
6. (i) What is an educational project? (2) In what way is it the opposite of an expressive activity ? (3) Under what conditions may the project method be applied to religious teaching?
7a. Write one or two suggestions for a superin- tendent who expects soon to introduce graded lessons into his school.
7b. Explain how the courses to be studied next year in your school are to be determined.
7c. (i) What is more important than that the teacher shall cover the whole ground of every lesson? (2) What freedom is permitted your teachers in the rearrangement of their quarterly courses ?
VI
THE SCHOOL AND THE HOMES
1. Church Duty to the Home.
(a) Home the Great School of Religion. — Home is the great field for religious education. All that the best church school can do to build Christian character and train for godly living is small compared with what could be done in the homes, were these dedi- cated to the task, prepared by training and equipment for its performance and united with the church in a close bond of fellowship and mutual cooperation. In the rare cases where these conditions are fulfilled, the results fully establish the thesis here maintained.
(&) Religion Moved to the Church. — In defiance of this well-established fact, the processes of religious activity have been moved from the home to the church, leaving the home without adequate time or means for the discharge of its religious-educational duty.
The Rev. Samuel W. Dike in 1884 pointed out that the church for nearly a century had been enriching its own program of centralized activities at the ex- pense of the home's chance to cultivate family re- ligion. Sunday-school sessions, missionary societies, temperance and other reformatory meetings, young people's meetings, brotherhoods and guilds, — each as it came in had seized on some Sunday or week-day
124
THE SCHOOL AND THE HOMES 125
hour and appropriated it for the use of its own church-centered activity. The churches, in fact, had done for reUgious training what the factories had done for industrial training. They had taken it out of the home.
(c) Origin of the Home Department. — Others before Dike had seen this and had inveighed against these movements for thus discrediting and blocking the processes of home religion. Dike saw that the movements were in themselves good, but that their tendency to exploit the home must be met by a coun- ter-tendency that would carry a part of the energy thus developed in the church back to the home again. To meet this need he invented the mechanism of the home department and supervised its early operation in the rural parish at Royalston, Vermont.
Three years before this a movement developed In the New York State Sunday-school Association for the organizing of home classes as Sunday-school out- stations in outlying neighbourhoods, to be gathered from adjoining homes and taught each week by a visiting teacher from the Sunday school. As these classes met in the homes, the movement was a contri- bution to the need later voiced by Dr. Dike. Later a determined effort was made by W. A. Duncan, leader of the home class movement, to identify the two ; and for many years he was for the combined idea the zealous spokesman and International leader. The home class method has always been an interesting missionary possibility, seldom realized; while the home department idea of Dr. Dike, enriched with im- provements from several sources, has for a genera-
126 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
tion been a standard method, indispensable to the right organization of the church school.
Since the introduction of the home department method, more new ways of getting the children, the young people and the parents out of the homes have developed than in the whole century preceding. Not all of these now center in the church or are of as- suredly uplifting value. If Dike had need to rescue the home in the name of religious training, our need is critical indeed. It is our business first to see, then to understand, and then to meet the situation.
2. Home Service to the Church School.
(a) The Self-Sufficient Home. — The first diffi- culty we encounter in any plan of service to the home is its spirit of self-sufficiency. This is not a fault but a virtue. It springs from the instinct of full parental responsibility for the welfare and right upbringing of the children. Any policy that tends to break down this instinct, whatever its immediate advantages, will ultimately weaken the power of the home. We must, therefore, beware of methods that aim to sub- stitute the influence of the teacher or any other school institution in place of that of the parents. However incompetent, they must be strengthened and established as educational factors rather than dispos- sessed. When the case passes the point where this is possible, it is one for attention by the public authori- ties or the social agencies rather than by the church school.
{b) The First Step a Call for Service. — Taking this difficulty on the flank, then, let our first aid to
THE SCHOOL AND THE HOMES 127
the home come in the form of a call for its coopera- tion. Our general church-school program has long included this call; but we have thought of the co- operation as a gain to our own work. So it is ; and so much the better for our present purpose. Let this continue to be the only motive we avow ; for so long as we stand on this ground we do not raise the issue of home independence.
In responding to this reasonable call, however, many parents will take their first steps in conscious religious effort for their children. Apart from any question of the furtherance of our school plans, it is worth while to seek home cooperation for the sake of the home ; for in this way it may be possible to start the home to working on its own immeasurably greater program.
(c) A Scale of Home Cooperation. — The specific services which the homes may render to the church school vary with the different grades. As an aid in the systematizing of our efforts and in the rating of our homes as to the degree of cooperation secured, we may use some such scale of home cooperation as the following :
1. Attendance. Child sent regularly; attendance facilitated.
2. Disciplinary, Report card signed and re- turned ; authority of school and teacher supported.
3. Facilitating. Home life regulated so as to fa- cilitate the child's full performance of home-study tasks.
4. Sympathetic. Parents attend church-school events and discourage adverse claims of other inter- ests on child's work-time.
128 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
5. Financial. Regular, spontaneous and personal giving encouraged; parents contribute, proportion- ately to means, to church-school funds.
6. Normative. Parents second school in the ef- fort to establish habits of religious living such as church-going.
7. Pedagogic. Assistance in lesson study and other home work for the church school.
8. Devotional. Family worship maintained, with grace at meals.
9. Evangelistic. Early lessons in prayer and rec- ognition of God's presence, power and love; presen- tation of Jesus as Saviour and Lord; encouragement of child in seeking full church membership as soon as he feels himself ready and the church authorities ap- prove.
10. Vocational, Encouragement of the child in seeking to obey the divine call to service in God's kingdom.
Good management of the church school calls for a systematized effort to secure the rendering of these services by every represented family. A method for coordinating the forces that must work together to this end, if it is to be even partially accomplished, is outlined under Section 6, below.
3. A Home Program of Religious Education.
(a) A Wide Scope. — By as much as the oppor- tunity of the home is larger than that of the church school, by so much is the possible content of its re- ligious education fuller and its material more varied.
A parent who is religiously minded may make any contact with the child, at any age, a means for de- veloping his sense of relationship with God. Jesus,
THE SCHOOL AND THE HOMES 129
as He walked and taught in Galilee, saw the power of God around Him in nature and man and turned the simplest and most homely incidents and objects into lessons in religion. A matter-of-fact parent, whose religion, like Martha's, is practical rather than mys- tical, may yet be shown, along his own temperamentcd line, how to teach religion at home. All parents may at least be called on to cleanse their own lives and seek a deeper religious experience for the sake of their children's religion.
(b) Goals, Not Standards. — No two homes, of course, could follow the same program. To erect a standard program would therefore be an idle en- deavour. But a wise leader might lead some of his homes to adopt a series of goals of home endeavour, and then he might aid these homes in finding definite ways of seeking these goals. When a circle of such families had begun to work and pray together in the pursuit of these goals, it might be found possible to draw others into the circle. Methods tried in one family and found effective would tend to become standard for the church or community group, and if of general value would be utilized elsewhere.
Among such goals of family endeavour may be suggested :
( 1 ) The establishment in the home of the reign of law. When father and mother are themselves guided not by caprice or passion, but by rule, even the infant feels the influence and learns the lesson of self-mas- tery at the call of a higher power.
(2) An appraisal of conduct on lines of duty rather than those of pleasure or economic value. As
130 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
long as the breaking of a glass brings a whipping and the telling of a lie a laugh, religious home training cannot begin.
(3) An early familiarity and sympathy with the works of nature as manifestations of God and outlets for religious impulse.
(4) Grace at meat, as an acknowledgment of our daily dependence on God's care.
(5) Early use of the approved means of grace, especially private prayer, the Bible and family wor- ship.
(6) Unconscious tuition through pictures and ob- jects of religious value.
(7) Provision of books and periodicals likely to interest in facts and considerations of religious value.
(8) Story-telling and reading aloud with the chil- dren.
(9) The habit of extending hospitality to visitors whose table-talk and personal influence may prove a religious stimulus to the younger members of the family.
(10) Formation of plans for the children's edu- cation and life-work in which God's call and the claims of His kingdom shall have a part.
4. Agencies for Reaching the Homes.
(a) The Pastor as Preacher. — High on the list of the home-reaching agencies of the church must be reckoned the pulpit service, with its opportunity for the preacher to speak from time to time directly to the parents in attendance as to the message of home religion and the vehicles for expressing it effectively. The leader of the church school, considering the ur- gency of the need, is surely not presumptuous in sug- gesting to the pastor from time to time the value and pertinence of sermons to the home.
THE SCHOOL AND THE HOMES 131
(b) The Pastor as Visitor. — Still more significant is the pastoral service of visitation. We have not yet, even in city and suburban fields, outgrown the expectation of more or less regular pastoral calls. A pastor with a program for his homes might touch them all in a year without adding to his labours any service that he does not owe them now.
If we determine to insist on the inclusion of the pastor in the church school's educational plan, we may insure at least his familiarity with our home pro- gram; and some pastors will forthwith make this program their own. As leader of church activities, the pastor may in many ways throw his influence in- dependently in the direction of the fostering of home religion; and in the pulpit, as we have seen, he has the ear of all parents who are members of the con- gregation.
(c) The Cradle Roll. — Vast possibilities inhere in this popular but far from fully utilized church agency. The apparent simplicity and juvenility of cradle-roll forms of work must not lead the church- school administrator to undervalue its efficiency. Under a trained and purposeful leader, with reason- able support from the related departments and from the treasury, the power of the cradle roll in the estab- lishment of religious education in the homes is pro- found.
To begin with, the cradle-roll superintendent's friendly call on the new baby and his parents is al- most never unwelcome, however estranged from re- ligion and church the family may be. It is easy then to invoke the spirit of responsibility for this newlx
132 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMmiSTEATIOJST
entrusted soul and to suggest steps for discharging the trust, directly in the care of the child, indirectly in a better performance of acknowledged church duties and home religious observances. Thousands of families have thus been drawn from the outside into the warm fellowship of the church's religious life, and the children's religious nurture has so far been assured. In the work of welcome and enlist- ment the partnership of the beginners' teacher, the adult classes and the pastor is called for; and this should be seen to by the executive of the school.
In homes of culture and external church connec- tion the problem is different but the need not less. The cradle-roll leader may here seek for partners among the officers of the woman's club and the par- ent-teachers' association as well as in the church- school company. Remembering that a baby is the household king or queen, whatever the family's es- tate, let the visitor, with tact and courage, carry out her visiting and reminder-sending program and ask God's blessing on its influence.
(d) The Home Department. — Ambitiously named is this institution; for it reaches only some of the homes and does even for them but a part of the service the church is due to render. For years, as we have seen, it was confused with the quite distinct method of home classes. It has further suffered from over-advocacy by zealous partisans who have failed to see it as one line of a larger service that should be developed in its entirety. But in itself the method introduced in 1885 by Dr. Dike is as valuable to-day as when first presented.
THE SCHOOL AND THE HOMES 133
There is need, however, for a broadening in the content of instruction in the lessons brought by the home department visitors into the home. The quar- terly magazine expounding the current uniform les- son may still be used where that seems the best response to the Bible-studying capacities of the mem- bers. But the department should constitute itself a bureau for the distribution of all kinds of literature needed in the homes, especially bulletins bearing on child-training. In homes where older children are studying the intermediate or senior graded lessons, the parents may take these as the basis of their own home studies and be credited therewith. The deter- mining of what lessons shall be used by the home department members is to be counted one of the edu- cational problems of the church school and settled accordingly.
(e) The Organized Adult Class. — Besides its many other functions of usefulness, the adult class, organized for self-active service as well as for study, discussion and fellowship, can be made a definite agency of home stimulation to a program of religious education. Steps in this direction will comprise :
(i) Development of the class recruiting service until it draws into at least occasional attendance per- sons not ordinarily identified with church member- ship and activity. The methods of such " boosting " are familiar.
(2) Among the class membership as thus en- larged will be found many parents. Occasional les- sons and discussions may be given on problems in nurture, guidance and home discipline, and the result-
134 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMimSTRATION
ing interest and participation noted. A simple ques- tionnaire may be passed to ascertain and record the facts. The way may thus be prepared for the organ- izing of one or more classes of parents.
(3) Special addresses by teachers, physicians and social workers on problems of the home may from time to time be introduced in the general class pro- gram.
(4) Father-and-son and mother-and-daughter banquets, promoted as class activities, may be made an annual feature of the class social program. They should be planned so as to be educationally and re- ligiously purposeful and not merely jolly times.
(5) Connection should be established with the home department, by which each adult class may refer to the home department all its members who are unable for a time to attend, and by which also the visiting home-department members shall be welcomed to seats as extension members of the class. From the adult class membership also will be recruited the needed visitors and substitutes for the home depart- ment's force. The simplest way to establish this connection will be by making the home department superintendent or one of the leading visitors a mem- ber of the class executive committee.
(/) The Parents' Department. — We have seen with what instinctive aversion the average parent receives outside advice as to what he is to do for his own child. He feels that " a man's house is his castle." For an enthusiastic educational director or a teacher with ideas to proceed to form a parents* class or department, in order to impart to the parents of the church that wholesome instruction in parent- hood which they now lack, is to invite failure. The subject must be approached indirectly.
THE SCHOOL AND THE HOMES 135
If the way has been prepared by systematic calls from the departments and classes for home coopera- tion (Sec. 2b), and by studies of home problems in the adult classes (Sec. 4e), a beginning may be made by calling together a few of the more intelligent and interested parents and suggesting the organiza- tion of a parents' club or circle, for parents of junior pupils, high school pupils, or some other group of children or youth. Leadership of the movement should as soon as possible be lodged with the parents themselves. The school register, if properly kept, will furnish a directory of the parents, with resi- dence, occupation and church affiliation. With the help of this information, supplemented from the church roll and the pastor's visiting list, the club membership may be recruited.
After the meetings for organization, the club should plan for a limited series of meetings for the season. It may hear lectures by the educational di- rector or some other speaker, follow a text-book course or prepare its own program, with papers from the members, followed by discussion. A small club grouped around a definite age of childhood can do better work than a large body whose bond of inter- est is more diverse.
One such club, successfully started, will pave the way for another. A parents' department, with super- intendent and a definite program, will naturally fol- low. The periodic canvasses of the home department should advertise the parents' classes and recruit members for the parents' department.
In many beginners' departments a company of
136 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
mothers is already in attendance as visitors, some' times to the serious embarrassment of the orderly work of the hour. To reassure these that their off- spring will be safe without them should not be hard. Then an invitation to a conference in some adjoin- ing room may be given; and after one or two weeks of preliminary conversations, with exhibit of bulle- tins secured from the Children's Bureau at Wash- ington on diet for young children and other practical matters, a definite call may be extended to all moth- ers of young children and a start made on a ten- weeks' course of class study. A class of older girls might cooperate by contributing some " sunshine band " work in staying with the babies at home or caring for them elsewhere in the church while their mothers were thus engaged. If the beginners' teacher must lead this group, the time will have to be fixed at some other hour than that of the church school.
5. Training for Parenthood.
A vital function of the church school under all con- ditions is the training which it is due to furnish, in rudimental form to the intermediates and more specifically to the senior and young people's classes, in the principles of home-making and child-nurture. The inauguration of such a service would be an appropriate activity for the parents' department and an easy extension of its scope. Having finished for themselves a course in child-nurture, with its dis- cussions on the mistakes of parents and their tragic consequences, what more natural than that these now
THE SCHOOL AND THE HOMES 137
thoughtful parents should take steps to save the pres- ent young people of the church from like mistakes and to lead them to a clearer conception of the re- sponsibilities, the joys and the conditions of success- ful child-training? But the need for such service is too urgent to await the prior starting of parents' work.
(a) A Community Responsibility. — But this is not primarily a church responsibility. It inheres in our whole social situation. The earnest words of Her- bert Spencer, in his classic little work on education, should not be forgotten. Speaking as a biologist, he postulates that the great work of this generation is to cause that the next generation shall reach higher ground in the scale of existence, physical and social. It therefore follows that of all possible fields of for- mal education the most significant is education in the principles, the art and the purpose of intelligent and loving parenthood. To us who in addition see the value of the religious element in education, this sage reminder comes with double force.
(b) A Task for the Church School. — Here is one fundamental task which for two reasons may prop- erly be left by the community to the church school. In the first place, most pupils leave the day school before the mating instinct, with its aroused interest in home problems, has begun to dominate life. In the second place, all parties are ready to agree that a religious background should colour and shape the teaching and training of the home. Whenever the church school, or the community school for week- day training in religion, can qualify for the depend-
138 CHTJECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
able discharge of this trust, general education will be ready to pass it over.
This trust, let it be noted, cannot be confined to the teaching of religious values alone. The great essential in successful home teaching of anything is atmosphere, the combined influence of the home sit- uation as a whole. There can be no dividing be- tween the physical, mental, social and religious phases of this situation by those who would plant seeds of better home life in young and aspiring hearts. If the desired religion of the home is to be a real and a living religion, it must function in and through every feature that makes the home, sustains its life and gives it character. Here, then, is one field where the natural unity of general and religious education, divorced by nineteenth-century conditions of life in a new democracy, may without controversy be experimentally reestablished.
(c) A Field for New Endeavour. — How this great trust is to be administered is a question not yet furnished with a standardized and well-tried answer. We have not yet even assured ourselves of regular contact with the individuals for whom the instruction is to be provided. Many of these are in the ages that call students and workers away from home. The project method, with its necessarily expert han- dling and its freedom from fixed and sustaining courses of weekly lesson assignments, seems pecu- liarly adapted to this field. Splendid opportunity is here for original experiment, the working out of new plans and the making of history in religious educa- tion.
THE SCHOOL AND THE HOMES 139
While waiting for the Edisons of the situation to appear, those engaged in the more commonplace service of teacher-training may take notice that in the possible future home and fireside we have at least as worthy an object of normal study by young people as in the responsibilities of the church-school teacher's chair. Bible study, child psycholog}^, meth- ods of teaching and the place and standard methods of the church school are all studies of prime value to the future parent ; while such a course as that on the training of the devotional life is more a home course than a school course by far. In planning and pro- moting our training courses and classes, then, while properly stressing ostensibly the call for church- school teachers, we may well have in mind the need for trained home teachers too.
6. The Department of the Home.
(a) Elements of the Combination. — Putting to- gether all the actual and possible resources of the church for the reaching and leading of its homes in the work of religious education, we have the elements out of which may and should be organized a De- partment of the Home.
To this department will belong all that part of the pastor's work which concerns the homes, all the cra- dle-roll work which involves calls, canvasses and correspondence, the home department as now usually run, the home side of the adult class work, the par- ents' department, the home-training side of the teacher-training service, and the principals of all de- partments whose teachers and supervisors make a
140 CHUBOH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
call on the homes for educational cooperation. The missionary societies and all other church agencies contributing to the undergraduate educational pro- gram will be included as interest may Appear.
(b) Organisation and Relationships. — The natural head of the department of the home will be the pas- tor. In the church home council, meeting statedly and representing every agency at work for the homes, he will preside. A home superintendent will organ- ize and correlate the various activities and will sup- ply initiative as to areas needing further service. If the existing home department under its present standard plan can be broadened in thought and sym- pathy as well as in function until every service-con- tributing body is welcomed and full cooperation and supplementation is secured, no launching of a new enterprise will be necessary.
In this connection we may note that it is time to drop the sentimental connection of the home depart- ment with the undergraduate classes of the Sunday school. In the early days of home department pro- motion this was made much of, on the plea that our main work was to get the stay-at-homes to studying the same Bible lesson that the children were study- ing in the Sunday school. With the passing of uni- form lessons this plea has gone out of date. But the logical relationship of the home department has always been in reality with the church proper rather than with the attending Sunday school. And under our new conceptions the church school embraces all that is educational in the life and work of the local cSiurch; the undergraduate graded school of religion
THE SCHOOL AND THE HOMES 141
being one church activity and the home department another.
By the present International standards, as already noted/ the home department and all work for par- ents comes tmder the care of the adult division. Or- ganized work for young people in teacher-training and training for prospective parents goes under the young people's division.
(c) Program. — The ultimate objective of the de- partment, of course, is to cause each home where there are or may be children to embark upon its own proper work of home religious education for each child and to continue this work to the child's ma- turity. Toward this objective the pastor may preach and labour, and the parents in their own department may be led in the development of higher ideals of home religious service. Festival occasions may be utilized for presenting these higher ideals in pageant and dramatic form ; and the claims of childhood on the home may be voiced at father-and-son banquets by the boys themselves.
The systematic efforts of the department, however, will be mainly spent on the securing from every home of the full ten-point cooperation with the church school called for by the scale given above under Section 2c. Under these heads each agency concerned should be asked to formulate exactly what cooperation it wants and to do its part in making such cooperation easy. Reports should be systematically gathered, not from the homes but from the teachers and other workers as to how far cooperation has ^ Chapter I, Sec. 3.
142 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
been rendered and what benefits have been observed therefrom.
Then, if the secretary of the department will ar- range a card index of the homes, recording first the general facts and then the periodically gathered rec- ord of cooperation, exact information on the progress of the homes toward a home policy of religious edu- cation can be recorded without recourse to personal judgment and the making of invidious characteriza- tions. By means of the ten-point scale a statistical measurement may be made of home cooperation ; and reports may thus be given that will stimulate the progress of the department's work.
Assignments I a. What is your own conviction as to the place the home should have in religious education?
ic. What tendency did the home department aim to counteract ? By what method ?
2a, Why is the home properly jealous of inter- ference with its own plans of child-nurture?
2b. In assisting the home along this line, what should be our first step?
