Stories from the olden time: Teacher's text book, course IV, part I — John Shaqi
Stories from the olden time: Teacher's text book, course IV, part IBaldwin, Josephine L.
Religion
Stories from the olden time: Teacher's text book, course IV, part I
Baldwin, Josephine L.
Bible -- Study and teaching; Bible stories, English; Christian education of children
The Junior period is a time when the pupils are searching for realities.
If normal children, normally trained in the home and church, they have
almost unbounded credulity, which during this period rapidly develops
with growing knowledge and experience into true faith. This is the
God-given time for so strengthening the foundations of religious
belief for the children that in the succeeding periods, when doubts
will normally arise and sometimes beat most insistently upon the house
of their faith, it will stand firm because built upon a rock. It is
a crime to suggest doubts to Junior children or to surround them
with an atmosphere of uncertainty. The teacher who attempts to guide
children in this period should know what he believes, and believe it
with all his heart, and speak with no uncertain sound. This may seem
an almost impossible condition in an age when most learned scholars
find innumerable points of criticism upon which they cannot agree, and
concerning which many declare themselves to be agnostic; but there are
certain great fundamentals which all must believe if they are to be
intrusted with the leading of the young, and those who are chosen for
Junior teachers should have the temperament which puts emphasis upon the
positive and constructive in belief rather than upon the things which lie
on debatable ground.
A person who has not a keen sense of justice, and who is not able to
be impartial and to keep in the background any personal preferences
that he may have, should not attempt to teach Juniors. The children
will apply to themselves the most rigid rules if given an opportunity
for self-government, and will rejoice in obeying them, but they will
resent with the utmost intensity the slightest ruling of a teacher or
superintendent which has in it a taint of partiality or injustice. This
does not mean that the teacher of Juniors must be ideally perfect. The
impossible is not required of anyone in God’s work; but because “we teach
only a little by what we say, much more by what we do, and most of all
by what we are,” it is more important that the Junior teacher should
cultivate those qualities in himself which appeal most strongly to the
Junior child than it is that the lessons chosen for the children shall
present those qualities through the lives of the heroes of the past.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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