How to Teach Religion: Principles and MethodsBetts, George Herbert
Religion
How to Teach Religion: Principles and Methods
Betts, George Herbert
Religion -- Study and teaching; Religious education
While loyalty should be permeated by a sense of duty and obligation, and
even of self-sacrifice, it cannot rest on this alone. Most children and
youth are loyal to their homes; but this loyalty rests chiefly on a
sentiment formed from day to day and year to year out of the satisfying
experiences connected with the love, care, protection, and associations
of the home. Let these happy, satisfying home experiences be lacking,
and loyalty to the home fails or loses its fine quality.
In similar way, if the experiences in the Sunday school and the church
continuously yield satisfaction, enjoyment, and good feeling, the
child's loyalty and devotion are assured; if, on the other hand, these
experiences come to be associated with dislike, reluctance, and
aversion, loyalty is in danger of breaking under the strain.
The response of interest.--_Are the children interested?_ While, as we
have seen, the atmosphere or spirit of the classroom supplies the
condition necessary to successful work, interest supplies the motive
force. For interest is the mainspring of action. A child may politely
listen, or from a sense of courtesy or good will sit quietly passive and
not disturb others, but this does not meet the requirement. His thought,
interest, and enthusiasm must be centered on the matter in hand. He must
withdraw his attention from all wandering thoughts, passing fancies,
distracting surroundings, and concentrate upon the lesson itself. There
is no substitute for this. There is no possibility of making lasting
impressions on a mind with its energies dispersed through lack of
attention. And there is no possibility of securing fruitful attention
without interest.
Interest therefore becomes a primary consideration in our teaching of
religion. The teacher must constantly ask himself: "What is the state
of my pupils' interest? How completely am I commanding their enthusiasm?
Suppose I were to grade them on a scale with _complete-indifference_ as
the interest zero, and with the _'exploding-point'-of-enthusiasm_ as the
highest interest mark, where would the score mark of my class stand? And
if I cannot reasonably hope to keep my class at the high-water mark of
interest at all times, what shall I call an attainable standard? If one
hundred per cent is to represent the supreme achievement of interest,
shall I be satisfied with fifty per cent, with twenty-five per cent, or
with complete indifference? If the minds of my pupils can receive and
retain lasting impressions only under the stimulus of the higher range
of interest, in how far am I now making lasting impressions on my class?
In short, _is the interest attitude of my class as good as I can make
it?_"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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