2c. Name a few lines on which the church school may properly seek for cooperation from the home.
3a. Why will the home's own program of re- ligious education take a wide range?
3b. Name some of the desirable goals of home effort in religious education.
4a, b. What can the pastor do to help ?
4c. In what ways has the cradle-roll superin- tendent a unique opportunity?
THE SCHOOL AND THE HOMES 143
4d. (i) Why is the home department ambi- tiously named? (2) What can it do to increase the practical value of its present routine?
4e. Name some of the ways in which the adult class may work for the homes.
4f. (i) What specific work for the parents is now done in your school? (2) How would you start such work and extend it after the first steps had been taken?
5a. Why is training for parenthood a community responsibility ?
5b. Why may the community be expected, when the church school is ready, to turn over the general responsibility of training for parenthood to the church ?
5c. (i) Why do we not have in every church school a well-developed plan for training in the re- ligious duties of future parenthood? (2) What part of our present plans may be adapted to that end ?
6a. What elements should be combined into a department of the home ?
6b. How should such a department be organized ?
6c. What are some of the things it can do ?
VII THE BUILDING AND EQUIPMENT
1. Begin Where You Are.
When the newly called administrator takes charge of his church school, the first element of the situation to meet his notice will be the room or rooms in which the work is to be done. So far as these rooms, with their equipment, are fixed and permanent in struc- ture, it will be wise for him to conform the opening steps of his plan to the limitations they impose. He must show that he can work with the tools that are given him; and he needs to gain prestige and a fol- lowing before attempting radical measures. The treatment thus far has therefore said little about ways and means for adapting the church-school plant to the needs of better educational service.
Rooms and tools, moreover, are dead things. No amount of modernness, expensiveness or abundance in the material outfit will supply motive, skill and content of instruction, or can take the place of edu- cational and spiritual life. It is the heart-touch of the living teacher that makes the school. What equipment did Jesus lack for His dialogue with the woman of Samaria, His parables by the lake, His ser- mon on the mountainside? Was not Garfield right in his oft-quoted sentiment that a seat on the end of a log, with Mark Hopkins on the other end, was aJl the university he wanted ? Why then should not the
144
BUILDING AND EQUIPMENT 146
church-school administrator bravely take the rooms and furnishings that he has and go on making the best of them?
2. The Power of the Wall.
Why not? Because Mark Hopkins is not a fair sample of the average church-school worker; nor is Garfield a fair sample of the average pupil; nor is the problem of teaching one auditor comparable to the problem of organizing and administering a school. And if a poor workman is not made a good workman by being given good tools, neither is a good workman given his chance to do good work when he is condemned to work for years under conditions that make fine or even standard work impossible.
Edward Thring, headmaster for thirty-four years at Uppingham School, and a valiant fighter for better conditions in English education, says : ^
" Whatever men say or think, the almighty wall is, after all, the supreme and final arbiter of schools.
" I mean, no living power in the world can over- come the dead, unfeeling, everlasting pressure of the permanent structure, of the permanent conditions un- der which work has to be done. Every now and then a man can be found to say honestly :
* Stone walls do not a prison make. Nor iron bars a cage.'
But men are not trained to freedom inside a prison. The prison will have its due. Slowly but surely the immovable, unless demolished, determines the shape of all inside it.
'Addresses, pp. 75 f.
146 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
" Examine well, in no discontented spirit, seri- ously, hopefully, the structure of your schools — the buildings, the appliances, the tools, the whole ap- paratus for work, living or material. Be not hasty; but never rest till you have got the almighty wall on your side, and not against you. Never rest till you have got all the fixed machinery for work, the best possible. The waste in a teacher's workshop is the lives of men. And what becomes of the waste? You cannot take your failures and lynch them; they live on; they persist in living on; and they hang heavy on the neck of all progress."
3. Makeshift Housing.
(a) The Present Situation. — In the light of this •suggestion, what shall we think of the situation in the ordinary church school to-day? The great majority of these are working in rooms and with tools that were made with substantially different purposes in view from those which our workers are now pursu- ing. There is hardly an item of our program but runs against some architectural limitation to educa- tional progress. Such a limitation is often taken By the worker as a full discharge from any responsibility to bring his work up to standard in that respect. He bows to the authority of the almighty wall.
Many Sunday-school sessions are still held, for all but the primary class, in the church auditorium. Other schools use a broad basement room with a low ceiling, poorly lighted, ventilated, divided and approached. The limitations of the old-time country church are educationally disheartening. Yet between these and the recently erected " modern " Sunday- school building or parish house, if we seek a full
BUILDING AND EQUIPMENT Ul
efficiency, there is frequently not so much to choose. Most of these proudly cherished structures reflect a conception of the nature, mechanism and scope of church-school work that is already passing away. They were built to fit the Sunday school as remem- bered by the building committee, rather than the school of the church and the community as visioned by the educational prophets of to-day.
(b) The Way Out. — Whether therefore the work- ers and the congregation think of their own church- school plant well or ill, it is part of the adminis- trator's duty to study its adaptability to the best and most effective educational service of which his force can be made capable. The limitations that seem final to others must grow transparent tcf him ; and behind them he must discern and fix, with steadily increas- ing clearness, the lines of that better plan that is some day to replace them.
How this vision is to become real must be locally determined. The leader may plan to proceed by successive alterations. He may decide instead to work up a sentiment for radical rebuilding. Where two or three churches divide the Protestant forces of a limited field, he may see that no full attainment of his vision will be possible apart from some form of federation, so that the movement for a real church- school plant may become a community enterprise. In any case he will need a loyal constituency, to whom he may hope to impart his vision. The young folks at least will espouse the cause; and they will grow up. Imagination, enthusiasm, patience and capacity for getting results under difficulties are needed in the
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leader who would outgeneral that all but universal adversary, the almighty wall.
4. How to Plan a New Building.
(a) Emancipation. — The oyster makes the shell, not the shell the oyster. The building, fixed and final as its walls must be, should nevertheless be the plastic and obedient counterpart of the living church that is to use it. But the school that has lived for years in a makeshift building is like a hermit-crab. Its natural structure has been shaped by the limita- tions which its borrowed housing has imposed. Be- fore the leader is ready to think out his new build- ing, he must see just where his school has been pinched and its proper development arrested by the pressure of the wall.
(b) Inherited Limitations. — When the churches, early in the nineteenth century, adopted the Sunday school and gave it place within their walls, they were meeting-houses, places of public worship and preach- ing, and almost nothing more. This type of housing forced the Sunday school to make much of its as- sembly and worship features, instead of making these incidental to classroom work as in the public school. It took a long fight to get even a separate room for the " infant class," and another for the " Bible class." How much of our feeling that the church school is first of all a united assembly is a pure inheritance, a relic of our long bondage to the meeting-house wall?
Obliged to organize its classes in the church pews, and later on the broad floor of the church vestry or prayer-meeting room, the Sunday school soon found
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that there were fixed limits to the size of a class taught under such conditions. The teacher must sit near enough to every child to be able to reach and control him, and must be able to make him hear and attend without having to raise the voice above a conversational tone. Not more than six or eight pupils can be so seated. Where a class grows to ten or twelve, either the pupils or the teacher will soon disturb the adjoining classes and compel a readjust- ment. For a hundred years, therefore, our architec- tural limitations have been forcing on us the purely artificial idea that whereas in a public school forty pupils can be handled by one teacher, in a Sunday school forty pupils must have at least five teachers.
To be sure, we have of late been building class- rooms; and with their help the situation has been sensibly improved. We have also introduced movable chairs in place of pews and benches, tables to cen- tralize class discussion and facilitate the handling of lesson materials, and curtains to cut off disturbing sights. Few of our classrooms, however, represent careful planning for the permanent work of a partic- ular grade. Some are primarily clubrooms for or- ganizations that were strong and articulate enough to get what they wanted. Others are merely im- proved and enlarged locations for main-room classes ; and their size, shape, lighting, ventilation and ap- proach leave much to be desired.
Uniform-lesson methods in the sixties and seven- ties of the last century brought in the Akron type of Sunday-school architecture. For years this was con- sidered the last word in Sunday-school planning.
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Theater-like, the room was built around a central platform. In front were the main-room classes. To one side was the large primary room, with perhaps a junior room on the other side. Back of the plat- form, on the stage, was seating for an adult class. In the rear and around the galleries were the class- rooms, some square, others of lozenge shape, all de- signed first of all to enable the members to see and hear the superintendent. Curtains or movable par- titions cut these off more or less — frequently less — from the noises of the main room. The passing of uniformity has made these buildings nearly as out of date as the old Puritan meeting-houses that pre- ceded them; but in these forms and patterns of con- struction many of our local church leaders will be found thinking to-day.
(c) The Starting-Point. — The authority of ex- perts, as voiced in books on Sunday-school architec- ture, will help the leader in his planning, but is mani- festly a guide to be used with caution; since these inherited forms of thinking may colour even the expert's recommendations. To visit " model Sun- day-school buildings " is equally unsafe, except for suggestions in detail. Obviously, no ready-made plan will exactly fit the special needs of the leader's situ- ation. After all, it is the oyster we need to vision, rather than the shell. What sort of school may our school be, when we can hold it in a building made to fit its real and not merely its inherited needs? When the intricacies of that question have been an- swered, the form of the building will be relatively easy to determine. In any plan for complete re-
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building, there can be no effective starting-point short of a thorough reconstruction of the entire church-school plan.
5. General Principles.
(a) Unity. — Our plant must be planned to serve the church and parish as a whole. From the cele- bration of the communion down, every feature of the church's work has its contribution to make to the religious education of each individual. That educa- tion should be unified, each part related to the others and all combining into a harmonious whole as to every child, youth and man. We cannot therefore think out our school organization and its building without consideration of the church in its entirety.
{h) Efficiency. — For each service that a given room or appliance is to render, it must be made efficient for that service. The floor, shape, lighting, approach and other features of a room, with every fixed appliance, must be worked out from the view- point of what is to be done in that room. All possible advice and experience must be gathered as to this, from experts and from those locally interested. Against this principle the old Akron type sinned, in its habitual robbing of class and department rooms of half their efficiency in order to make them parts of a larger room. Architecturally, also, efficiency is often sacrificed to the requirements of a Gothic or other special style of construction, whose claims are indeed worthy, but should come in after those of efficiency in use.
(c) Economy, also, must be studied, no less than
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efficiency for each service. This calls for considera- tion of the load-factor. What figure will represent the week's use of a given room or appliance, as com- pared with one hundred if it were in use for every available hour of working time? If the church plant might conceivably be used seven hours a day on week-days and eight hours on Sunday, that gives us one hundred half-hours as the units of our weekly scale. On this convenient basis let the leader note the load-factor of his present church auditorium and other rooms. The figures will make a suggestive study.
Obviously, the way to cut building costs on any kind of plant is to increase the load-factor. In a church this can be done by ingenious adaptations of the same room to two or more purposes. Many such adaptations are already familiar; and with broadened plans we shall doubtless find ways of mak- ing many more. But no such economy should be at the cost of educational efficiency in any one of the uses so combined; nor should the proposed shifts and changes entail loss of time and a heavy load of weekly labour.
(d) Suggestion. — The general effect of the plant on the observer should be in line with the purposes of its creation. Externally, in site, grounds and architectural appearance, the church should harmo- nize with its situation and convey an appropriate im- pression of dignity, force and spiritual leadership. The interior of every room and lobby should suggest the emotions and responses proper to the worship and other activities therein to be carried on. Rever-
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ence is caught, not taught; and the unconscious tui- tion of well-planned rooms and approaches is a factor in the educational efficiency of the church-school plant.
6. Provision for New Features.
These general principles clear, we must next in- quire what new features in the development of local and community religious education must be taken account of, if our proposed plant is to be built in full alignment with twentieth century progress.
(a) Community Responsibility. — The church of to-morrow will realize its responsibility to serve the community which remits its taxes and counts on its service in raising moral standards and adding to the community's educational system the element of in- struction in religion. Whether or not a " community church " in the sense of being free from denomina- tional competition, the church must pay its com- munity debt of service to all sorts and conditions of men. Without the least abatement of its gospel of salvation, and without lowering its fellowship service to its own members, old and young, the church of to- morrow will provide rooms for service to some of the less fortunate groups of its surrounding society. The liquor saloon, of unwept memory, frequently found a room and a welcome for the labour group that had no other place of common meeting. Shall the church of the Carpenter of Nazareth be less hospitable in its social planning?
{h) Professional Service. — The unmistakable trend of the times in religious education is toward a wider
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use of professional service. Long before the church- school plant erected to-day has repaid its cost and finished its work, professional directors of religious education will be common, and professional teachers of religion will occupy on whole or part-time salary many of our principalships and teaching chairs. Such workers will refuse to waste time with the facilities we now contentedly offer our faithful amateur band; and the church will refuse to waste money on maintaining them in such a situation. Not all teachers will be paid, by any means; nor will the paid teacher in every case do finer work than the unpaid one. But room and equipment for some professional workers must be built into our new plant, or we may live to see it prematurely out- grown.
(c) Week-day Instruction. — Equally certain is the early incoming of week-day instruction in religion. Many and complex as are the difficulties that still bind us to one hour a week on Sunday, these dif- ficulties are already being successfully overcome. Each year adds to our experience and tends to standardize and improve our methods. The Ameri- can system of education in religion, correlative with but independent of the American public school sys- tem, is coming in. Buildings and rooms will be in- creasingly needed for the week-day teaching of re- ligion, for our own and other children. Classrooms, assemblies, playgrounds, health and recreation facili- ties adapted to regular use on several days of the week by large classes under professional teachers of religion will in a few years be called for. A
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church ambitious to take and keep the lead in serv- ice will build with these uses kept well in view,
(d) Visualisation. — In lantern slides, motion pic- tures and other forms of visual teaching, what new resources may come to our aid within the next few years we cannot tell. Those already at our disposal are ample to warrant the modern church in equip- ping its plant for visual instruction in every possible form. In some of the classrooms, if not in all, lan- tern facilities should, be provided, with a full motion picture equipment in the main social hall. The screens, lighting switches, signals and window-dark- ening facilities, also, should be so arranged that transition to and from visual instruction can be made simply, quietly and without delay.
(e) Play and Recreation. — Along with the Puritan meeting-house we inherited the Puritan mental as- sociation of all sports, games and recreations, espe- cially the theater, with evil. From this association our minds are still far from free. Our Lord, with His inspired educational psychology, saw in the chil- dren's happy street dramatism of marriage dance and funeral wailing, in the social feast, and even in the seven-days' wedding jollification, means of re- ligious education. Even so the great lawgiver of earlier days had seen in the ancient tribal feasts and picnics of springtime and harvest-home the oppor- tunity of the religious teacher. The time has come to build not in prejudice but in wisdom.
When the church is ready to serve the whole life of its young people, it will have the right to their whole allegiance, and not before. So long as it in-
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sists on ministering only to that side of their natures with which its gospel message is primarily concerned, it will continue to get from them a partial, casual and exceptional response. Social amusement is part of the serious life-business of normal youth. Studies, employment, household duties, church work — these have their place; but real life for us young folks is what we do in our marginal hours. Into the enter- prises of these hours we put our whole selves ; be- cause through them we are enabled to mingle with our fellows in the unceasing quest of our hearts for true friends and worthy competitors in one sex and a life-partner in the other.
For the children's play and the games of the boys and girls some architectural provision must be made ; though most of their needs can better be met by the homes, the school and the community. It is for the young people from fifteen to twenty-five that the church needs especially to build. What business does for profit the church must do for love. It must re- member that its young people want to do rather than to be done for; and its facilities, instead of furnish- ing amusement ready-made, must be so shaped as to make it easy for groups of young people to organ- ize, conduct and carry to completion their varied projects of amusement, dramatism and altruistic en- terprise. Where a church keeps up its heart-preach- ing and its evangelistic endeavour and at the same time gives its young people facilities for making its rooms their social home, it may hope to retain their allegiance and bring them through "the slippery paths of youth " to a rounded maturity of loyal and
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well-trained readiness for a wide range of Christian service.
7. Realization.
(a) Working Out the Ideal. — Putting together these critical and constructive suggestions, with all others available, the leader or group of local leaders will steadily work out what their projected new church plant ought to be. Many conferences may be held, at which divergent views will be compared and special studies and visits reported. Step by step needs will grow clearer, plans more comprehensive, courage more audacious and hope more sure. The less likelihood now of a new building, the better the chance for a quiet and unhurried study of the fun- damentals of the situation. A specific group should be organized for the unofficial study of the architec- tural problem, with the understanding that its full so- lution may be a work of years.
(h) Winning a Verdict. — A necessary part of this group's duty, first for themselves and then for the whole church and community, is to win against the present plant a verdict of condemnation. No move- ment for rebuilding can start until the people are dislodged from their complacency. Destructive criti- cism is in itself unlovely and by itself unprofitable; but in every constructive process it must play an im- portant part.
The weakness of such a case is usually its sub- jectivity. The leader knows w^hy he wants better rooms, but he has not yet succeeded in putting his criticisms into objective form. The people know
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them simply as his feelings. The group understands why he so feels, and they are beginning to feel with him; but others are reacting in the opposite way. " This building is a disgrace," say the progressives ; and back comes the reply, " We love it; touch not a single stone ! " If we could measure the building with an educational yardstick and show exactly where and how far it falls short of being what the church needs, we should still need to do much mis- sionary work with the conservative element; but we should have freed our arguments from the charge that they were merely a personal opinion or a fad.
(c) Specifications, Not Plans. — As the studies of the group advance, the tendency will be strong to draw sketches of the new building and its rooms. A limited amount of this sketching will help the committee in its conferences; but the attempt should not be made to formulate final conclusions in this way. No amateur architect is likely to draw a floor plan that will take proper account of elevations, standard lengths and stock sizes and other necessaiy technical details. Where such a plan is submitted to an architect it tempts him to flatter and please his clients by embodying their crude notions in his own plan, though he may see other and better ways of reaching the results they desire.
Specifications, therefore, rather than plans, should be the outcome of the committee's study. Let each member, after agreement on general objectives, draft by himself a detailed statement of what he wants to see embodied in the new building. If he is con- cerned as to the size of a room^ let him specify what
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he thinks its dimensions should be. If he has seen a useful built-in device, or has thought of an eco- nomical adaptation of one room to two uses, let him set down his ideas in shape for committee consider- ation and action. Then let the various papers be studied together, with a joint set of " owner's speci- fications " as the result.
The committee may now proceed, if it will, to con- sultation with an architect; it being stipulated that this action is preliminary, obligates only those in- dividuals who seek the architect's advice and en- tails no lien on the freedom of the church in any plans it may later make for actual building. With the specifications to guide him, a competent architect can easily draft a set of sketches embodying the committee's wishes in the best possible form.
Before such consultation, however, it will be manifest wisdom for any such group to meet with the trustees and other authorities of the church for a frank and full talking over of the project and all its implications. It should be made clear that the objective is not now a new church but simply a clear vision of what a new church should be in order to serve well the needs of religious education. Every possible convert among the powers that be is so much gained toward the real start of the campaign.
(d) Estimates and Adjustments. — Sketch-plans, on a scale of one-eighth of an inch to a foot, can be prepared at small expense and without responsibility for a later percentage on cost, if arrangements are so made. While contractors* estimates cannot be secured on these in any but the roughest form, the
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sketches will do very well as a basis for enlarged public discussion and consideration of economies and adjustments. Of these there will necessarily be many. Every combination that increases the load- factor and makes the plant useful to more people and at more hours per week diminishes the total expense for covering all these uses and either hastens the day of moving in, or releases part of the cost for investment in the reaching of some additional need, or by cutting the total cost brings in new supporters who would oppose a larger expenditure. The outcome of this discussion campaign may come soon, or it may take years to mature in action. Enthusiasm, however, is catching, especially when based on a case made clear. If the group has gone well over the ground of its problem and can stand firmly on the educational need for every one of its claims, recruits will flock to its standard; and the time to sound the call for advance on " the almighty wall " of old restrictions will come betimes.
8. An Available Building Standard.
(a) Origin. — Through the work of the Inter- church World Movement the " educational yard- stick" called for in Section 7&, above, has been made at least partially available. As part of that movement's American Survey of Religious Educa- tion, conducted under the direction of Professor Walter S. Atheam, a thousand-point standard for a city church plant was worked out by a group of edu- cational and architectural authorities and prepared
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for use in the exact objective rating of any existing city or village church plant. A like standard for the measurement of rural church plants was likewise projected but not finished during the lifetime of the movement.
Not only was this standard published in convenient form/ but it was applied by its authors in a sys- tematic survey of the seventeen existing churches, large and small, in a typical American small city; and their findings, with numerous illustrations and comments and a reprint of the standard and its speci- fications, was also published in a volume * which, with the standard, is now available for the guidance of such a group as we have imagined at work on its own local vision. Here is the yardstick for measur- ing every defect and excellence in the building we now have, and with it the material for the construc- tion of our dream of what we ought to have. The issuance of these two manuals should mark an era in the architectural history of the American churches.
(b) Form. — Of the thousand points that would be «cored by a perfect plant for church life and religious education under city conditions, with building laws, materials, inventions and educational apparatus as they stood in 1920, the Interchurch standard makes this allotment:
I. Site 130
Location 55
Nature and condition 30
Size and form 45
* Standards for City Church Plante. "The Maiden Survey.
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II. Building or buildings 150
Placement 20
Gross structure 80
Internal structure 50
III. Service systems 160
Heating and ventilation 40
Fire protection system 40
Cleaning system 10
Artificial lighting system 15
Water supply system 15 *
Toilet system 25
Other service systems 10
Service rooms 5
IV. Church rooms 170
Convenience of arrangement 20
Auditorium 100
Chapel or small assembly 15
Parlor and church board room 5
Church office 10
Pastor's study 15
Church vault 5
V. Religious schoolrooms 200
Location and connection 15
Assembly room 60
Classrooms 90
Cloak-rooms and wardrobes 15
Superintendent's office 10
Supply rooms 10
VI. Community service rooms 190
Rooms for general use 60
Rooms for social service 70
Recreation and athletic rooms 60
Under these subheads there are also specified more
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than a hundred points of detail, to each of which is assigned a standard rating. The accompanying specifications discuss each point in turn, indicating what constitutes standard construction or equipment and what alternative materials or arrangements are available. On fireproof construction and fire safety, heating and ventilation, and the different sizes of pipe organs, the specifications are particularly full and clear.
The important item of illumination, in which so many of our so-called schoolrooms in church build- ings so seriously fail, is reduced to measurement by the use of the foot-candle unit. A foot-candle is the light cast by a standard candle at the distance of one foot. Every seat in church, assembly rooms and classrooms should furnish at least three foot-candles of natural light for the occupant's use. Many like items are covered in this exact and practical way.
(c) Mode of Application. — Application of the standard to the rating of an existing plant, if made by an interested and untrained individual, will be simply a personal judgment with little power to con- vince. A right application is laborious; but the re- sults are well worth while.
A committee of judges should be chosen, repre- senting the various sides and viewpoints concerned. To these should be added a school principal or other educational expert and an architect or builder. If it can be planned to make a comparative survey of all the plants in a town or other community unit, results will be much more satisfactory; because the team will learn the art of quickly reaching a just decision
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on one point after another, and the outcome will be an educational stirring up of community opinion. The team must give time to the work, visiting each plant together, and each man checking his rating of the various points on his own score-card independ- ently. One of the team, then or at another time, will gather the local information called for in the survey blank. After thus inspecting one or more plants, the team should hold a session for report, discussion and settlement of the joint score as to the plant concerned. This was the process followed in scoring the churches of Maiden.
9. A Glimpse of the Vision.
In conformity with the positions of the Inter- church standard, and in the light of the principles and suggestions of this chapter, can we now catch a glimpse of the church plant of to-morrow, as the church of to-morrow will demand that it shall be?
An ample and well-placed site is needed first of all. The church of to-morrow will use its out-of- doors and will fight the limitations of noise, shadowed windows and nearness to sources of foulness and fire. If a generous campus cannot be had in the heart of the city, then auxiliary grounds, easy of access, will be provided for recreation and other uses. On the site the buildings will be so placed as to make the effect harmonious, impressive and uplifting.
Two main halls, one for worship, the other for social and educational assembly, will appear; each capable of seating the full congregation, and each
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built, adorned and equipped in line with the finest ideals of the life it is to foster and train. The social hall must be available for lectures, concerts, choruses, dramatism, pageantry and visualization, while the church must suggest worship, reverence and the pres- ence of God and must fit the needs of minister, wor- shipers, communicants, candidates for baptism, or- ganist and choir. If without sacrifice of these ideals it is found practicable to make one hall serve these two purposes, the general load-factor of the whole plant will be substantially lifted and the cost cor- respondingly decreased. But the difficulties of mak- ing this combination have not yet been successfully overcome.
On special occasions the church school will use the social hall as its place of united assembly. There will be separate assembly rooms for the beginners', primary and junior departments, with classrooms for the cradle roll class of three-year-olds and for the graded classes of the junior department. Each of these junior classrooms will be planned to seat thirty children under good school conditions, with chairs, tables and separating devices for smaller classes while it is necessary so to divide. The upper-grade classes will each have its well-planned classroom ; and there will be an intermediate and senior assembly room, possibly divisible into two, which might also serve as chapel for the mid-week church service and other smaller assemblies. Rooms of adequate size for the adult classes and for the training class and other classes of the young people's department will also be provided.
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Work in each of these schoolrooms will be given full time and freedom from distraction. This will be architecturally encouraged by wide lobbies, easy stairs and landings and convenient approaches from the assembly rooms; by solid walls wherever prac- ticable; by access from pupils' rear; by standard lighting, heating, ventilation, bells and signals; by cloak-rooms and toilets to insure comfort and con- venience for all ages and in all weathers; and by a well-planned service and cleaning equipment to en- courage a maximum of good condition at a minimum of labour and expense.
Equally careful provision will be made for the auxiliary and overhead functions. The library, ex- hibit and supply services will be adequately and cen- trally housed. Secretaries, treasurers, supervisors and other special workers will have desks, cabinets and filing space, with guards against intrusion and facilities for dealing with those they serve. The principals of departments will have desks, book shelving and other facilities for good educational administration. The pastor will have his study, the chorister his music room, the church secretary an office equipped for duplicating, mailing, carding and bulletin work, and the educational executive — direc- tor and superintendent — an office and study worthy of their joint responsibility. The building in short will make for division of function, that every worker in every place may be free at all times to give of his best.
Bodies will be served by this building as well as souls.
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" Let us not always say * Spite of this flesh to-day I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole ! '
As the bird wings and sings. Let us cry ' All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul ! ' "
Safety from the tragedy of fire will be studied in walls, floors, stairs, doorways, storage, wiring and approaches. Cleanliness and sanitation will be thought of, freedom from eye-strain, dust and odours, fresh and warm air, encouragement to healthy and fascinating sports like bowling and tennis, that the sexes can enjoy together and that may satisfy in part the craving of youth for the perilous dance. Full gymnasium equipment, with basket-ball and swimming facilities, will be provided when the way is clear to a non-competitive com- munity relationship, and when a continuous, com- petent and spiritually trustworthy leadership can be assured.
The plant will facilitate the church's relationship of hospitality to the community. Not primarily as feeders to its own membership and welfare, but rather as its ministry to need, rooms will be dedi- cated by the church to mothers and babies, employed boys and girls, workingmen, readers, new Americans and other special classes in the community served. When the church, forgetting its self-interest and catching the full spirit of its Master, builds thus to serve, the answering love, gifts and devotion will in due time vindicate its leaders' faith.
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Every great building embodies and visualizes a great idea. The formative and unifying idea of this building will be aspiration. That life is more than meat, that service is better than gain, that the on- coming generation must distance their fathers in religion no less than in culture and comfort, progress and speed, that the world shall be more brotherly, that earth shall grow nearer to heaven, and that Christ shall have a temple fit for His ministry to men and His communion with the Father, — such is the message that our building and its equipment will carry to the sons of men.
Assignments
1. Why begin work with rooms as they are?
2. Why not so continue ?
3a. Illustrate from experience, if you can, the limitations of current church-school housing.
3b. What gain comes by making alterations? What loss ?
4b. ( I ) How has architecture caused us to make much of our school's " opening exercises " ? (2) How has it limited the size of our classes ?
4c. What must the leader plan before he can wisely plan his new building?
5a. What will his plant include?
5b. What must be his requirement as to each part of this plant?
5c. (i) What is meant by the load- factor? (2) On a scale of 100 half-hours a week, what is the load- factor of your church auditorium? (3). What is the average load-factor of all the rooms? (4) What
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gain in raising the load-factor? (5) What possible loss?
5d. How might the plant be efficient as to every part and yet fail as a whole ?
6. Mention and briefly explain some of the new features that a modern church-school plant should provide for.
7a. How should the leader, having begun to get his vision of the new plant, start the work of making it a reality?
7b. What case must he prove ?
7c. (i) Why not start to draw plans? (2) What would be a better way? (3) What consultations should be had ?
7d. How may the people be interested and their help secured?
8a. What standard for church-plant measurement is now available ?
8b. How is it arranged?
8c. (i) How should it be applied? (2) Of what help would it be to a committee working out a new plan?
9. (i) With special reference to your own field, note those points of the " vision " that you count su- perfluous or unwise. (2) Which points seem espe- cially desirable? (3) What would you add?
VIII TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP SERVICE
1. The Master Task.
High and exacting is every one of the tasks that make up the responsibihty of the church-school ad- ministrator. But when we take the school as a per- manent institution, and think of its possible service and its inevitable needs for the years ahead, one ad- ministrative duty stands out as chief of all. The leader must train his workers and his oncoming ca- dets for the continuance, enlargement and improve- ment of all that is now being done. It is great to labour well to-day. It is greater to insure that better work shall be done by those that enter into our la- bours. The administrator's master task is training for leadership service in the church school.
2. The Size of the Need.
Provision must certainly be made for training "both the present force of officers and teachers and those who will be needed as their successors. What pro- vision? How large is the need which the training service of the church school must arrange to fill ?
(a) Vacancies and Losses. — It is exhilarating to open the session of a well-organized church school, every class with its earnest teacher and every office
170
TEAINING FOR LEADEESHIP 171
with its working officer. But one year's life in most of our American communities will see a fourth, a third or even a half of these places either vacant or filled with a newly found worker. And when we or- ganize our training class of teacher-candidates, how many of those who enrol and start with the class will drop out before graduation or fail for any one of many reasons to report for assignment ?
(&) General Progress. — But during this same year of recruiting, the educational world has gone forward. Higher ideals have been visioned, stand- ards of service raised. The pupils have advanced in their expectations. The community life has ad- vanced in the calls it makes on our graduates for service, and also in the variety and insidiousness of its temptations to evil. We must be doing better work than a year ago, or we are losing ground.
(c) Overtaking the Deficit. — Nor are our Sunday schools yet doing their allotted share of the com- munity's task of education in religion. Every can- vass shows a large percentage of the Protestant chil- dren of school age, to say nothing of the adults, out- side the church school. We can reform this situa- tion only by gaining ground steadily from year to year. The only effective way to make inroads on the mass of the unreached is to make new places in our working force and then go after the outsiders. This means still another call for new workers.
(d) Completing the Course. — One period a week, whether taken at the regular church-school hour or on a night of the week, is all the training time we are usually able to command; and in most fields forty
172 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
weeks is the limit of a possible training-course year. It is the judgment of our leaders that 120 lessons is the least number required to cover the instruction that every church-school worker should receive. If then we can fix the number of candidates whom we should enrol each year, in order to be ready to fill every vacancy and keep the average quality of the work improving, we must multiply this by three to provide for the three years of the standard training course.
(e) A Going School — In the light of these obvi- ous and inescapable needs, how can we longer depend on past customs and limits of investment and effort to provide us with an adequate system of leadership training? And until we are so provided, can we properly call our school " a going concern " ? In many sections the Sunday schools are showing signs of spiritual and educational anaemia. They barely hold their own. They dare not adopt aggressive modern methods, for lack of leaders among their number. In the rural districts they frequently, on slight provocation, give up the struggle and cease to meet. Need we look further for the reason ? In the day of their apparent prosperity they neglected to provide for their own perpetuation and increase. Now they are paying the penalty ; and the children are bearing the first of the long train of losses that come with the breakdown in the processes of relig- ious education.
What system of training, then, will make a pres- ently successful church school reasonably sure of its future ?
TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP 173
3. Undergraduate Training.
(a) From the Beginning. — The whole curriculum should be developed with a view to the place it will have in the training of future leaders and teachers in home, church and school. No point can be set where the element of training for teaching and official serv- ice shall begin. The baby on the cradle roll, in the mind of the wise church-school planner, is due to receive some lessons that will fit him for better serv- ice some day as a religious teacher. The lessons taught the little child, bearing on his fundamental traits of character and the quality of his religion, will some day contribute to his teaching efficiency; and for lack of just such lessons some of our present teachers are inefficient as soul-leaders to-day. It would be reason enough for graded lessons in the church school that through a properly graded course we contribute, through the work of every grade, to the adequacy of the equipment of our future teaching supply.
(b) Junior Training. — With the junior grades, fourth to sixth, ages nine to eleven, our training pur- pose begins to take definite and visible form. Train- ing elements in a junior church-school curriculum may properly include :
( 1 ) Possession of a Bible ; memorizing of classi- fied list of Bible books; association of book names with included stories and memorized material ; daily use of Bible in home readings; practice in reference- finding.
(2) A fairly full cycle of the great stories and
174 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMEHSTEATION
narratives of the Bible, effectively presented and re- produced.
(3) Simple Bible map study; including Palestine as a whole, its topography, contour and main loca- tions; detail of story backgrounds, as the plain of Esdraelon, the western slope of Judah, Jerusalem and vicinity, the Sea of Galilee, etc. ; Sinai and Palestine ; sketch maps of the Old and New Testament worlds.
(4) Memorizing of selected Bible passages for worship and religious expression.
(5) Parallel and additional stories and narratives from missionary history and adventure.
In the best printed treatments of the International and other graded lesson systems substantially all of this matter is included now. It is not easy to cover it all under the limitations of an ordinary church school. A few schools succeed in doing so; and their junior graduates enter the intermediate de- partment with a grip on the basic features of Bible knowledge and an appreciation of Bible values be- yond what the ordinary adult church member enjoys.
(c) Intermediate and Senior Training. — Present graded courses for the six intermediate and senior years (grades seven to twelve) contain, year for year, less of drill material and memory work than does the junior course. Adolescent interest in life demands the full available lesson period for the study and discussion of the character, topic or story as- signed for the day. 'Adolescent independence of au- thority and suggestion, with the heavy program of school work, social engagements, community organi- zations and uncorrelated church work under club, band and society leadership, makes it no easy matter
TEAINING FOE LEADERSHIP 175
to add drill work of any kind to the church-school lesson. When we are able to command even one addi- tional lesson period a week, with a corresponding pe- riod for supervised study, advanced map work and other information lessons may be given, leading to a mental organization of the outlines of Biblical his- tory and the contents of the more important books, and to a great extension of acquaintance with the literature of missions and social service and the facts of church history.
More significant for the prospective religious teacher, however, even than these desired attain- ments, are the present actual results secured by good teaching of the curriculum for these six grades. In the biographical studies which now predominate the pupil is given the key to the Bible as a book of life. Its men and women are made real to him. The les- sons of their lives are expressed for him not only in verbal generalizations but in applications to his own growing ideal of manhood or womanhood. For his present spiritual need he gains a vision of the true values of life ; and for his future use as a teacher he gains an appreciation of the true values of the Bible and of many illustrative and parallel lives from other centuries of time. The requirement that every teacher shall be an intelligent Christian, able to dis- cuss and defend his faith as well as to profess it and to maintain and apply his code of ethics and religious observance, is provided for in the senior studies on the life of Christ and the meaning of church member- ship and the following of Jesus as Lord. Most of the practical problems that confront the adolescent in
176 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
his personal and social living are also faced and sym- pathetically considered in the lesson courses for the senior years.
(rf) Entrance Requirements Fulfilled. — Comple- tion of twelfth-grade study, at the average age of seventeen or eighteen, thus fully prepares the teacher-candidate for entrance on advanced elective studies, which in his case will look forward to quali- fied teaching service. Completion of even the full junior course will amply cover many of the Bible and map lessons of the old-time Sunday-school normal text-book; and the addition of the intermediate courses will give an appreciation of the Bible that will make all subsequent Bible study intelligent and inter- esting. It is, therefore, a reasonable feature of a church-school training system to require a definite covering of graded studies, or an examination to show equivalent preparation, before the candidate is admitted to the training class or allowed with the school's approval and support to matriculate in the community training school. The standard can be set low and advanced grade by grade as progress may warrant.
Normal studies, of course, can be and usually are entered on in the average Sunday school with no such stipulation. The very idea of insisting on any entrance qualification seems seldom to occur. Yet what college or technical school would think of open- ing its courses to matriculants without raising the issue of what they have studied and may now be trusted to know ?
Two of the customary obstacles to the starting of a
TEAtNING FOR LEADEESHIP 177
local training class are the hardness and unfamiHarity of the studies and the lack of interest in the project on the part of the young people whom we desire to enrol. Therefore, it is argued, we should not add to these difficulties by so much as mentioning that candi- dates for the training class shall be required to know anything or to have taken studies of any prescribed grade. Is this reasoning sound? By making mem- bership in the training class an evidence of standing and acceptance shall we make it more or less desir- able? By stressing in advance the need of honest Bible study and fulfillment of graded requirements in order to qualify for entrance on these higher studies, shall we help or hinder the work all along the line? Under such a policy, will the appetite for real studies and worth-while masteries languish or grow? And without a large and well-organized " apperceptive mass " of preparatory knowledge as the teacher- trainer's working capital, can we really fit any one to teach religion?
Graded studies, therefore, should be counted among other things as a necessary and natural prepa- ration for normal studies in the church and the com- munity system of religious teaching. Courses in teacher-training and officer-training should fit and follow the higher graded courses and should be reck- oned as a regular though an elective portion of the school's curriculum. Admission to such normal classes should be handled as the highest honour to which a faithful pupil may aspire; and the require- ments, once set, should be sustained by real tests and unflinching exclusion of the unfit.
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4. The Training Curriculum.
What, now, shall be the form and content of the standard course of studies by which, in a modern church school, the properly prepared candidates for official and teaching positions shall be fitted for effi- cient performance of these high tasks ?
(a) The One-Year Manual. — For young people who have been fragmentarily taught under the uni- form lesson system or where the working ideals of graded lesson instruction have not been reached, and particularly for mature students eager for knowledge but rusty in their habits of study, the most acceptable course of study has been that of the one-year manual or drill-book, with a few crisp outline studies on each of those bodies of information which, it is held, every good Sunday-school teacher ought to possess. This form of instruction came in with the uniform lessons, was perfected in the annual classes of the Chautau- qua Assembly under the lead of John H. Vincent and his successors, and is exemplified in Hurlbut's Teacher Training Lessons and many other manuals of the same type. From 1908 to 1917 it formed the basis of the International " First Standard Course." Of its popularity and the practicability of using it in gathering, holding and graduating a class under un- favourable educational conditions there can be no question.
{h) A Superseded Type. — But in changing from a uniform to a graded lesson basis the church-school constituency has also changed its needs for a normal curriculum. Candidates must now train for real teaching work, rather than for a set of hortatory con-
TEAINING FOE LEADERSHIP 179
versations on a dozen Bible verses each Sunday. They must speciaHze in studies preparatory to service in a particular department. Each topic in the course must be so filled with content that it shall be under- stood and assimilated in detail and not merely memo- rized in outline ; which means that the course must be several years long. The undergraduate studies of the graded lesson course are coming more and more to be found in use in our Sunday schools, with con- sequent better preparation of candidates for normal study. These fundamental changes in the situation make the Hurlbut type of manual an outgrown insti- tution, except where the traditions of the uniform lesson continue to prevail and the leaders are satisfied to perpetuate them.
But deeper than these changes of situation is the shift in the educational center of gravity from the Bible to the child. Once v/e taught the Bible for its own sake. Now we see that it was " written for our learning," and that, precious as its values are, they are not to be compared with the values presented by the children whose lives we seek with its help to guide and form.' The child, therefore, takes the place of the Bible as the primary subject of our study.
(c) The Three-Year Standard Course. — The old- style manuals all began with the Bible, Into forty or fifty short lessons, complete in themselves and leading up to no subsequent studies, they aimed to pack the rudiments of Old and New Testament outlines, Bible
' See also what is said as to logical aiid psychologic aims, Chapter V, Sec 4*
180 CHUKCH-SCHOOL ADMIlillSTEATION
geography and institutions, child nature, methods of teaching and the Sunday school. The eagerly antici- pated outcome of the course was a teacher-training diploma and the status of an alumnus at the annual teacher-training banquet or rally.
Following a vigorous attack on this method and its educational results, made by Professor Walter S. Athearn at the Fourteenth International Sunda}^- school Convention, Chicago, 1914, the denominational leaders of religious education began a carefiil study of the problem of normal curricula. In 191 7 a new standard course of teacher-trainh.g studies was com- pleted by the Sunday-school Council and was jointly approved by them and by the International Sunday- school Association. In distinction from the " first " and " advanced " courses, which it superseded, it pro- vided for:
(i) Three years of study, when pursued at the rate of one 1^- 1 a week for forty weeks a year; a total of 123 lessons.
(2) The course to be divided into twelve units of ten or more lessons each; four units to constitute a year's work.
(3) The material of the course to be selected pri- marily for its training value ; information as such being as far as possible left for graded studies to supply.
(4) The first four units to comprise the studies of greatest general value to all kinds of church-school workers ; so that those pursuing the course for only one year might get the greatest possible help for their future work.
(5) The Bible material in the first year's lessons to be such as is used in classes of every age.
TEAINING FOE LEADEESHIP 181
(6) The first eight units to be studied by the whole class.
(7) The last four units, comprising the third year's work, to be separate for each main specialty of church-school service ; a different text or set of texts for each specialty being therefore required.
(8) Certificates to be granted on completion of any unit or year; a diploma on completion of the full course.
The general titles of the eight units of the united two-year course under this plan, as approved by the Council in 1916 and 1917, are:
First Year: (i) The Pupil; (2) The Teacher; (3) Significance and Teaching Values of the Life of Christ; (4) The Sunday School.
Second Year: (5) Significance and Teaching Values of the Old Testament; (6) Significance and Teaching Values of the New Testament (other than the Life of Christ) ; (7) The Message of the Chris- tian Religion; (8) How to Train the Devotional Life.
Under these titles, variously modified, and under the five sets of titles also adopted by the Council for the five lines of third-year specialization recognized in 1917,' many text-books have since been issued; concerning which the administrator will naturally in- quire of his denominational headquarters, comparing what is there recommended with other texts by differ- ent authors, to find that which will on the whole best meet the needs of his local work.
(d) Preliminary Courses. — So unready is the North American field as a whole for the full program of three-year studies thus outlined, that thousands of ^ See Appendix C.
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workers still cling to the older and simpler text-book form. For many years we shall still have some young persons and many adults who would gladly take training studies for church-school teaching, but who lack preparation to fit them for satisfactorily pursuing the standard course.
If confronted with such a need, the administrator, instead of lowering his standards of entrance and continuance on his regular graded three-year course of training, should organize a preparatory class. The studies of this class will be mainly on the Bible. They may be frankly informational in content and aim. The old-line normal manual will not answer for this work ; but numerous useful texts have been published which may be used to gain a general view of the Bible contents, an outline of Bible history and an introduction to the appreciation of its literary, ethical and religious values. Treatises of this sort, written for this purpose, are much to be desired.
5. Supervised Substitution.
Qualification as a teacher implies experience along with knowledge and good-will. The laws of peda- gogy are as dead as the formulas of trigonometry until we have applied them to living cases, used them in overcoming actual difficulties and so made them part of ourselves. All good normal training, there- fore, involves a certain amount of practice teaching.
(a) No Premature Interruptions. — The training class is never to be used by the improvident superin- tendent as a hunting-ground for emergency substi- tutes. For at least the first term, and preferably for
TEAINING FOE LEADEESHIP 183
the first year, the students should go on with their lessors without distraction or break. To call them out during this period is to disregard and vio- late the conditions of successful training.
But when the interested student has learned the characteristics of childhood at different ages and the elementary rules of good lesson-making, and has had these applied to some of the lessons in the graded course, he will want to try his own hand at the proc- ess. It will then be good training to afford him a chance to do so.
(b) Lower-Grade Departmental Assignments. — In the lower departments, as we have seen,* the de- partment principal does most of the hour's work and is herself a preceptor to her teachers and assistants. Under these conditions, the candidate for future service in any one of these departments may be by special arrangement detailed for a month as extra assistant or substitute teacher. On completion of this period the pupil will resume her place in the training class and submit a report of her experience and observation for discussion and criticism. One or more of such temporary assistants may thus be furnished monthly throughout the year ; and the prin- cipal concerned will organize her permanent force ac- cordingly. The missed training lessons will have to be studied week by week and the recitation work made up with special help from the training teacher.
(c) In the Upper-Grade Classes. — For those who are to teach upper classes, single Sunday assignments will be the rule. Arrangements may be made — per-
' Chapter IV, 3a.
184 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
haps at the monthly workers' conferences — to relieve certain teachers of their classes for certain Sundays two or three weeks ahead; and for these and other expected vacancies the training teacher will prepare pupil-assignments. The pupil-teacher is to work up the lesson with care, if possible after consultation with the regular teacher, and is to submit his plan to his preceptor. This is needful not only for his good, but to make the lesson, for the pupils' sake, as effect- ive as possible. After teaching, he is to report his experience in class for the usual discussion and sug- gestions by fellow-pupils and teacher.
(d) Other Opportunities. — In addition to these outlets for pedagogic expressive activity, the pupil- teachers, especially in the second year and later, should be encouraged to seek opportunities to teach wherever they can be found. Groups of children can be gathered for story-telling; service can often be given in a mission school at some other hour on Sun- day ; or the school can develop its extension service as a branch of the home department and open one or more home classes for weekly visit and instruction in outlying sections of the parish ; the training students acting as teachers. The candidates for service as church-school officers may find their best fields for practice in these out-station appointments, including the supervision of the home classes. A training su- pervisor whose students are eager for such oppor- tunities rather than for diploma credits is a success.
6. The Training Department.
(a) Its Scope. — The real training curriculum, as
TEAININQ FOE LEADERSHIP 185
we saw in Section 3, reaches into every grade of the school. Similarly, every officer and teacher should be a student under training. The administrator's aim should be to make every position in the school force a continuous course of training for better and higher service.
The traveling teacher, attached to an unpromoted class/ has no chance to accumulate experience vi^ith a certain grade and grow proficient through repeated effort. Nor can one who teaches a revolving course of Bible lessons gather a store of recitation material for use when covering the same course with a new set of pupils. But the department faculty member can do both these things ; and so his place in the graded church school is itself a training course. Every year of his experience adds to his value as a teacher.
The scope of the training department will therefore embrace everything in the school that contributes to proficiency in service. The training leader's advice, suggestions and criticism in this direction should al- ways be made welcome. If the secretary is handling his assistants as mere drudges, never giving them a chance to work out some problem or acquire some new experience, his function as a trainer should be called to his attention. If the graded studies in one department are a failure, the training leader should bring up the issue if the superintendent or the direc- tor does not.
The assignment of pupil-teachers as apprentice helpers and supervised substitutes will give the train- ing leader a further relationship to the work in all ' See Chapter IV. 2.
186 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
departments. Tact, therefore, no less than courage and skill, will be a requisite, if the training service is to be developed to the full.
The work will further extend to all the forms of extra-school training discussed in Section 7, below.
(b) Its Leader. — Service to the extent and of the quality thus indicated is obviously necessary, if this master-task of the administration is to be adequately discharged. Equally obvious is it that the fields where such service can be had on our usual volunteer basis will be few and far between.
Here, then, is the point where the far-seeing ad- ministrator may hope with least friction and speediest success to begin the inevitable movement of our church-school system from a wholly voluntary to a partially professional basis. The employment of a director of education is a church matter, of a class with the calling of a pastor. The securing of a com- petent head for the training department is a responsi- bility of the church school.
The need of such a worker and the scope of his or her duties should be explained to the workers' coun- cil. A vote should then be taken to fill the place when the way is clear. A limit of salary may be set and a committee appointed to find the man or woman and the money. Until the church is ready to add this part-time salary to its educational budget, the cost will have to be covered by a special subscription.
The work might form part of the duties of the director; but it is far better placed in the hands of one who has no other task in the school. A Qiristian school teacher or principal, who will accept this io
TRAINING FOR LEADERSHIP 187
place of night-school work under his board of educa- tion, would be the likeliest selection. But the com- munity might furnish some better choice.
(c) Its Members and Methods. — In a small school the trainer will organize one class of young people and carry it over two years of class work, then seeking places for the students in their chosen de- partments, where they may pursue their studies for the third year by text-book study and practice under tutorial supervision. Where the school is larger, as- sistant trainers must be found, so that a fresh class may be launched each year. With students doing third-year work under supervision, the trainer or an assistant should be free of class work during the les- son hour, so as to be able to visit students at work for criticism and suggestion. The second-year students doing supervised substitution should likewise have the help of a critic-teacher whenever this can be fur- nished.
The members of the department should be encour- aged to organize, to develop their social life as fel- low-students, to wear a badge and to look forward to the honours of graduation and entrance on the status of an accredited graduate of the training course.
(d) Equipment. — A room or rooms of adequate size, furnished with student armchairs, ample black- board space, library shelving and a teacher's desk, is clearly needful, if the training classes are to be kept up to purposeful work. The room must be closed from sight and sound of other departments, kept clear of interruptions from visitors and officials and
188 CHUECH-SCHOOL AD]\nNISTRATION
made available for week-day work whenever so needed. Note-books, paper and other supplies should be furnished, and the department's library kept fairly up to date. As most of the graduates will serve the church freely, the least it can do is to be generous in recognizing and meeting the department's requirements for efficient service.
7. Training Outside the School.
(a) Headquarters Leadership. — The church school at its best will need and should use help from the general body of church-school workers, denomina- tional and territorial.
From the educational headquarters of its church or denomination the school's training department is due to receive its approved text-books, the enrol- ment, examination and grading of its students and the general supervision of the training-class work, with much else of suggestion and supply. Some of the denominations conduct field institutes and em- ploy educational representatives whose correspond- ence and occasional visits to the churches may prove to be the starting-point of effective local organization.
Wherever this denominational service is unavail- able or inapplicable, as in the case of a church of a small denomination, a federated church, a union school or a community class formed by joint action of neighbouring churches, the leadership of the state association headquarters may be invoked for a simi- lar service. The conventions and institutes held by the state, county and city associations are likewise fruitful sources of educational inspiration to the
TEAINING FOR LEADERSHIP 189
schools represented; especially where the larger and more progressive churches and church schools give to the united w^ork their active and liberal support. All standard training-class work should be promptly reported to the proper officials both of the denomina- tion and of the associated work.
(b) The Community Training School. — Wherever population and educational interest make possible, the training department of the church school should re- ceive and utilize the immense assistance of a com- munity training school. In the enterprise of starting and maintaining such a school, such a church school as this book has been describing will be an active partner.
In a community training school run on the Inter- national standard there are held each night two sets of lectures or classes, with an assembly period before or between. The school meets on one night a week for at least twenty nights a year. The work is di- vided into two terms of ten or more weeks each. The studies include thorough courses on the Bible, to organize and deepen the workers' Bible knowledge; courses in psychology and pedagogy; courses in the practical methods of the several departments; and courses on such topics as story-telling, map-making, pageantry and dramatism in religious education, and other specialties needed by particular workers.
These studies are planned and announced three years at a time. This enables each student to elect his course so as to cover in three years what he wants to learn. At the end of the three years, or on suc- cessful completion of six units of twenty or more
190 CHUECH SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
lessons each, the standard diploma is awarded to those whose work has been satisfactory. It is usual not to offer all the courses every year. In a properly run community training school — or a school of re- ligious education, as it is also called — each member of the faculty is fully qualified to teach the courses assigned him, and the texts used and classroom standards maintained are those of a college; a high- school training or its equivalent being presumed for all students.
Where such a school is available — even if many obstacles in the way of transportation and the shift- ing of other engagements must be overcome — the leader of the training department will unite with the superintendent to secure the enrolment and regular attendance of as many of the force as can possibl> be induced to attend and work. The small registra- tion fee and the cost of transportation will of course be met by the school. The method courses for the work of the several departments will aid the train- ing teacher in getting his students over the ground of the training-course specialization year.
(c) Summer Schools and Reading Courses. — In thousands of communities, of course, the community training school does not now seem a possibility. From these fields, as well as from the more favoured centers, selected workers may be sent by the church to take a week's course in religious education at a school of principles and methods. A number of these week-long schools are held every summer. The oldest and in some respects the most advanced in educational development is that held at Asbury
TEAIKING FOR LEADERSHIP 191
Park, New Jersey, the first or second week in July. The church school's denominational headquarters will be able in the spring to supply information as to these summer school opportunities; as will also the office of the state association.
In the standard simimer school, as in the com- munity training school, the studies are planned in a three-year cycle. To unite the work of the three years, reading courses are offered, which students may pursue at home. By means of these courses, frequently supplemented by correspondence with the educational secretary at headquarters, the student is enabled to utilize his regular service in class and de- partment as practice work in his course and is fitted for the higher studies of the second or third year. Several of the denominational headquarters also offer correspondence courses for individual training stu- dents who live where an organized class and a teacher cannot be maintained.
8. The Workers* Conference.
Not the least of the training facilities available to the church school is to be found in a properly de- veloped monthly conference of teachers, officers and presidents of older classes. With the pastor as mod- erator, to keep the program to time, a well-digested docket of necessary business items despatched with- out delay, and earnest periods of worship at the be- ginning and conference on problems following the business session, time in addition may regularly be found for a half-hour's study of some vital topic in method. On this topic, announced on a yearly cal-
192 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
endar, one of the principals or teachers or officers may be asked to present a paper, to be followed by a short discussion.
Nothing educates us like the expression of the thought that is in us. One year of such meetings as is here described may well bring up the force to a new level of seriousness as to their work and its claims and problems.
9. The Wider Outlook.
Divine grace, ministered through determination, hard work, the pastor's sympathy, full cooperation in the departments, the raising of a fund for paid leadership and the finding of the right leader, may enable the church school to develop its training func- tion as is here described. What will the harvest be ?
(a) In the School. — Advance provision for need, in the form of a waiting list of graduates ready in each department for the next class vacancy, will be the immediate end of our efforts. Several years of steady progress should bring us approximately to that condition. Automatically we shall thus fix a higher rating for our teaching service and increase the pressure for standard educational results. Some of the teachers older in service will improve their work ; others will resign. The pupils, especially those of high school age, will respect our calls for attend- ance and home study as they do not ordinarily respect them now.
(b) In the Church. — If ours is a church school, it should offer training for church as well as church- scbool service. Home visitation, church and bencv-
TEAINING FOR LEADERSHIP 193
olent collecting and finance, leadership and service in aid and missionary societies and church boards, and service in the simpler forms of inter-church co- operation, are among the method specialties that may be offered as elective courses in the church school's training curriculum. As this broadened service is felt in the church life, through the incoming of trained recruits for these needed services, the problem of support for a work so manifestly profitable will be sensibly lightened.
(c) Life Service. — Abundant experience shows that when real training is anywhere given for volun- tary and marginal Christian service, it stimulates some of the students to the point of dedicating to the work their whole hves. The Lord has need of such workers ; and every year sees the need increase and the prospect brighten of a living salary and a standardized service awaiting the qualified worker. Already we have the standardized profession of di- rector of religious education and that of the deacon- ess or trained church worker. Soon we shall in like manner standardize that of the graded teacher of religion, with its basis of church or community sup- port.
It is high time that our church school should seri- ously consider these coming needs. If we are to be ready to meet them, the boys and girls concerned should be under elementary training now, and every likely recruit of older age should be encouraged to train to the limit of present opportunity. Profes- sional schools exist where a student in residence may coD^lete the training begun at home. Departments
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of religious education in Christian colleges are more common than formerly and are doing better work. If one in ten of our enrolled training students is led to turn his eyes to the white field of religious educa- tion as his life-call, will not that result alone make all our efforts worth while ?
(d) Reciprocity. — It is American to move. Many of those whom we seek thus to train for service in our own church school and the homes of our parish will in a few years, perhaps in a few months, go else- where. What then? Is the effort to be counted lost? Does not the strong school owe a debt to the field at large akin to that which it seeks to pay in its missionary offerings? Should we not rejoice to send forth a stream of leaders who in some less fortunate place may reproduce the standards and the atmos- phere of the old school at home?
Mention was made at the outset of this chapter of the drawback of transient workers. It is indeed a discouraging feature of our work. But are we not obligated in honour to give to the field at least as much as the field sends back to us? When every church school is doing its part in the service of train- ing for Christian workers, the evil of transiency will largely disappear.
Assignments
1. Why is training the master task of the church- school administrator?
2. (i) What percentage of the pupil-members of your school should be students in training? (2) In calculating this, what should be taken into considera-
TEAJNING FOE LEADEESHIP 195
2e. How does lack of adequate training aifect Sunday-school conditions generally?
3a. How does good elementary religious training contribute to training for teaching service ?
3b, Name some of the training features of the graded junior course.
3c. What contribution is made by the graded in- termediate and senior studies?
3d. (i) Why is it reasonable to set up entrance requirements for the school's training course? (2) What obstacles will this help to remove ?
4a, b. Why is the one-year drill-book type of teacher-training manual no longer standard ?
4c. Give some of the features of the present standard outline plan for the training course.
4d. What preliminary study may this call for?
5a. Why should the superintendent in need of substitutes let the training class alone?
5b. How may the students training for work with children get contact with the work of their prospec- tive grades?
5c. How may pupil-teaching in the upper grades be handled ?
5d. What other chances for practice are avail- able'
6a. How wide is the scope of the training de- partment ?
6b. (i) What are the minimum qualifications es- sential in a successful leader of the training depart- ment? (2) How may such a leader be secured?
6c. How shall the training class be taught in the S3>ecialized third year of the standard course?
196 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
6d. How would you build and equip the room or rooms for a training department in your school ?
7a. (i) What help may be sought from the school's denominational headquarters? (2) From the headquarters of the state association?
7b. (i) What is a community training school? (2) Does it supersede or stimulate local training work? How? (3) What should be the relation of the church school to its community training school? (4) If none, what to the need for one?
7c. ( I ) What is a summer school, or " school of principles and methods," for church-school workers? (2) How does it complement the work of the com- munity training school? (3) How can its work be made continuous from year to year?
8. How can the school's monthly workers' con- ference be made a training force ?
9. (i) Mention some of the results that a well organized training department may be expected to secure. (2) State if you can any such results that have come to your attention.
IX
THE YEARLY PROGRAM
1. The Annual Goal.
(a) Not Sessions but Years. — Between the work and the ideals of the old-line Sunday-school super- intendent and those of a modern church school the distinctions are many. One fundamental distinction should be emphasized; especially as it is subject to personal exceptions on both sides. The superinten- dent of the earlier ideals was wont to make his plans and do his work session by session. Modern ideals demand that the executive shall make his plans by the quarter, the season and the year.
The goal for next Sunday is not primarily a rec- ord attendance and an inspiring session. Success to this extent is surely desirable, providing it can be attained without the sacrifice of higher values. The true goal for next Sunday is rather the making of a definite and standard contribution, in every class, department and assembly, to the lesson-teaching and character-shaping work undertaken for this school year.
The year forms the natural unit of all school work. While the school and the college emphasize terms and semesters or half-years, it must be remembered that they work twenty or thirty hours to the church school's one. The church school should take pains to punctuate its years one from the other, if this punctuation is not already effected by the vacation
197
198 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
period. When this clear marking of the years has been made, it will be possible to formulate and keep in mind an annual educational goal.
(b) When Shall the Year Begin f — The educa- tional year of the church school will naturally begin, with the graded lesson courses, on the first Sunday in October. No other date fits our American school habits, to which all systems of graded lessons con- form. This fixes Promotion Sunday, with its public transfers of pupils, classes and teachers, on the last Sunday of September; in order that all grades may start with Lesson i on the following Sunday. An earlier Sunday in September may be taken if more convenient.
Four full terms of three months each is the ideal to be striven for everywhere. But where attendance runs low in the summer, or the school is closed al- together, classes are frequently reorganized and pro- motions made on Children's Day, the second Sunday in June, or on some other Sunday of that month. This then becomes the school's commencement day for the year; the summer work if any being sepa- rately planned for on a reduced scale, with fewer workers and consolidated grades. It is then in order to hold on the last Sunday of September a setting-up day, in which the new roll of teachers is called over and provision made for vacancies which have devel- oped since June.
Whenever it may occur, the end of the school's teaching year should be a high day, with formal an- nouncements and the conferring of honours, and .with such speaking and exercises as will lend dignity
THE TEAELY PEOGEAM 199
and interest for all grades to the completion of an- other unit in each pupil's life-work of religious edu- cation.
(c) A Goal for Every Work. — Back of the public school's commencement lies a year of serious work, the plans for which, in every class, grade and study, were made at the beginning and followed up with determination. Illness or absence of a teacher, dif- ficulties with the heating plant, an epidemic and quarantine — these were not placidly taken as full ex- cuse for failure to keep work up to schedule. Sub- stitutes were found; emergency measures were adopted; the term was lengthened to make up for lost time. The public school takes itself seriously. When the church school does the same, its com- mencement also will be a really momentous occasion.
The educational leader, therefore, must plan his year of work, not only for the school in general but for each department and class and for every empha- sized specialty. He will do this, of course, through the principals, supervisors and teachers concerned, by calling on each to prepare and submit his state- ment of plan for the coming year's work and results expected therefrom. These drafts, after study in committee and digestion into standard and simple form, will be supplemented by the formulated goals of the general officers and presented to the workers' council for adoption and record; after which each worker will take his carbon slip and keep it before him throughout the year.*
*A detailed statement of such goals for a Sunday school of fifty members, presumably in a rural neighbourhood, will
200 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMIKISTRAHON
No goal for any work, of course, can be more than an estimate of what good work should accomplish in that place within the unit period. No worker is bound by the goal except as he himself accepts it as his challenge. Each worker so accepting will pro- ceed to pass on the challenge to his pupils or under- workers and call on them to join in making the chal- lenge good. The spirit in which these goals are pre- sented, therefore, will have much to do with the suc- cess of the effort. No goal should be set that earnest effort by real workers cannot reach. But allowance may be made for the factors of improvement in per- sonal efficiency and in the cooperation and coordina- tion of other lines of work ; so that the goal is higher than Tan be reached unless these improvements are secured.
2. Promotions.
(a) Remaking the Graded Roll. — ^The children are constantly growing. If the graded structure of the school is to remain and grow stronger year by year, promotions are inevitable. These may take place semi-annually with the very little children, every three years in schools graded departmentally ^ and annually in all other cases. The effective handling of these promotions will constitute an important fea- ture of the educational year,
he found in the author's " How to Run a Little Sunday School," pp. 117-121. As arranged for a school of this type, the statement covers the five heads of community uplift, development of Christian character, Bible teaching, training for service and self-perpetuation. ' Chapter III, 8t.
THE YEAELY PIIOGRAM 201
If the name of every pupil, with the grade to which he belongs and the class in which he is now enrolled, lies before the educational director in the school's graded roll, it will be easy to make up the list of those to be promoted from the third grade of one department to the first grade of the next. Promo- tions within the department will be equally clear. If this roll has not been prepared or is uncertain, pro- motions will give trouble and may lead to unpleasant personal issues with pupils and parents. Suggestions for making transfers of pupils earlier in the year, in order to bring the graded roll and the roll by classes into closer harmony, were given under Chapter I, 3, above.
(b) The Policy of Na Demotions. — It is not well to demote pupils in the church school for failure to reach a standard set for lesson preparation and mas- tery of graded studies. If in this or any other way it is learned that the pupil properly belongs in an- other and younger group, a transfer may be made; but this should rather be done informally and earlier in the year, as suggested in the reference just cited. The information-content of the courses is important ; but our dominant aim is spiritual, the growth of character, the development of interest, ambition, en- thusiasm, reverence, faith. Fear of demotion is of no avail in the reaching of these ends. Moreover, when a pupil fails to reach the standard it is some- times his own fault; but the real trouble may lie at home or with the teacher. Our policy should be to give each class each year its full chance to receive and profit by the school's instructioR, and al tit
202 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
year's end to move it along, that its members may be properly grouped for the new year and that room may be made for the others coming on.
(c) Promotion Day Suggestions. — With the policy of no demotions should go an earnest effort in each department to bring every pupil up to the line, with the assignment of extra honour work for those able to carry it. Credits should be given throughout the year in the classes for work done, with monthly re- ports to parents of attendance, lesson work finished and other items as deemed vital. If this has been done, it will be easier to insist on lost work being made up before the pupil is ready to move on to the next grade. Honour work, especially in the junior department, is usually given public credit at com- mencement in connection with the pupil's promotion.
Other suggestions for the conduct of Promotion Day and for work during the year which will tend to its success may be thus summarized :
(i) In the main school assembly, advertise the grades during the year ; sometimes by dismissing one grade after another, beginning with the higher grades, sometimes by asking one grade to answer a question or read a passage, and again by references to what a particular grade is studying. This stimulates graded ambition and encourages the pupils to look forward to gaining a grade at promotion, even though at the cost of changing teachers.
(2) In a large school only the names should be read which are promoted from the roll of one de- partment to that of the next ; with mention of honours. In a small school it will be possible to read the whole graded roll as it stands for the new year.
THE YEARLY PEOGRAM 203
(3) Promote from the top down. Announce first those entering the young people's department from the senior, then those intermediates who become seniors, and so on, finishing with the cradle roll mem- bers who have become beginners during the year.
(4) Handle each department differently. It is easy to disgust the older pupils with " baby work." In all cases let the pupils of the department to which the promoted pupils go have a hand in the work of welcoming them.
(5) Interesting programs have been prepared for use by the principals of the juvenile departments on Promotion Day. These will usually need pruning, to keep the whole exercise within limits and allow of the necessary general announcements. Give each department its time allowance and see that it is ob- served.
(6) In welcoming the new juniors from the pri- mary department, the school should present each with a small but clear-print Bible, American Standard Version, suitably inscribed. This provides him with his text-book for the work of the first year junior lessons, standardizes the school's Bible supply, adver- tises \he school to all his friends and takes the place of the useless giving of Bibles at Christmas. Later, as a senior, he will need a reference Bible ; not now.
(7) Before closing, each principal should have an opportunity to explain to his department as to the new courses which begin on the following Sunday. The teachers will have received their pupil's and teacher's books at least three Sundays before. The best way to insure this opportunity will be to dis- miss the departments to their separate rooms.
(8) Promotion Sunday should be clearly dis- tinguished from Rally Day. The former is a family affair of the school, to which guests may be invited, but in which the school's educational needs have the right of way. Rally Day is a public gathering of all
204 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
Sunday-school members and friends, old and new, to emphasize the duty of regular attendance through- out the year. It is best held several Sundays later. The need for any such occasion, with its high-pres- sure advertising, is a significant sign of our low edu- cational status. Go-to-Sunday-school Day, empha- sized in some fields, is a still more popular affair, be- ing an appeal to the whole community. This should come later still.
3. Appointments and Installations.
(a) The Principle. — Following the problem of making up the new graded roll and carrying it into effect through promotions will come the kindred problem of the recasting of the teaching force. How shall the administration set back the organization to the form it had one year ago, improve and enlarge it where advisable, fill every vacancy, strengthen every weak place, locate each worker where he can do his best for the school, and equip and inspire the whole force for better service ?
In connection with the problems of upper-grade teaching, the annual appointment of teachers has al- ready been discussed.' The same method should be used with the teaching and staff forces of all the de- partments.
If the school is not already committed to the prin- ciple that no class owns its teacher and no depart- ment its principal or assistants, but that every mem- ber of the teaching force is subject to appointment where his service will be of greatest good to the school, it should be led to that position and com- ' Chapter IV, 6c.
THE YEAELY PEOGRAM 205
mitted to it as a permanent policy. Every Methodist minister is subject to the appointment of his con- ference. Every Moravian minister takes his ordina- tion subject to the right of his church to send him anywhere, to a home field or to some lonely post on the " far-flung battle line " of that heroic communion. The church schools that have resolutely applied the appointment principle, in place of the old notion that we dare not interfere between a class and its beloved teacher, have found it both workable and popular. Wise management will of course take due note of personal and class preferences and will meet these as far as school interests will allow.
(b) Method of Application. — The general issue as to annual appointments should be raised and settled, with the mode of operation, early in the year. The only open matter as commencement approaches will then be the various personal applications of the prin- ciple. Appointments should be announced as far ahead of Promotion Sunday as the school's seasonal calendar will permit, to allow the new appointees time for advance study of their assigned lesson courses. The resolutions by which the principle is adopted should also indicate the authority that is to make the appointments and when they are to be an- nounced.
The following form of resolutions is suggested:
(i) Every divisional, departmental and class posi- tion in the teaching force of this school, including principalships, staff and assistant positions and teach- ers' chairs, shall henceforth be filled by annual ap- pointment.
206 CHUKCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
(2) Appointments to these positions shall be an- nounced on the Sunday next before Promotion Sun- day (on Commencement Day if that is held in June), by the pastor, or in his absence by the superintendent.
(3) Appointments shall be made by a board of appointments, consisting of the pastor, the director of religious education, the superintendent, the di- visional and departmental principals and the church committee on religious education (or other central educational authority).
(4) Each principal shall submit to the board his recommendations for the positions of his department and shall be consulted as to any changes in these which the board may deem needful for the common good. Temporary appointments and the filling of vacancies arising during the year shall continue to be made as heretofore provided. (If by principals, so specify.)
(5) Principals, staff officers and teachers, when newly appointed to the force, must first be confirmed as eligible to appointment in the manner now pro- vided. (Specify how.)
(6) No teacher shall be transferred with his or her class to the next higher department, unless at the request of the director of education and the prin- cipals of both the departments concerned.
(7) Requests for the return of teachers or other appointees to their former places may be considered by the board only after the appointee has filled the new place for at least two Sundays.
(8) Teachers and others left without appointment shall remain on the roll of the workers' council as reserves for vacancies and for service as substitutes and on committees.
(c) Installations. — On Promotion Sunday if there is time, or on the following Sunday, or, still better,
THE YEAELY PEOGRAM 207
at the pulpit service of the church on either of these days, should be held a brief service of installation for the offigers and members of the teaching force. It is not desirable that this shall be elaborate and "preachy"; nor is there need of a prepared form other than such as any pastor should be able to write for the school. The service will include an appro- priate hymn; a roll-call of the principals and their staffs, with the names of the teachers at the same time or in a separate call ; the gathering of all at the desk or pulpit as their names are called; suitable brief Scriptural selections, with or without responses provided to be made by the appointees; a pledge to faithfulness; a verse or two of exhortation; and a closing prayer and benediction.
4. The General Officers' Year.
(a) When Shall This Begin? — The school has a business year as well as an educational year. This also must be punctuated with care, that it may con- stitute for each officer a definite trust, to be annually reported on and its results compared with the goals and carried to the records.
It is not necessary, and it is seldom desirable, that the school's educational year and its business year should agree. We begin our personal year on the first of Januaiy, our business year whenever it suits us to close our books, and our church year, in most bodies, on the first of April or at Easter. It is with this church year, rather than with the graded lesson year^ that we should begin and close the official year of the church's school of religion. If this comes in
208 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
April, a new administration will have no more time than it needs to prepare for the opening of all depart- ments on a standard scale of efficiency by the first Sunday of October,
(b) Elections and Appointments. — Following the principles already laid down as to official appoint- ments/ the church, through its committee on re- ligious education or its highest governing body, will nominate the superintendent, assure itself informally of his acceptability to the workers' council, and pre- sent his name to that body for consideration and elec- tion at its meeting next before the close of the school's business year. The newly elected superin- tendent, then or at the next meeting, will nominate the members of his executive staff — associate, secre- tary, chorister and librarian, — and the council in like manner will elect them and receive and confirm their appointments to the various subordinate posi- tions.
Responsibility for making this process a means for avoiding friction, eliminating inefficiency and secur- ing each year a stronger and better organized corps of administrative officers will rest with the chairman of the workers' council, who is presumably the pas- tor. He must see that opportunity is given for frank questioning of the wisdom of any of these appoint- ments, that due regard is had to the principle of pro- motion for efficient service, and that each appointing officer accepts full responsibility for the training and faithfulness of his subordinates, and for the accept- ance of any who may not be present when elected. * Chapter II, 3c; 7.
THE YEAELY PEOGEAM 209
He will also enforce whatever rules the church may- have as to the eligibility of new appointees.
(c) Installations. — On the first Sunday of the school's administrative year, preferably in the pulpit service, the new officers should be installed in the same general manner as the teaching force, but with the use of a varied selection of Scripture and song and a different pledge and exhortation.
(d) Annual Reports. — Every officer in the super- intendent's cabinet should make to him an annual re- port, covering whatever items he may call for. These should be in hand in time to enable the superintendent to utilize them in the preparation of his report to the church at its annual meeting. They should include statistics of resource, operation and result, with such facts as may show the value of the work and the profitableness of the church's investments therein. All reports should be in writing.
The treasurer's report, while properly made to the workers' council as disbursing body of the school, should be submitted in duplicate to the superintendent with the other reports, as he will need the informa- tion it contains. Reports of the department prin- cipals and the other special departments, home, teacher-training, etc., may also be called for, to show what the school is now doing and what results of the year's work have been noted so far.
Digesting these, with his own record of service, into one clear, specific and carefully condensed story, the superintendent will prepare the annual report of the school. He will in this make mention of note- >vorthy records of faithfulness in service and will
210 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMTNISTEATION
endeavour to voice the school's administrative ideals. If the church has a director of education, he may make a separate report or let the educational work of the school be reported by the superintendent, as may be mutually agreed on. Any officer's report may be presented separately if the superintendent and his advisers so agree. All these reports may vi^ell be laid first before the workers' council for discussion, amendment and approval, before presentation to the church.
5. The Annual Budget.
Attached to the superintendent's annual report to the church should be his budget of estimated needs for the new year. This indeed should better be pre- pared in time for previous consideration by the church trustees or other authorities, that they may be enabled to incorporate its total in their church budget for submission to the meeting. The super- intendent's report will then be a speech in defense of the school's asking; and if the trustees have scaled down his estimate, he will be in position to plead for the original figure.
In preparing the budget, the experience of the present year should first be carefully studied by means of the treasurer's report, the file of bills pay- able if any, stocks on hand, and other facts available. Each officer and principal should then be consulted and asked to submit his needs for the year ensuing. A finance committee of the council may then digest these, compare them with the offset resources and with the giving power of the school, and make out
THE YEARLY PEOGEAM 211
the list of appropriations, to be confirmed or revised in accordance with the action of the church at its annual meeting.
In defending his budget before the trustees of the church, the superintendent may, if he pleases, use the weekly offerings of the school as a sHding scale with which to adjust the financial weight of his proposal to what the church will bear. It is manifest wisdom educationally to train the pupils — all the pupils, not merely those whose parents are church attendants and contributors — to contribute to the support of the church which sustains the school. Be the parish never so wealthy and so interested in missions and benevolences, the school should at least once a quar- ter make an offering for the support of our church and should understand what it is doing. If the church is poor and needs all that the school can raise, the figures may be reversed, with a missionary or benevolent offering once a quarter; and between these any proportion of Sundays may be taken that will suit the situation. Then, with his offer already ratified by council action, the superintendent may challenge the church to take up the support of their own school, promising in return that the school will stand by the church, and that neither this year nor in the future will the church be the loser by its pres- ent generosity.
6. The Festival Calendar.
(a) Forestall Worry. — At certain seasons in our community life, especially among the children, the festival spirit is in the air. Woe to the superinten-
212 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
dent whom the advent of this spirit takes unawares ! To some leaders Christmas is a nightmare and a year-long worry; to others it is a precious oppor- ''tunity. The way to the latter attitude is through a year-long plan of festival preparations, with due re- gard to educational principles of festival observance.
Some church schools follow the Christian year in their observances. Others take the popular sequence of Easter, Children's Day, Rally Day and Christmas ; with Mothers' Day, Thanksgiving and other minor festivals in between. Whichever we use, it is pos- sible so to unite these with the weekly life of the school that the whole shall form one educational, spiritual and social enterprise, each part contributing to the success of the other.
(b) Departmentalize. — Many of our Christmas difficulties disappear automatically when the school is handled by departments. Where the department meets in its separate room, recognition of all but the most significant festivals should be left with the de- partment principal. The interests and habits of the beginners and primary children are so distinct from those of the older ones that a separate observance by these of the social features of all festivals is en- tirely in order. This is now the usual plan in the larger schools.
Once a quarter, or at the major seasons of the Christian year, the whole school should assemble on Sunday for its united festival worship. The begin- ners may march in with the others, take their part in the program, and soon after retire to their room for their own story and worship. This experience
THE YEARLY PROGEAM 213
of the visible unity of the school will persist in the memories of even the smallest children until the next festival and will render quite unnecessary that weekly sacrifice of departmental separateness on which some superintendents unfortunately still in- sist.
(c) Use the Young Folks. — While the Sunday festival observances are part of the year's educational program, to be handled under the director's lead, with the best efforts of superintendent and chorister to make them spiritually effective, the week-day and evening occasions are part of the social and recrea- tional program. These, too, contribute to the edu- cational program indirectly. Much of their potential educational value is lost when the school fails to make them as far as possible enterprises planned and carried out by the young people.
Busy as the young folks are, they can generally find time for real enterprises that appeal to them as large and worth while, and in which they can be hap- pily associated together. A young people's depart- ment, or two classes working together, with the boys and girls helping as needed and next time doing it themselves, can with very little supervision from the adult leaders " put over " a first-class Christmas en- tertainment for the whole school, and will gain in character and leadership power thereby. But they must be given ample time for preparation, hearty co- operation, sympathy and appreciation and a reason- ably free hand.
(d) Use the Graded Work. — Each department should be encouraged to take its turn in contributing
214 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
to the festival program. Instead of having some- thing from each department every time, let the pri- mary department favour the school with something good this quarter, the juniors something better next time, and so on. This may apply both to the Sun- day observance and to the evening entertainment. The aim set before the participants should be to make the platform work as far as possible a sample or an outgrowth of the matters it has learned or become interested in. This cannot always be done; but whenever it is done it should be especially com- mended. Meaningless recitations given in parrot fashion by single children, and didactic platitudes in dialogue form, testify to the poverty of the depart- ment's educational program.
At the outset of the quarter, in a junior or inter- mediate department, the principal may designate some of the work as festival material, to be dram- atized, pictured in pageant or tableau form, or pre- sented through selected essays or narratives, or a jointly worked out exhibition of models and maps. A platform map exercise, if well rehearsed, is al- ways impressive. Where drill-work on the Bible books has been done, it may be exhibited by ques- tion and answer; some honour pupil acting as inter- locutor. If the rest of the entertainment is bright and snappy, an interlude of serious material, well and strikingly presented, will heighten and not mar the success of the show. The festival thus adds zest to the lessons and aids in securing home study and parental interest.
(e) Make the Music Count. — The Sunday festival
THE YEAELY PEOGEAM 216
observances may also be made to pay tribute to the general progress of the school. The worship pro- gram, instead of being accepted ready-made from the missionary or Sunday-school headquarters of the denomination or bought of a music house, should be worked out by the leader and the chorister and printed in outline for the use of school, participants and congregation. Following the order of worship should come the school's story of its quarter's work, with honours and announcements. The festival thus advertises the school, at less cost than is usually in- curred by the use of purchased orders of service.
During the months preceding the festival, the music needed for the program should be introduced and sung in the weekly sessions of the school, with special selections learned by the departments and per- haps by a chorus or quartet. If a properly educational hymnal is in use, it will be easy to select and learn the hymns to be sung by the school. The responsive reading can also be taken from the hymnal, or spe- cially provided. Care should be taken not to infringe copyright by reprinting copyrighted hymns without permission. If the book supply is what it should be, this will not be necessary.
In some schools a certain hymn is always sung at Christmas as that school's Christmas hymn; and so with other seasons. The associations thus established remain through life and help to fix religion as a part of character.
7. Picnics and Outings.
The Sunday-school picnic has a high historical
216 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
value. It is the testimony of our predecessors to their belief in social fellowship and the physical side of religious education. The recent developments in organized class life and club activities for boys and girls should never be suffered to overshadow the great day when pastor, superintendent and other dig- nitaries meet all ages and social classes on the play level and show what they can do. It is a question whether a man is fit to superintend a Sunday school who does not enjoy the annual picnic and cannot see wherein it may be made a means of grace.
Not all picnics, indeed, are entitled to such a rating. The centrifugal forces of the occasion are strong. Family and clique parties tend to get together, ignor- ing the crowd. Young folks who should be think- ing of others go off in squads, or two by two. The burdens of the day are borne by the faithful few. Against these tendencies there should be worked out a plan of centralization that will distribute the re- sponsibilities and keep the crowd attracted together for at least half the day, leaving a reasonable amount of free time for those desiring to organize their own company. Here, as at the Christmas festival, the young people should be challenged to take charge of the social and athletic features on behalf of the school as a whole.
Department picnics and outings have a special value, bringing together as they do the children of like age and their teachers and developing in the de- partment the spirit of fellowship and team play. The tasks of the graded lessons will not seem so hard to accomplish, if asked for by teachers who can lead x|
THE YEAELY PBOOEAM 217
fine games and are willing to spend a fatiguing day in giving pleasure to others. For a department with no separate room, the department picnic or excursion is an invaluable invigorator of department spirit. But under all conditions, there is room in the sum- mer's program for one general picnic or excursion and another outing for every department and organ- ized class.
8. The Ordering of Supplies.
In a well-managed church school every material need will be fully met at all times. Year after year, without breaks and need of explanations, teachers and classes will receive the right text-books and pa- pers on the right Sundays. Festival, financial and secretarial supplies will arrive in time for scheduled use. Hymnals and Bibles needing rebinding will drop out of sight before loose pages are gone and from time to time will reappear in new dress or be replaced. Broken chairs and tables will be attended to. Erasers and crayons will be found in good con- dition where they belong. The little jolts that slow down a school's educational efficiency will be fore- stalled by rules, organization and adequate budget provision for upkeep and renewal.
Traditionally, the secretary is purchasing agent for the Sunday school. It certainly conduces to order and system for all supplies to be ordered by one of- ficer, except as may be provided for by giving the department principals allowances for incidentals, which should always be done. But back of the agent should be a purchasing system, audited by the super-
218 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
intendent or his associate and operating under a few simple rules, such as :
(i) Principals shall place with the secretary their yearly orders for graded supplies not less than six weeks before the first Sunday of the lesson year. (Change number of weeks to fit time required for sending orders and receiving shipments.)
(2) Changes in quantities desired shall be reported to the secretary three weeks before the first Sunday of each quarter.
(3) Supplies for principals and teachers, including one each of teacher's book and pupil's book or paper for grades covered, shall be delivered to departments on the third Sunday before date of first lesson.
(4) Supplies for pupils shall be delivered on the Sunday before date of first lesson.
(5) Principals shall retain full sets of the books used in their departments.
(6) Teachers' books not purchased by teachers shall be returned to the secretary (or librarian) at the end of each quarter, together with all left-over pupils' books.
(7) Before ordering new supplies, the secretary shall ascertain how much of next quarter's needs can be met out of stock on hand.
(8) All orders for graded supplies and for peri- odicals shall first be approved by the director of edu- cation and the superintendent (or associate acting as comptroller of the budget).
(9) The librarian shall be responsible for the con- dition of the hymnals, Bibles and library books. He shall promptly remove from use all loose and dam- aged books and shall hold classes responsible for damage beyond ordinary wear and tear. He shall from time to time, as needed, submit to the superin- tendent proposals for rebinding or renewal of book
THE YEAELY PEOGEAM 219
supplies and for the purchase of new books for the library.
(lo) The associate shall be responsible for the con- dition of furniture, blackboards, maps, pictures and similar equipment. Proposals of purchases of this class of supplies shall be made to the superintendent through him ; also proposals for repairs and replace- ments as needed.
(ii) In the weekly handling and the periodic in- spection and checking of supplies the officers con- cerned shall encourage and organize the cooperation of pupils, transferring to them so far as seems wise the responsibility for the service.
(12) No bill for supplies shall be paid without the superintendent's written approval ; and no bill ex- ceeding the budget appropriation for the department or item concerned shall be approved or paid without the vote of the workers' council, which shall include a transfer of credit to cover the expenditure so voted.
9. The Workers' Conference Calendar.
If the monthly workers' conference is to be made something more than a perfunctory business meeting, it must have a calendar of topics for the year. These may properly be planned by a committee, the superin- tendent assisting. The topics should be seasonal, bringing up each month for study and discussion, perhaps for action, whatever can most appropriately be considered at that time. How to make the sum- mer sessions successful, for instance, would be in order for May, while there was still time during June to act on the suggestions brought out in the discus- sion. The calendar should be printed or posted on the school's bulletin-board.
220 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
10. Finding Time for All This.
How shall the superintendent find in his busy week the necessary time for all these items of preparation and performance ?
(a) Fix a Routine. — The only way to do this is to establish a weekly routine. Complete organization saves labour, in that it relieves the superintendent of much that he would otherwise himself have to do. But it brings with it duties of inspection, consultation and supervision; and to build the organization and keep it up is itself a heavy labour. Besides the work of the session hour, the leader must set himself a series of preparatory tasks and must resolutely set apart the time necessary for performing them.
The weekly work of the superintendent may be di- vided into seven parts. We may call them his seven hours ; but only the last need be an hour long, nor will they necessarily come on the seven days of the week. He is more likely to despatch the first three by Sun- day night. The more fixed and unbroken the rou- tine, the easier it will be to maintain it against inter- ruption, and the freer the leader will be to put into his seven hours whatever the changing needs of his school may require.
(b) The Seven Hours. — As thus defined, the seven hours will be :
(i) The Survey Hour. As soon as possible after the platform hour the superintendent must ex- amine the records of the day's work and determine what they tell as to the condition of the school and the conduct and performance of its members. Some of these records he may be able to see during the
THE YEARLY PEOGEAM 221
lesson hour. Whatever records he needs as manager to inspect he will arrange with the proper officials to have put into his hands. He will provide for the prompt return of these. He will train one of the young people to act as his personal secretary, to make up for him each week the bundle of exhibits he is to carry home. Some of these records this secretary will copy into the superintendent's note-book; others he will put in his bag, while the chief is bidding teachers and pupils farewell.
(2) The Follow-up Hour. The checking up of records must be followed up by action. Members must be made to feel that the leader is watching. Telephone messages, short notes, personal words, brief references from the desk, resolutions intro- duced in council — these are some of the ways through which contact can be had with the force. As each department comes more and more under the full con- trol of its principal, the superintendent's words to the workers in that department will reach them through their official head.
(3) The Constructive Hour. Early in the week, before the urge of next Sunday's necessities is felt, should regularly come an hour for dealing with work beyond the next session. Only by the faithful main- tenance of this hour can the element of progres- siveness and readiness for new opportunity be devel- oped in the church school. Dull sessions, diminish- ing attendance and reliance on pins and other arti- ficial devices for keeping up interest usually indicate the absence of this hour from the leader's routine.
(4) The Study Hour. In this hour the superin- tendent will make personal preparation for his own work in the next session.
(5) The Hour of Adjustment. Somewhere, late in the week, there must be a time for adjusting the supposed perfection of next Sunday's arrangements to the facts as reported by telephone or otherwise. A
222 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
reserve supply of teaching and leadership must al- ways be within call, unless these worries are entirely in another's hands.
(6) The Hour of Spiritual Preparation. The su- perintendent is a leader of worship, a teacher and a manager. He must handle a large company in one crowded hour, with many distracting cares. He must secure for his platform hour an educational unity that shall impress lives and build character. His week will surely be incomplete if it fails to in- clude a time of waiting on God for the help of His presence through the trying hour of the session.
(7) The Platform Hour. Coming as the outcome of such a routine, the school's platform hour cannot fail to make its due impression.
(c) A Constructive Program. — As a docket of business for his constructive hour, the superintendent may find help in this list :
(i) The Calendar. Write the dates of the Sun- days for this and the next quarter, and against these note events, seasons and topics that must be provided for. Take up these dates for planning and arrange- ment in the order of their difficulty and importance.
(2) Future Programs. Make a full plan for some Sunday several weeks ahead, and enrich it with the cooperation of others. The hand-to-mouth superin- tendent cannot get people to read or sing or tell a missionary story, because he knows they will not do so on three days' notice.
(3) Next Meeting of the Workers' Council. In addition to the discussion item on the program for the year, each monthly meeting should have its well- planned docket ; especially if the superintendent is to run it from the floor, with the pastor as moderator. The docket drafted, reminders to officers and com-
THE YEAELY PEOGRAM 223
mittees of the items due from them will naturally follow.
(4) Committee Work. What are the council com- mittees doing? Which one of them is waiting for that set of instructions that the superintendent was to draft when he had the time?
(5) Officers' Work. In his survey of reports the superintendent no doubt saw some features that call for permanent improvements and rearrangements. One of these may now be worked out and turned over to the party concerned.
(6) New Organization. Every step of progress will reveal some new function to be provided for, either by increasing the duties of a present officer or by the establishment of a new office and the training of a new worker.
(7) Community Relations. Not sectarianism or selfishness, but simply lack of time in which to pay attention to notices and to exchange civilities, is the usual explanation of the isolation of a Sunday school from the life of its Sunday-school community. No- tices from the county secretary and other correspond- ents should be laid by for careful attention in the weekly planning hour. Plans for friendly visits with other superintendents may be made at this time.
Assignments
la. What should be the leader's goal for next Sunday ? ,
lb. When should your school's annual commence- ment be held? Why then?
ic. (i) How may the church school each year set its goal for every work? (2) What gain can you see in a school's so doing?
2a. How does a well-kept graded roll help at pro- motion time ?
224 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
2b. Why should no demoting of pupils be at- tempted ?
2c. Mention some of the gains that would come or have come to your school through a Promotion Day held as suggested.
3a. Why is a school weak where every class owns its teacher and every teacher his class ?
3b. What difficulties are met and overcome when we secure in advance the adoption of a school law governing all appointments?
3c. What should be the features of an effective service for installing church-school teachers?
4a. With what other year should the business year of the church school coincide ? Why ?
4b, c. How should the school's officers be elected and installed?
4d. (i) To whom should the chorister make his annual report? The treasurer? (2) How shall the superintendent prepare his report, and to whom shall it be submitted ?
5. (i) When and how should the annual budget of church-school expense be drafted? (2) How may the superintendent get its total accepted by the church ?
6a. What festivals or special occasions does your school annually observe?
6b. (i) How should festivals be departmental- ized? (2) When, in your judgment, is it best for the entire school to hold its festival together ?
6c. (i) Why lean on the young people in plan- ning for festival observances? (2) Under what con- ditions can this be done successfully?
THE TEAELY PEOGEAM 226
6d. What is gained when the graded lesson mate- rial or other parts of the educational program are drawn on in preparing the festival program ?
6e. How may the music of the regular sessions and of the festivals be combined, to the advantage of both?
7. Suggest ways by which the picnic may be made to further the school's educational and spiritual plans.
8. What are the main features of a supply system that will keep all classes, departments and lines fully supplied each Sunday and all bills and charges cor- rectly made and paid when due?
9. Make out a calendar for five successive monthly meetings of the workers' conference in your school.
10a. What is the secret of finding leadership time?
lob. What are the seven hours or periods of the superintendent's week of work for the school ?
IOC. Name a few items for which he needs the time of the constructive hour.
THE SCHOOL'S RELIGION
1. A School of Religion.
What shall it profit a church school if it grow in numbers and popularity, adopt every modern method, listen to the last word in educational science, and fail in causing its pupils to walk with God? How this can be made the outcome of the work is the greatest of the administrator's problems. Everything else is but a step on the way.
(a) Education for Holiness. — The church school is first of all a school of religion. Back of organiza- tion, curriculum and method, the teaching of the Bible and the work of conversion, is the objective of holiness, the life conformed to the likeness of Christ and in all its aspects dedicated to God. That every pupil may grow in grace, the church keeps school. Other objectives are mediate, steps on the way, means of grace that have received approval. In making much of them we do well. But the ultimate end is religion.
(b) Education for Service. — Holiness comes to ex- pression in love to God and love to man. That con- ception of the religious life that seeks holiness in solitude and separation from human society is untrue to the example of Christ. He did seek solitude for
226
THE SCHOOL'S EELIGION 22T
communion with God; but He used the strength its hours brought in better and fuller service to human- ity. Our educational objective must be neither a selfish individualistic seeking after salvation nor a selfishly motivated satisfaction in having influence, showing power for service and widening the circle of our beneficiaries. It must rather be such a love for God as will see Him in all His works and all His children and will express itself in conduct and service based on a spirit of good-will to all. It is thus, and only thus, that service has a religious value.
(c) Graded Religion. — To say that our ultimate end is religion is very far from saying that our ulti- mate end is adult religion. That indeed was the objective of most of the Christian nurture of fifty years ago. No child was deemed " pious " who could not tell his experience of sin and forgiveness in the language of adult conversion. Thanks to the vast revelations of child-study, the application of psychological method to religion and our growth in reverence for personality, we now see that every age of life has its characteristic religious attitudes and modes of expression, and that our ultimate objective can be sought and approximately realized in the free and natural religion of child, boy, youth and man.
Instead, therefore, of seeking to anticipate adult religious experience in childhood, we should rather labour that in each of the successive stages of imma- turity the genuine religion of that stage may fully appear. It will soon be outgrown and replaced, as we hope, by the type of religion normal to the next stage; and in due time the full-grown man will have
228 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINI9TEATION
his man's religion. The frog, as Dr. G. Stanley Hall has reminded us, needs neither tail nor gills. What he needs is to have had these when a tadpole. No more does the tadpole need legs and lungs; if you were to graft them on him he would smother and die. Not the future but the present need of the child is the law of the school.
2. Child Religion.
(a) Love and Obedience. — For the little child, re- ligious education is largely concerned with the train- ing of the emotions and the will. Our task is to lead him to God as his loving Father and to establish him as a happy and confident child of God. This in- volves the religious interpretation of the facts of life as the little child meets them; of which the classic illustration is Jesus' nature lessons on the Father's care. As sin, estrangement and reconciliation through forgiveness are among the facts of the child's experience in the home, they can be used to teach corresponding facts in our relation with God. Christ as the Friend of sinners and the Helper of all in need should also be introduced. The natural response of gratitude and desire to please the loving Father may easily be evoked ; and its expression in obedient con- duct and impulses of self-control will be the child's way of showing his religion.
(6) Child-Lessons in Religion. — In the standard graded courses of lesson stories for the beginners' and primary departments, with their accompanying pictures, simple texts and song verses, full provision is made for the covering of this ground and a great
THE SCHOOL'S KELIGION 229
deal more. When cooperation from the homes can also be secured, and when the teachers have caught the spirit of their assigned tasks and have made the work of the courses thoroughly their own, and when rooms and equipment and pictures make good teach- ing easy, the five years of church-school teaching that lead up to the child's ninth year, even though but for an hour each Sunday, are religious education indeed; and their influence on character and the later relig- ious experience is profound.
(c) The Administrator's Part. — It is therefore the part of the church-school administration, in defense of the sacred rights of childhood to a good start in re- ligious education, to face the question of whether or not courses as thus outlined are actually being given, No substitute can take the place of a real teaching of real religion. Are there in this church school certain unsatisfactory but well-entrenched conditions, which no one has had the courage to disturb ? Are the chil- dren in consequence being fed, year after year, on religious husks, in the shape of words without child- significance, or false and futile attempts to adapt kindergarten material without understanding of the kindergarten spirit ? Then no educational excellence in the upper grades will later give that depth of re- ligious feeling of which the foundation must be laid in the heart of the little child.
(d) Junior Religion. — To the junior child religion is first and last a matter of obedience. Regulations, in family and school, of that free and outward- looking life that tastes so good and goes so swiftly, form a conspicuous part of his experience. Being
230 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
good means to do what one is asked to do and to have one's fun strictly within the limits set by supe- rior authority. It is natural, therefore, that God should be to him the great Lawgiver. The fact of sin and a simple setting forth of God's plan of re- demption in Christ as our Saviour can be taught and made clear ; and the response of penitence for sin and a genuine struggle against temptation is as normal for the junior boy and girl as is interest in David's ex- ploits and the life of a pioneer missionary.
These evangelical teachings, with the applications to conduct arising therefrom, may be embodied in good junior stories and in projects of expression and service. They may also to a limited extent be pre- sented symbolically in those habit-lessons on prayer, giving, church attendance and daily reading of the- Bible which are so needful at this age, and in memory drills carrying some significance even though not fully understood. With this work well done, by teachers whose life attractively presents religion, the junior's religious reactions may be looked for; and however different these may be from the traditional voices of early piety, we may count them as signs of our boys' and girls' normal religious life.
3. The Religion of Youth.
(a) At the Place of Decision. — The early adoles- cent is confronted with the task of organizing his personality. As a junior, duty was presented to him in the will of others, and of God as interpreted to him by them. Now he demands his independence ; which involves the necessity, if be wo^ild continue as a child
THE SCHOOL'S EELIGION 231
of God, that he define God's will for himself. One after another the issues present themselves. Some- times he settles them wrongly. Sometimes he breaks with father or mother on an issue that is for him simply a matter of the freedom of his soul. What a relief to the perplexities of his spiritual situation if he can be led to see that in deciding once for all to give his life to God in a whole-souled adherence to Jesus as Lord he has found a means of settling all his issues and at the same time has established his free- dom from the spiritual dominance of all on earth ! The early adolescent who is not in some way given a chance to avow his decision to be a Christian has been deprived of his rights.
(b) Idealism. — Religious education for intermedi- ates and seniors, then, assuredly includes the call to Qiristian decision. In some cases this will be the solemn confirmation of a stand taken years before, or taken by parents and now personally assumed. In other cases it will represent a genuine conversion. Sometimes both aspects of the act will appear. But the course of study must furnish the pupil with far more than a series of evangelical appeals, needful as these are at the appropriate season.
If the youth's decision is to have content and value for life, he must in his religious lessons be given ma- terial out of which to frame his life's ideal. Bio- graphical lessons, such as form an important part of the graded curricula for these years, must acquaint him with the intimate personalities of many followers of God in Bible and later times. Among and above these must be presented in repeated and cumulative
232 CHURCH-SOHOOL ADMINISTRATION
form the life of Jesus, that he may absorb its char- acteristics and make its holy aims and aspirations his own.
(c) Service as Religious Expression. — Activity in practical service for others will be the normal relig- ious reaction from these and correlated intermediate religious lessons, provided ways of rendering such service can be attractively presented to the group or gang, A service program for each class, submitted for adoption with alternative propositions and freely undertaken, is therefore an indispensable part of the religious curriculum at this age. But the continu- ance of junior habits of Bible-reading, church attend- ance and giving may also be sought by teachers and leaders, and faithfulness therein taken as signs of love to God. Reverent attendance on public worship (because the pulpit has regard for the worshiper's se- crets as to belief, acceptance and approval of what is said) is an especially valuable adolescent means of grace.'
As the senior years are reached, we may more and more appeal to the spirit of loyalty to Christ. We may expect the young Christian to show that he is passing beyond the legalistic experience of conform- ity to a law of obedience into that aspiration after godliness that marks the Pauline sense of freedom from the law and bondage to Christ. A teacher who can call forth these aspirations is at this age a bless- ing indeed. A social organization in which the re- ligious side is kept prominent is also a needed means of grace.
* McKinley, " Educational Evangelism," pp. 173-188.
THE SCHOOL'S RELIGION 233
4. The Religion of Later Adolescence.
(a) Organization for Educational Service. — At the close of the high-school age, where our present senior department also ends, the church school should have some sort of graduation exercise and should grant its diploma for the completion of the full imdergraduate graded course.
The six or seven years of young people's life which follow this significant era, corresponding to the col- lege and post-graduate years, form a period where religious education is received in close and conscious reference to service. Some of the graduates will enter the training class to continue their graded studies intensively, with the prospect of winning di- ploma credit and taking some teaching or official posi- tion. Others will join a class of young people, there under class organization to attack problems and carry responsibilities in church and community, besides pursuing some one of the many profitable elective courses now available. Many will go away to col- lege or employment, returning on visits or at vacation times. What shall we do with them?
All these young people of the church and congre- gation, present and absent, whether church members or not, and whether or not they are now enrolled in the church school as workers or class members, should be united in one broad young people's organi- zation. This organization will be understood as em- bracing all in the congregation whose age or gradua- tion record from the church school puts them within seven years from receipt of the school's diploma. Every member whose educational age exceeds seven
234 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
years from this point will be honoured as an alumnus or alumna of the young people, v/elcome as an associ- ate or adviser but ineligible to serve on committees or hold official young people's positions. This universal college rule should not be hard to explain and en- force.
To this permanent, because constantly changing, guild of the congregation, wisely organized under a central committee, should be entrusted the work of uniting, uplifting and religiously educating its mem- bers and training them for Christian service. Every activity in which young people are concerned may be counted an activity of the guild, — the devotional meeting, the training class or classes, the organized classes, the mission study classes, the corps of teach- ers and assistants in each of the church-school de- partments, the corps of ushers, the correspondence section of students and workers away from home, the singing society, dramatic league, literary circle, or other group; — and all should be represented in the guild management and seated at its public gatherings for business, worship or commemoration. The ex- perience of young people's life in the church during these years should be made a bright and sacred chap- ter in the story of every one who has lived through it and passed on.
The distinguishing mark of that service which will avail as means of religious education for later adoles- cents, it will be noted, is reality. It will not do to hunt up some interesting task such as we would find for our intermediates and expect a twenty-year-old to seize it, leaving us adults in undisturbed possession
THE SCHOOL'S EELIGION 236
of our customary franchises of responsibility. What we offer must be something that the church itself has heretofore claimed as its own, or might claim. To take up in its own right, with the pastor's friendly co- operation, the whole problem of developing the relig- ious life of the guild and its members and providing for them adequate training for the service of the church and its community, — this is but the first of the tasks that the young people are ready to undertake, once we realize that until the church makes them its partners they are not interested in its enterprise at all.
(b) Faith, Fellowship, Dedication. — The religious education for later adolescents must include training in faith. With reason and judgment maturing, an- swers are wanted to the many new problems of the soul. Every class needs to be a forum, with the widest possible liberty of discussion. The kind of teacher who wants his tadpoles to stay tadpoles will see his class melt away. The way to faith is through intelligent questioning of that we thought was final before. When God is seen as great enough in His love and His working, His justice and His power, to satisfy the young man's ideals, faith will follow; though not always according to childhood's forms.
The later adolescent is also profoundly social. This is the mating time of the species. The senti- mentality of middle adolescence past, instinct impels to a wide mingling in social pleasures with those of both sexes, because out of such conditions may come the satisfaction of life's greatest desire. Religion is perfectly at home in this compan5^ The church should foster the plans of its young people, as worked
236 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
out in their guild or other organization with adult co- operation, and should encourage the means of relig- ious idealism. Such means are found in earnest weekly young people's meetings, the leadership of the pastor, and regular delegations to inspiring and edu- cative summer conferences and young people's con- ventions.
When by wise and well unified church administra- tion of religious education such conditions as these have been established, results should appear. The young home-makers should enter on their life of ma- turity with a spirit of dedication to God's service in their community, and with an appreciation of the re- ligious significance of industrial, commercial and public service and of the supreme sacredness of parenthood. The church should find it easier to be efficiently served in its many places of voluntary la- bour. And every year should see one or more deci- sions for the gospel ministry or some one of the many other modern forms of non-commercial dedication to the service of God and humanity.
5. Adult Religious Education.
Adult religious education frequently includes a making up of lost opportunities in Bible study and the rudiments of Christian ethics and theology. Most adult classes include a few near-heathen thinkers, some of whom, it may be, sit high in the rule of the congregation. To open the eyes of such to the view- point of Jesus and Paul is good though sadly belated education. Training for teaching, for parental serv-
THE SCHOOL'S EELIGION 237
ice and for Christian citizenshipj through special classes, may also figure in our plans for the adult department.
The main adult objective, however, at least for those already Christian by profession, is to teach, illustrate and apply to life the essential principles of the Christian religion. The standard method is dis- cussion ; usually w^ith some Bible passage or topic as a point of departure. To help busy workers and burden-bearers to see the religious meaning of the facts and institutions of their daily life; to expound the New Testament philosophy and the implications of the gospel of love as the rule of living; to meet hard questions with illuminating answers ; to give help to the soul for its fight of the week to come, — that is the religious education our men and women need ; and the department should be organized to fa- cilitate their getting it.
6. The Religion of the School.
(a) The School's Need of Religion. — To make the church school truly a school of religion, the curricu- lum in every grade must have its religious side ; and the school administration must understand and value that side and take whatever steps may be needful to put it into operation as a teaching force. To this end have we thus reviewed the curriculum and to some extent the teaching organization. Let the superin- tendent see that his school teaches religion.
But back of the curriculum is the school itself. It also must teach religion. The curriculum is its voice ;
238 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
and the voice must speak from the heart or its mes- sage will not carry. Before a school can hope to teach religion, it must be a religious school.
Some church schools do have religion, or did have it years ago, as their old members can feelingly tes- tify. Others run for years at a " poor dying rate." Some, whose standing was never questioned, fall out over some personal issue and lose their religion in strife, jealousy and bitter recriminations. While such an atmosphere prevails, the teacher of religion labours almost or altogether in vain.
(b) Religion as Personal Life. — Every teacher and leader in a school of religion must realize the educa- tional necessity that his " manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ." No qualification as officer or teacher can make up for inconsistency of beha- viour and insincerity of profession. In a school ad- ministered on the plans herein laid down, full pro- vision exists for the orderly retiring of the unfit from any place ; and each board or other appointing body has full responsibility for every choice and retention. The life of the leaders, as thus known and endorsed, is therefore the life of the school. Let that life teach religion.
(c) Religion as Relationship. — No insignificant part of the daily life of church-school workers is that which is lived in the presence of the school. The school organization establishes relationships of the members one with another, and other relationships with the offices they hold, the duties they perform and the values they handle. In all these is scope for the exercise and culture of the religious life. Cour-
THE SCHOOL'S RELIGION 239
tesy and consideration, punctuality and exactitude of performance, self-control under provocation, rever- ence and recognition of God's presence during times and acts of worship, and other evidences of personal walk with God, are mighty forces for the teaching of religion; while every breach and fall from Christian standards is a setback, the more serious as the judg- ment of adolescence is more keen and pitiless than that of age that knows.
Times of election and promotion are especially valuable opportunities for religion to show its power in the teachers' and leaders' lives. If there is any element of injustice or unwisdom in the rules by which these occasions are governed, he whose re- ligion has the element of courage will bring up the matter in due season and have these rules amended if he can get for his proposals his fellow-workers' com sent. When the time comes for decisions, appoint^ ments and it may be separations, disappointments and failures to recognize true worth and meritorious service, the religious worker will loyally play the game and look to his Master for justice and reward. For a teacher of growing girls or boys to show such a spirit under trying circumstances is a lesson in re- ligion indeed. Should not the pastor at some con- venient season make this clear?
(d) Religion as Service. — There are church schools where the missionary offerings are treated as a tax that must be grumblingly collected and paid in order that our credit may not suffer. Such schools usually also confine their personal service activity to the making up of one or more Thanksgiving dinner
240 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
baskets and the gathering of Christmas gifts for some institution or for the neighbouring poor. In each case there must be a return in the shape of fun for the school and at least a letter of unqualified appre- ciation from the matron or the missionary, or the school will think itself ill used. Does not such a spirit indicate a rather low level of religion?
In a truly religious school such openings for gifts and service will be seized as privileges and will be occupied without calculation of acknowledgment and return. Givers will not wait until the coming of the festival spirit makes it fashionable and easy to re- member the poor; nor will they scrape off into their own bin the heaping top of their missionary measure. Such a spirit will not reduce the joy of sei-vice gath- erings; nor will gifts so made fail of recognition. The religion of our Lord Jesus Christ is service. Let our school's service be religion.
7. The Service of Worship.
(a) Significance of School Worship. — In the pulpit services of the church we worship for ourselves, to find soul-strength and pay our duty to the Lord. In the church school we should worship not less but more devoutly, because here we not only draw near to God but bring with us the children, that they too may find the way to Him. Our worship is part of our program of education in religion. In the class the appeal is mainly to intellect and reason; in the worship the appeal is to the emotions of the religious life.
Evangelism and worship ought to go forward hand
THE SCHOOL'S EELIGION 241
in hand. It is strange that the connection between these two outstanding features of church-school life has not been more clearly seen. If the God whose forgiveness we seek, and who so loved the world that He sent His Son to be our Saviour, is a real and liv- ing God, then every contact established between our spirits and His divine presence is a step toward fuller fellowship with Him in Christ, or else a step toward the clearer revelation of our sinful self and our own utter need of His forgiving grace. Insistence on purity of doctrine cannot take the place of the pub- lican's prayer for forgiveness and the worshiper's glad and free approach to his Father's footstool. Let every great conviction of truth be taught with posi- tive clearness ; and let the way of the contrite heart be kept open, hallowed and free. So shall each of these religious influences support and reinforce the other.
(b) Magnifying the Worship Period. — The church school being a school, with a complex organization and with many features heading up in a single busy hour, the whole of our order of service evidently can- not be called worship. We should therefore organize it, as was suggested in Chapter I, Section 2 ; and that part allotted to worship should be "holy to the Lord," religiously kept clear of all frivolity, all inter- ruption and all attempts at instruction.
During the worship period the doors should be closed and all official moving about should be for- bidden. The service should as far as possible be au- tomatic, without directions, explanations, the beating of time, the playing over of the tune, or any other
242 CHUKCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION
intrusion between the souls of the worshipers and the presence of God. Later, if need be, the leader may drill on material to be used in the next worship service, teach a hymn, explain a passage or correct some fault of behaviour. But in worship he rever- ently leads in a varied but constant acknowledgment of the reality and the nearness of the loving and hearing God.
The best of our modern church-school hymnals now furnish ample material from which the leader may take his orders of worship. To secure that au- tomatism that makes our church services so quietly worshipful, the same service should be used for a series of Sundays ; the service number, with the num- bers of the hymns, being posted so that no announce- ment need be given. Teachers should be drilled apart from the school as to their part in reading the an- nouncement board and leading their classes in rever- ent participation.
An appropriately phrased call to worship should bring all to their feet, ready for an animated re- sponse. Prayers should be brief and for definite utterances and needs. Full use should be made of memory passages that have been learned in the graded courses. Hymns should be sung from an opening chord and chosen to express some desired emotion. If the leader can tell or procure the telling of a brief story embodying the emotion the worship is designed to nourish — gratitude, good-will, rever- ence, faith, loyalty — it will add to the impression. After an interval of from seven to ten minutes, the doors may be opened, late-comers admitted and the
THE SCHOOL'S EELIGION 243
tension lightened ; though the atmosphere of worship will still be cultivated for the rest of the opening period/
(c) The Reverent Opening of Worship. — What seems to some schools an insuperable obstacle in the way of holding such an opening service of worship is the irreverent atmosphere preceding the opening and the difficulty of promptly bringing the school to or- der. How to secure even respectful quiet and atten- tion, to say nothing of the worshiper's attitude of reverence, seems a problem. Yet the problem must be solved. We must have discipline, or the higher goal of reverence in worship will be forever beyond our reach.
How is reverence secured in the church? By in- suring that no irreverence shall have a chance to de- velop. The janitor opens the doors and represents church authority till some one arrives to whom the unspoken trust shall pass. There is also a sequence of items in the unwritten program of the church's assembly period, — the incoming and silent prayers of the early worshipers ; the arrival of the organist, the ushers, the choir; the musical prelude; the pastor's entry and the opening act. Just such a sequence can be organized for the school's assembly period, with
' For many forms of opening worship, with carefully selected and arranged prayers. Scripture selections and hymns, see Hartshorne's Book of Worship for the Church School. For a large collection of stories to be u^ed in these services, with other guidance for the leader, see the same author's Manual for Training in Worship. Professor Hartshorne's theory of educational worship and the experi- ments on which the Manual is based are discussed ia his Worship in the Sunday School.
244 CHURCH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
no break or interval of unorganized time, and with every step leading up to the opening words of devo- tion.
Every door should have both an outside and an inside sentinel. These should be in their places two minutes before the " zero hour," or substitutes should replace them for the day. As the superintendent rises, the doors should close. The inside boy will then watch the leader for the signal to reopen ; while the outside boy explains the rules to the late-comers and awaits the signal of the turning latch to say, " Please go quietly to your seats."
8. The Call to Confess Christ.
In a Christian school which has succeeded in em- bodying its religion in its life and worship as herein described, confession of Christ will be the normal and obvious act of all but those whom some evil com- panion or ill-advised parent seeks to hinder. But where the school life is essentially irreligious, spend- ing itself on activities that do not count toward its main objective, such a proposition as the holding of a Decision Day will seem strange, undesirable and fraught with much anticipated danger.
It is educationally indispensable that some provi- sion be definitely made to confront with the call to decision, at least once a year, those from whom a Christian decision is due. In the primary department the little children are equally entitled to be known as followers of Jesus and to hear His loving call; but only in exceptional cases will it be wise for the
THE SCHOOL'S EELIGION 245
church to confirm, baptize or otherwise seal their in- dividual act. The older juniors and the intermedi- ates may be given a wider chance to take a public stand; and for all seniors and young people not yet professing Christians an earnest effort to win them to out-and-out decision should be made and carried up by personal organization to the unconverted of ma- turer years. How these appeals are to be made each church will, of course, determine for itself.
Preceding such appeals there should be education in the meaning of the decision called for. A proper graded course will contain such teaching ; and to sup- plement this a pastor's class of catechumens is usually formed and in some communions is counted indis- pensable. Where the school joins with the pastor in this work of evangelical education, and the church holds a public confirmation service, with vows of consecration to Christ made by the confirmed, the act should be considered that church's mode of observing Decision Day.
Following the decisions, likewise, every one who has made any kind of sign of religious interest should be noted, followed with care by teacher and pastor, invited to make his confession complete if that has not yet been done, and given some congenial activity to pursue as evidence and exercise of his newly avowed faith and purpose. Under the plans of class organization, pupil-management of departments and self -organization of the young people's guild already presented,* opportunities for such activity will not be lacking.
* Chapter III, Sees. 5, jh, 9 ; Chapter X, Sec. 4a.
246 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTEATION^
9. Is Ours a Religious School?
The educational director, the superintendent, the pastor and all who share responsibiUty for the con- duct of the church school may well take up for fre- quent and prayerful study the question whether their plans are leading in the direction of a fuller and deeper religious life for the school. Religion may be in the studies; and in the hearts of many of the teachers and other workers it may shine. But is it in the school? Does it reach to the homes? Is it felt in the community? Is it a temporary state of revival, or has it the means of its own perpetuation and the nourishing supply of a rich program of wor- ship and brotherly service? Are the little children granted the full franchises of the kingdom? Do those who lead in its counsels walk with God? When such schools have been multiplied and extended to meet the want of them that now prevails, the future of our nation and of the world will be secure.
Assignments I a. (i) Do you agree that a church school should be first of all a school of religion? If so, give rea- son. (2) If not, what other end would you put in religion's place ?
lb. When has service a religious value?
ic. What are the evils of seeking an adult relig- ious experience in children and youth ?
2a. What will be the main features of religious education for the little children in the church school ?
2b. By what support and cooperation can this be made effective?
THE SCHOOL'S EELIGION 247
2C. (i) What instances have you observed of a Sunday school that failed to give good religious edu- cation to its little children? (2) What v^ould you have done to improve matters ?
2d. (i) What would you teach the juniors, as a
What
2d. (i) What would you teach the juniors, means for developing their religion? (2) ^ would you watch for as signs of success?
3a. Why do we owe to our intermediates and seniors a chance to make a public avowal of their decision to serve and follow Christ ?
3b. What besides appeals to accept Christ is needed in adolescent religious education ?
3c. (i) How will intermediate religion normally express itself? (2) Senior religion?
4a. (i) If the plan of a young people's guild, as outlined, were applied to your congregation, what organizations and activities would be thereby corre- lated, what changes would be needful, and what benefits might be expected when the plan was fully installed? (2) What sort of service will meet the older young people's religious needs ?
4b. (i) With the young people properly organ- ized, what will constitute the main elements of their religious education? (2) What results should be looked for?
5. What is the essence of adult religious educa- tion?
6a. Why must the school as well as its lessons be religious ?
6b. Why is the life of the leaders, for better or worse, the life of the school ?
6c. How does the religion of the school show through its members' relationships?
248 CHUECH-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION
6d. (i) What sort of service and giving fails to be religious? (2) How would you make it better?
7a. (i) Should school worship be less or more worshipful than church worship? Why? (2) Why should evangelism and worship work together for souls ?
7b. Draft an outline service of opening worship that will embody the features suggested.
7c. Draft a program for the assembly period, to control conduct, direct activities and lead up to a worshipful opening of the school. Indicate the hour of each item.
8. ( I ) How would you handle a day of decision in your school? (2) What preparatory steps would it involve, and what follow-up?
9. (i) On a scale of icx), how would you grade the religious life of your school? (2) Show how you arrive at this conclusion.
APPENDIX A
A Policy for the Young People's Division (See text, page 63)
On recommendation of its committee on young people's work, the Sunday-school Council of Evan- gelical Denominations, at its annual meeting in Bos- ton, January 16-18, 1917, adopted a general policy for the handling of church-school work in the Young People's Division, as follows:
/. The Scope The years of adolescence are regarded as the scope of our work. The natural groupings within these years are recognized as follows :
Group I — years 13, 14 (12 optional). Group 2 — years 15, 16, 17. Group 3 — years 18-24. It is understood that these groupings shall in all cases be considered flexible, thus permitting the adjustment of group organization to local needs.
The grouping of any particular pupil is not to be determined primarily by age. His week-day social relations and his mental and religious development are exceedingly important factors.
It should be clearly understood that in the applica- tion of these principles in the local school the relative efficiency of the organization of the junior depart- ment and of Group i should be taken into account in placing the twelve-year-old pupil.
The upper age-limit of Group 3 shall not be under- stood to prevent the promotion into the adult depart-
249
250 APPENDIXES
ment of those young people who, before passing twenty-four, shall have established homes of their own, or otherwise taken up the responsibilities and interests of adult life.
//, The General Aim
Building on the foundation laid in previous years (the elementary departments), the aim is to produce through worship, instruction and training, the highest type of Christian manhood and womanhood, express- ing itself in right living and efficient service.
///. Group Aims
The aim of these groups is to realize in the life of each individual the following results:
In Group i, (a) the acceptance of Jesus Christ as a personal Saviour; {h) a knowledge of Christian ideals; (c) a personal acceptance and open acknowl- edgment of these ideals; {d) the public acceptance of the privileges and opportunities of church member- ship; {e) the development of the social consciousness, and the expression of the physical, social, mental and religious life in service to others.
In Group 2, (a) the acceptance of Jesus Christ as a personal Saviour; {h) the testing of his earlier Christian ideals in the light of his enlarging experi- ences and the consequent adjustment of his life- choices and conduct; (c) the expression of the rapidly developing social consciousness through the home, church and community; {d) the development of initiative, responsibility and self-expression in Christian service.
In Group 3, (a) the acceptance of Jesus Christ as personal Saviour and Lord; {h) the maintenance of his tested Christian ideals and the relation of these to the practical work of life; (c) the preparation for and a willingness to assume the duties and responsi-
APPENDIXES 261
bilities of home-making and citizenship; (d) the preparation for and acceptance of a definite place in the organization and work of the church for the community and the world; (e) the preparation for and acceptance of a definite place in the work of life, business, professional, industrial ; that in and through his daily work he may do the will of God and promote His kingdom in the world.
IV. General Principles
1. The ideal is one inclusive organization in the local church for each group of adolescents. Each of these organizations should provide all necessary in- struction and training through classes organized for specific tasks and individual training; the classes to meet separately for instruction, together for prayer, praise and testimony, separately or together for through-the-week activities.
2. In churches where there already exist a Sunday school, young people's societies and other organiza- tions for adolescents, the work of these organizations should be correlated in such a way that it may be complemental, not conflicting or competing. For this purpose there should be in each group a committee composed of the presidents and teachers of the classes, the officers of the various organizations in- volved, the pastor and any advisory officers appointed to this committee by the local church. These com- mittees in conference with those charged with the work of religious education in the local church should determine the program of study and activities in order to prevent overlapping and duplication of ef- fort.
3. The program of study and activities for adoles- cents should be such as to develop them on all sides of their nature — physical, social, mental, religious. This should include Bible study and correlated sub-
252 APPENDIXES
jects, the cultivation of the devotional life, training for leadership, and service through stewardship, recreation, community work, citizenship, evangelism and missions.
V. Means
Groupings. — For purposes of administration, the three natural groups may, for the present, be named as follows: Group i. Intermediates; Group 2, Se- niors; Group 3, Young People.
Suggested Form of Organisation. — The officers of these groups should be president, vice-president, sec- retary and treasurer, to be elected by the members of the group from their own number, and a counselor or superintendent, selected by the group in confer- ence with the proper church authorities.
The officers of the group, with the presidents of the organized classes and the counselor or superin- tendent, shall constitute the executive committee in each group. The pastor and general superintendent shall be ex-officio members of the executive com- mittee. All the activities of the members of each group shall be under the direction of and related to this central executive committee.
Other committees may be formed as needed, pref- erably short-term committees appointed for special tasks.
Meetings. — Meetings may be held (a) on Sunday, as a group, for worship and the expression of the devotional life; in classes, for instruction; (b) through the week, for expressional activities as occa- sion demands, recognizing the physical, social, mental and religious life.
Program. — Any complete program of religious education must include the three factors of worship, instruction and expression.
I. Worship: The program should provide oppor- tunity for training and participation in worship.
APPENDIXES 253
2. Instruction: (a) Teachers. The teachers should be graduates of a recognized teacher-training course, or its equivalent. (b) Time. A class period, at least thirty minutes of which should be given to the lesson, (c) Course of study. There should be courses of study graded according to the needs and interests of each group ; with elective courses for the young people's group. Definite provision must be made both in lesson material and by practice for the training of leaders for all Christian activities.
3. Expression: Provision should be made so that all worship and instruction shall issue in service for Christ in the home, the church, the community and the world along physical, social, mental and religious lines.
APPENDIX B
Published Graded Lesson Texts
Graded lessons for use in Sunday schools may be classified as (A) International, based on the series of yearly lists of graded lessons issued by the Inter- national Lesson Committee; (B) denominational, based on lists formulated by denominational au- thority; (C) independent, based on lists formulated by a publishing house working independently of de- nominational or International relationship.
A few facts as to the genesis of the International Graded Lessons will be of interest to administrators using or planning to use them in any of their present forms :
The International Lesson Committee was_ first formed in 1872, to select the International Uniform Lessons. It was regularly elected and instructed by the successive International conventions, representing
254 APPENDIXES
the Sunday schools of all Protestant evangelical de- nominations in the United States and Canada. In 191 2 it was reconstructed, to represent the Sunday- school Council of Evangelical Denominations and the denominations severally as v^ell as the Convention. Originally fourteen, later fifteen, the reconstruction increased the membership to about forty; the de- nominational lesson editors predominating.
In 1895 the Lesson Committee, to meet a demand from some critics of the uniform lessons, issued a one-year primary course, so-called. This was little used. A more specific demand later arising, it issued in 1901, for use in 1902, a one-year course for be- ginners, following this with a two-year beginners' course, which had been sanctioned by the Interna- tional Convention of 1902. This was widely used and led to a demand for other graded courses to follow.
In October, 1906, the International Superintendent of Primary and Junior Work, Mrs. J. Woodbridge Barnes, pursuant to authority given her by resolution of the International Executive Committee, called to- gether a conference of workers at Newark, N, J., to study the spiritual needs of children of the elementary grades, ages four to twelve, and to outline a course of lessons for each of these nine years, to meet the needs thus studied. In April, 1908, the result of the labours of this conference was presented to the secre- tary of the Lesson Committee, in the shape of nine years of graded lessons for the ages already named. For each year there was a list of fifty-two titles, with Scripture and other specifications for the lesson- writer's guidance.
Meanwhile the current discussions of graded and uniform lessons led to a conference, called by Mr. W. N. Hartshorn in January, 1908, at which all parties agreed that the International Convention, through its Lesson Committee, should continue to
APPENDIXES 256
prepare the tiniform lessons as long as they were demanded by the schools, and should also prepare a full set of graded lessons, to be used by any who might so desire. In July, 1908, the Convention, meet- ing at Louisville, Ky., endorsed this policy.
In January, 1909, the Lesson Committee, after hav- ing carefully revised the outlines received from the conference, issued three yearly sets — first year be- ginners, first year primary and first year junior — and continued so to issue these yearly lists until the elementary courses were complete. In October, 1909, the first sets of lessons were introduced into the Sunday schools.
The demand for these new International graded lessons proved unexpectedly large, notwithstanding the many difficulties which the Sunday schools adopting them found in training teachers to use them effectively. The Lesson Committee asked the Graded Lesson Conference, so-called, to reorganize itself under the same chairman and proceed with the draft- ing of the intermediate and senior lists, for the eight years from thirteen to twenty. This was done, the denominations cooperating. The lists thus prepared were submitted to the Lesson Committee in printed form, and were by them revised and issued from' time to time. For the fourth senior year, age twenty, two alternative courses were prepared, one Biblical, " The Bible and Social Living," the other non- Biblical, giving an outline of Christian history under the title " The Spirit of Christ Transforming the World." The whole series of seventeen yearly courses was completed in 1916.
Objections having been raised to certain extra- Biblical features In some of the courses, the Lesson Committee issued alternative lists to cover these fea- tures. It has also issued other elective courses for senior and adult students, and has sanctioned the departmental handling of its graded lists. The Com-
256 APPENDIXES
mittee of course has no control over anything beyond the use of the designation " International " ; and even under this title the publishers have handled the lists rather freely.
Directors and others desiring to study the Com- mittee's lesson lists, with their aims and other in- troductory matter, can usually procure them through the editorial office of their denominational publishing house, for whose use they are furnished.
A. International Texts
1. The Syndicate issues. Immediately upon re- lease of the first graded lists, the Congregational, Methodist Episcopal, Methodist Episcopal South and Presbyterian houses formed a syndicate to issue jointly the entire International graded lesson series. The lessons were written by members of the confer- ence which had discussed and selected the lessons and were carefully edited by the lesson editors of these denominations — Drs. Sidney A. Weston, John T. McFarland, E. B. Chappell and J. R. Miller. Each house used its own title-page and trademark. Pilgrim, Berean or Westminster ; but otherwise the text-books were the same. Many other denominations also used these issues, the title-pages carrying the denomina- tional name and imprint. In 1914 the Presby- terian house withdrew from the Syndicate, after it had cooperated in the issuance of the first fourteen of the seventeen courses. In 191 7 and 1918 the Syndicate lessons were entirely revised and reissued, with many improvements.
2. The Keystone issues. With equal promptness the American Baptist Publication Society, under the editorial leadership of Dr. C. R. Blackall, brought out and has since revised its own independently written " Keystone Graded Lessons," based, like those of the Syndicate, on the International lists, with some modifications.
APPENDIXES 2b7
3. The Southern Baptist Convention followed a little later, using the strictly Biblical material fur- nished alternatively in the International lists, and pub- lished for their constituents a complete graded series.
4. The Standard Publishing Company (Disciples), and the Christian Board of Publication (Disciples) each issue a complete series based on the original International outhne.
5. Several other publishing houses, denomina- tional and independent, including the Universahst Publishing House and The Sunday School Times (undenominational), have at various times issued text-book material based v^holly or in part on the International graded lessons,
6. The Presbyterian house, after its withdrawal from the Syndicate, formed a new syndicate of Pres- byterian and Reformed houses and began the issuance of " International graded lessons, modified," in de- partmental issues published in periodical form. Each periodical is intended for use in all three of the yearly grades of the department concerned. The lesson books and papers are dated and like the uni- form lesson quarterlies are freshly issued whenever the course is repeated ; that is, every three years.
B. Denominational Texts The Department of Religious Education, represent- ing the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U. S. A., issues the Christian Nurture Series, published by the Morehouse Publishing Company, Milwaukee, Wis. It covers all grades. The lessons are prepared and constantly revised by commissions, numbering over one hundred persons, under the guidance of the Department.
The Lutheran Publication Society, representing the United Lutheran Church in America, issues, from its headquarters at Ninth and Sansom Streets, Phila-
268 APPENDIXES
delphia, the complete graded series of text-books, papers, pictures and appliances formerly furnished by the General Council, now united with the General Synod. This series is now being rewritten and re- cast. It also issues the "Augsburg " imprint edition of the Syndicate's International texts.
The Friends' General Conference, from its Cen- tral Bureau, 150 North Fifteenth Street, Philadelphia, issues a set of graded lessons covering nearly or quite all the grades, with courses for adults. The juvenile lessons are partly based on the International graded lesson topics.
The Unitarian Sunday-school Society, from its headquarters, 25 Beacon Street, Boston, issues the Beacon Series of graded lessons, covering all grades. These lessons, with the earlier texts which preceded them under the same distinctive name, were used by the schools of this denomination for many years prior to the issue of the International graded texts.
Information concerning any of these lessons, or concerning the lesson policy and available issues of any denomination not here listed, may be secured from the denomination's publication headquarters.
C. Independent Texts
In addition to various publications intended for graded teaching in some department of the Sunday school, or available for such use, the following com- plete systems of Sunday-school graded study are offered :
The Completely Graded Series, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, 597 Fifth Avenue, New York. This series is the successor to the Bible Study Union or Blakeslee Lessons, issued about 1891 by Dr. Erastus Blakeslee and used by a large company of Sunday schools prior to the introduction of the Inter- national Graded Lessons. From the Bible Study
APPENDIXES 259
Union, organized by Dr. Blakeslee, the publication of these partially graded lessons and their " completely graded " successors passed to the firm which pub- lishes them nov/. The series provides for all grades. The Constructive Studies, published by the Uni- versity of Chicago Press, Chicago, is a series of texts covering all grades and intended for use in the Sun- day school. It is the outgrowth of the " constructive Bible studies " promoted for many years by President William R. Harper and his colleagues in the Ameri- can Institute of Sacred Literature. Like the Com- pletely Graded texts, these books represent a high degree of scholarship and an appreciation of the ideals of religious education.
APPENDIX C
The Standard Teaclier-Training Course (See text, page i8o)
Besides the titles adopted by the Sunday-school Council for the eight units of the first and second years, as given in the text, these were in 1917 adopted for the five parallel courses of the third year. Num- bers indicate the number of lessons in each section.
Beginners and Primary Units. — (In publication, the courses for beginners and primary teachers may be separated if publishers so desire.) Specialized Child-study (beginners and primary age), 10; Story- telling (selection and telling of stories, with practice work in class), 10; Beginners and Primary Methods (including practice-teaching and observation), 20.
Junior Units. — Specialized Child-study (junior age), 10; Junior Teaching Material and Its Use (story-telling, analysis and emphasis, with practice- teaching), 10; Christian Conduct for Juniors (includ-
260 APPENDIXES
ing special reference to habit and Christlike action), lo; Junior Department Organization and Methods (with practice-teaching and observation), lo.
Secondary (Young People's) Units. — Specialized Study of the Pupil (intermediate, senior and young people's ages), lo; Material for Secondary Teaching (studied with reference to the development of Chris- tian character), lo; Christian Doctrines and Institu- tions (in relation to the life and thought of the pupil at this age), lo; Methods for Intermediates, Seniors and Young People, lo.
Adult Units. — The Psychology of the Adult and His Religious Education, lo; How to Present the Social Message of the Bible and Its Modern Applica- tion, 10 ; Adult Aims and Methods, lo; The Church, Its Activities and Leadership, lo.
Administrative Units. — History and Principles of Religious Education, lo; The Educational Task of the Local Church, lo; The Sunday-school Cur- riculum, 10 ; Sunday-school Management, lo.
Bibliography
Among recent books bearing on church-school adminis- tration, these may be mentioned :
Stout, John Elbert. Organization and Administration of Religious Education. Covers week-day and collegiate re- ligious instruction, in addition to the work of the Sunday school, from the viewpoint of a professional educational administrator. Abingdon Press, 1922.
Bower, William C. A Survey of Religious Education in the Local Church. Explanation of the survey method; full schedules of queries covering the church school, generally and by departments. A guide to clear and detailed ad- ministrative thinking. University of Chicago Press, 1918.
Cope, Henry F. The School in the Modern Church. Stimulating presentation of the new ideals in local religious education; useful bibliography appended. Doran, 1919.
Other books of this introductory type are:
Bett's, George Herbert. The New Program of Religious Education. Abingdon Press, 1921.
Bower, W. C. The Educational Task of the Local Church. Front Rank Press, 1921.
Useful for detailed suggestions on several of the topics named below, especially H, IH, VI and X :
Faris, John T., editor. The Sunday School at Work. Chapters by various authors on special topics in Sunday- school administration. Westminster Press, 1914; revised €d., 1915.
Of special value on the chapter-topics named: /. The Church School Organised:
^ Athearn, Walter S. The Organization and Administra- tion of the Church School. A brief handbook of principles of administration, with suggested methods, from the edu- cational viewpoint. Pilgrim Press, 1917.
261
262 BIBLIOGEAPHY
Cope, H. F. The Modern Sunday School and Its Pres- ent-day Task. A study of practical administrative church- school method. Revised from the author's 1905 book. Re- veil, 1919.
Cunningim and North. Organization and Administration of the Sunday School. Abingdon Press, 1919.
Lawrance, Marion. How to Conduct a Sunday SchooL Management problems practically treated, from the view- point of an experienced field worker, who was also for over thirty years superintendent of a large city Sunday schooL Revell, 1905; revised ed., 1915.
Fergusson, E. Morris. How to Run a Little Sunday School. Revell, 1916.
//. The Official Staff:
Brown, Frank L. The Superintendent and His Work.. Detailed suggestions, well arranged, with index. Methodist Book Concern, 191 1.
McEntire, Ralph N. The Sunday-school Secretary. De- tailed suggestions, with comparison of various methods and numerous sample forms. Methodist Book Concern, 1917.
On the chorister's work, help can be had in a study of any of the recent high-grade school and church-school hymnals, especially :
Smith, H. Augustine. Hymnal for American Youth. The Century Company, 1919. See also a series of accompanying pamphlets based on this collection, by Professor Smith's fellow-workers; same publisher, later dates.
Valuable suggestions on the handling of a Sunday-school library will be found in The Sunday School at Work, listed above.
III. Divisions, Departments and Classes:
' Athearn, W. S. The Church School. Includes a careful educational study of each department, with numerous lists of books, pictures, story material, etc. Pilgrim Press, 1914.
Bryner, Mary Foster. The Elementary Division Organ- ized for Service. Revell, 191 7.
Baldwin, Maud Junkin. The Children's Division of a Little Sunday School. Westminster Press, 1922.
BIBLIOGEAPHY 263
Maus, Cynthia Pearl. Youth and the Church. The pro- gram of work for the intermediate, senior and young peo- ple's departments, in conformity with the 191 7 standard of the Sunday-school Council. Standard Publishing Company, 1919.
Wood, Irving F. Adult Class Study, Analysis of what constitutes effective teaching in the adult class; lists of courses. Pilgrim Press, 1911,
IV and VIII. The Teaching Staff; Training:
McElfresh, Franklin. The Training of Sunday-school Officers and Teachers. Abingdon Press, 1914.
Athearn, W. S. The City Institute for Religious Teach- ers. University of Chicago Press, 1915.
Slattery, Margaret. A Guide for Teachers of Training Classes. Leader's manual for the now superseded Pilgrim training course, but suggestive for guidance of practice- teaching. Pilgrim Press, 1912.
Text-books of special value for the teacher-trainer:
Betts, G. H. How to Teach Religion. Abingdon Press, 1919.
McKeever, William A. How to Become a Successful Sunday-school Teacher. Standard PubHshing Company, 1915.
V. The Course of Study and Expression:
Pease, George W. An Outline of a Bible-school Curric- ulum. Suggestive, though now largely of historical value, as a pioneer work in this field. University of Chicago Press, 1904.
Meyer, Henry H. The Graded Sunday School in Prin- ciple and Practice. Full on the then new International Graded Lessons. Methodist Book Concern, 1910.
Coe, George Albert. A Social Theory of Religious Edu- cation. Note especially Chapter IX, " A New Theory of the Curriculum." Scribners, 191 7.
Hutchins, W. Norman. Graded Social Service for the Sunday School. University of Chicago Press, 1914.
264 BIBLIOGRAPHY
VI. The School and the Home:
Cope, H. F. Religious Education in the Family. Uni- versity o£ Chicago Press, 1915.
VII. The Building and Equipment:
Athearn, W. S., editor. The Maiden Survey. See text, p. 160. Doran, 1920.
Evans, Herbert F. The Sunday-school Building and Its Equipment. Based on the modern educational viewpoint. University o£ Chicago Press, 1914.
Burroughs, P. E. Building a Successful Sunday School. Full and helpful on housing and equipment. Revell, 1921.
IX. The Yearly Program:
Lawrance, M. Special Days in the Sunday School. Re- vell, 1916.
X. The School's Religion:
Hartshorne, Hugh. Childhood and Character. Pilgrim Press, 1919.
Same. Worship in the Sunday School. Teachers College Publications, 1913.
Same. The Book of Worship of the Church School. Scribners, 1915.
Same. Manual for Training in Worship. Scribners, 1915-
Brewbaker, Charles W. The Devotional Life of the Sun- day School. Revell, 1921.
Stowell, Jay S. Story Worship Programs for the Church- school Year. Doran, 192a
Index
Adaptation, the principle of, Cai<e;ndar, the, organized, 28
99 . ... Character shaped by lessons.
Administration division, 21, loi
24 Child religion, 228
Adult classes, started, 53; in Children's Day as commence-
the small school, 58; as an ment, 198; its observance,
agency for reaching the 212
homes, 133; religious edu- Chorister, the, 28; his duties,
cation in, 236 45
Adult division, the: control, Christmas, 212, 215
63, 69; includes the home Church officers in the school,
department, 21, 141 Z7
Aims of lesson courses, 107; Church relations, 31
of the graded lessons, 109; Church service, training for,
administrative use of, iii 192
Akron plan of Sunday-school Class organization, T2)
buildings, 55; history, 149; Class presidents, council of,
description, 150 68
Annual appointment of teach- Classes of officers, 36
ers, 89, 204 Classes, Sunday-school, how
Annual reports, 209 started, 53
Architecture, church-school: Classrooms: size, 62; origin,
history, 148; general prin- 148; limitations, 149
ciples, 151 ; new features in. Clerk of the workers' coun-
153 ; a standard for, 160 cil, 40
Assistant officers, how Committee on education 12
elected, 48 41 > v .
Associate superintendent, du- Communitv, responsibility of
a/iI^"' '\?r^u o < o church to, 153; discharged Athearn, Walter S., 160, 180 through its building 167
Average Sunday school in Communitv training school
U. S., size, 57 the, 189"
T> , Confession of Christ, 244
BEGINNERS department: its Correlation of church-school
spirit, 65 with other work, 105, 116,
iiiographical studies, value in 234
training, 175 Council, the workers', see Budget, the annual, 30; how Workers' council
prepared and presented, Counselors in young peo-
210 pie's division, 63, 68, 79
265
266
INDEX
Course of study: features of a, 102; for a church school, 103; built for a school, 118; selected, 120; train- ing-course features of, 173; religion in the, 228- 237
Cradle roll, the: in the chil- dren's division, 65, 79; as an agency for reaching the home, 131 ; its place in teacher-training, 173
Cradle-roU class, 65, 79; a room for, 165
Curriculum; see Course of study
Decision Day, 115; princi- ples governing, 230; meth- ods, 244 Demotions unwise, 201 Denominational headquar- ters, to be utilized, 181, 188 Denominational relations, 32 Department of the home, the,
139 Department of training, the,
184 Department principals : re- sponsibility, 42; in the chil- dren's division, 65, 79; in the young people's division, 63, 68, 81; should keep graded roll, 120 ; facilities for, 166; their work on Promotion Day, 202; an- nually appointed, 205; fes- tival work of, 214 Department without a room,
the, 63 Departmental diflFerences, 61 Departmental lessons, 66, 71 Departmental staffs, 83 Dike, Samuel W., 124 Director of religious educa- tion, the: his jurisdiction, 37, 46; his work in corre-
lation, S3; in lesson-choos- ing, 97 ; his office room, 166; should not be teacher- trainer, 186; candidates for, 193; annual report of, 210 Distribution of jurisdiction,
35. Dominant principle, the, 100 Duncan, W. A., 125
Easter, 212
Education of the emotions, 27
Educational projects, 116
Entrance requirements for the training class, 176
Equipment : in the children's division, 62, 65 ; for map teaching, 84 ; lack of, 105 ; for home work, 142; place of, 144; for visualization, 155 ; for play and recrea- tion, 156; of church room and social hall, 165; for of- ficers' work, 166; for physical training, 166; for training, 187
Evangelism : as religious ex- pression, 115; methods of, with childhood, 228; with the juniors, 229; with adolescents, 230
Executive staff, the, 42
Executor, figure of the, 35
Expanding the one-room school, 56
Expression, the course of, III
Expressive activities, graded,
113 Expressive conduct, 114
Father- AND- Son banquets,
134 Features of departmental or- ganization, 64
INDEX
267
Federation of local churches,
147
Festivals, 211
Financial organization, 29
Five-class school, the, organ- ization, 58
Freedom of the teacher, 121
GARfiELD and Mark Hopkins, 144
Goals: of home endeavor, 129; annual, 197; for every work, 199
Going school, a, 172
Go-to-Sunday-School Day, 204
Graded lessons: how intro- duced, 118; use in festival preparations, 213
Graded religion, 227
Grades and promotions, 70
Grades, International stand- ard, 20
Grading: definition, 19, 70
History : of the teaching or- ganization, 53 ; of the uni- form-lesson idea, 54; of department names and age- limits, 60; of primary spe- cialization, 76; of the junior department, Tj; of the International graded lessons, 109; of the home department, 125 ; of church- school architecture, 148; of teacher-training courses, 178
Home classes : history, 125 ; use of for training prac- tice, 184
Home department, the; his- tory, 125; its needs, 132; related to the church, 140
Home service called for, 126; a scale of, 127
Home, the: a school of re-
hgion, 124; self-sufficient, 126; a program for, 128; agencies for reaching, 130 Hurlbut type of training manuals, 178
ILLUMINATION of rooms. 163
Independent lesson courses, no
" Infant schools," 23, 53
Inherited limitations i n church-school practice, 148
Installations: of teachers, 206; of officers, 209
Interchurch World Move- ment, 160
Intermediate training, ele- ments of, 174
International Graded I<es- sons: history, 109
Junior Department : its fourth year, 21 ; its needs, 66; history, ^T, staff, 83; place in teacher-training, 173; Bible supply for, 203
Junior religion, 229
Junior training, elements of,
173
Jurisdiction distributed, 35
Lesson-choosing, 97
" Lesson of the day, the," old
and new, 28 Librarian, the, 47, 218 Life service secured through
training, 193 Little Sunday schools, 57, 64 Load-factor, the, 152, 165 Logical and psychologic aims,
108 Losses of workers, 170
Makeshift housing, 146 Map teacher, the, 84
268
INDEX
Membership increase : organ- ized, 24; needed, 171
Music : how organized, 27 ; relation to festival obser- vance, 214
Needs of the pupil para- mount, 98 Neighbourhood relations, 32 New building: how to plan, 148; start with full reor- ganization, 150; general principles, 151 ; new fea- tures, 153; how to realize,
157 New members, how take in,
24 Nomadic teachers, T], 185
One-lesson-for-all idea, the,
54 One-year training manual,
the, 178 Opening worship, 241 ; how
opened, 243 Order of service organized,
18 Organization, good and poor,
Organizing the pupils, 19; the teachers, 22; the of- ficers, 23; the course of study, 26; the music, 27; the calendar, 28; the finances, 29; the school's relations, 31
Paid officers and teachers,
30, 49, 1S6 Parenthood, training for, 136 Parents' department, the, 134 Pastor, the : as a school of- ficer, },•], 39; as a catechist, 116; as an agency for reaching the homes, 130 Pay, the officers', 49
Periods in the order of serv- ice, 18
Pianist, the, 46
Picnics, 215
Play and recreation provided for, 155
Primary department: its start, 54; growth from pri- mary class, 59; arrange- ment of classes in, 66; his- tory, 76
Professional service in the church school coming, 153
Project-teaching, 116
Promotion Day, 22, 72, 90, 198; suggestions for, 202
Promotions, 72, 88, 200
Public schools cannot teach religion, 103
Rally Day, 203, 212
Reading courses, icx)
Reciprocity in the training of workers, 194
Recreation provided for, 155
Religion : need for a course in, 103; difficulties of such a course, 104 ; taught by the school, 226; lived by the school, -ZZT, 246
Rooms, the leader's attitude to, 144; the vision of, 164
Rules: for sulistitutes, 86; for annual appointments, 205 ; for the purchase of supplies, 218
Secretary, the: not clerk of council, 40; his duties, 44; facilities for, 166; should train his assistants, 185; as purchasing agent, 217
Senior promotions, 90
Senior religion, 232
Senior training, elements of, 174
INDEX
269
Separation of pupils and
teachers, 62, 72, 88 Short-course senior classes,
91 . . ^
Speciahzation, primary, 76
Spencer, Herbert, on parent- training, 137
Standard for city church plants, 160; interpreted as a vision, 164
Standard teacher-training course, 179
Standards, official, to be fol- lowed, 61
State and county Sunday- school association : rela- tionship recognized, 2>2', re- ports to, 44; leadership utilized, 188; notices from, 223
Substitute service, the, 84; as part of the training course, 182
Summer schools, 190
Superintendent, the : as a music leader, 27 ; as a calendar-maker, 28; a church officer, 38; manager of the workers' council, 39; of the platform work, 47 ; must pay the workers, 50; responsible for unorgan- ized department's, 83, 229; must choose the lessons, 97; his annual report, 209; his sevenfold routine of work, 220; his docket of work ahead, 222
Supervised substitution, 182
Supplies, how ordered, 44, 217
Tadpoi,e illustration, the, 228,
235 Teacher, the Sunday-school : the concept, 76, 78; in the upper grades. 87; allow-
able freedom of, 117, 121, 138; annual appointment of, 90, 204
Teacher-training; see Train- ing
Teachers' meeting, the, 93
Ten-class school, organiza- tion, 58
Thring, Edward, on " the wall," 145
Todd, John, 76, 78
Training: the master task, 170; size of the need, 170; of undergraduates, 173; its curriculum, 178; substitution as part of, 182 ; the department of, 184; re- sults of, 192
Transfer of pupils to another class, 22, 201
Treasurer, the, 40; his annual report, 209
Trumbull, H. Clay, 76, 78
Ungraded teacher, the, 76 Uniform Lessons, 26; his- tory-, 54; institutions based on, 55 ; are for adult con- venience, 97; fail to meet needs, 99; not a true course, 102 Unity of church plant, 151 Upper-grade teaching, 87 ; promotions, 88
Vacancy wanted, 91 Vincent, John H, 178 Visualization, 155, 165
Week-day religious instruc- tion, 107 ; architectural provision for, 154
Workers' council, the : estab- lished, 32; its officers, 39; its action, 90; its confer- ence : how run, 93 ; as a means of teacher-training.
270 INDEX
igi ; should approve the Young people's department : annual school report, 210; needs, 69; a plan ior or- its calendar, 219 ganizing, 233; teaching for,
.Worship: as religious ex- 235 pression, 112; the service Young people's division: fea- of, 240 tures of organization, 67;
activities of, 116, 245;
Year, the, when begin, 198, should help in festivals, 207 213
CHURCH AND CHURCH SCHOOL
W. EDWABD BAFFETY, Ph.D., P.P.
Editor of The Intemattonal Journal of Reltgtous Education^
Church School Leadership
An Officers' Manual of Practical Methods for Workers in the Church's Sunday, Week-Day and Vacation Schools. $2.00
"A combination of a systematic manual of methods and inspirational treatise. It covers the entire field of re- ligious education in the church, including week-day and vacation schools and principles of grading." — Congregsk- tionalist.
OEOBGE EZRA HUNTLEY, P.P.
Author of "Seeing Straight in the Sunday Schooi"
Hope Victoria at the Helm
A Story of the Twentieth Century Church School. $1,50 "A book with a purpose, one that every Church school superintendent and teacher should read and ttnll read. The fascinating form of the book carries^ one through a real course in Church School administration." — IV. Bdwari Raffety, Editor, International Journal Religious Education
CLINTON WUNPER Pastor Baptist Temple.
-^—^■^———^——^— Rochester
Crowds of Souls for chust and the kingdom
Introduction by Pres. Clarence A. Barbour (Ptochester Theol. Sem.) $1.50
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WORK AMONG YOUNG FOLKS
WALTEB BUSSELL BOWIE, B.B.
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Chimes and the Children $1.25
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The Sunday School Teacher the Book
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