The Boy and the Sunday School: A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday School with Teen Age BoysAlexander, John L.
Religion
The Boy and the Sunday School: A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday School with Teen Age Boys
Alexander, John L.
Sunday schools
The welfare type of organizations has multiplied in the past few years,
_and their less religious activities have served to keep the religious
and semi-religious types alive_. The Boys' Brigade, the National First
Aid Association, the Woodcraft Indians, Sons of Daniel Boone, Boy
Scouts, and others of like type, are in season and out of season
appealing to American boyhood. Their aim is not specific, but general
and vague: "Something to do, something to think about, something to
enjoy, with a view always to character-building." Their appeal is
mostly to the physical and the out-of-doors; their philosophy that of
the recapitulation of the culture epochs. Their promoters do not claim
that they touch all of life. They seek to dominate the leisure time
only, and to produce goodness by affording no free time for positive
wrong-doing. The domination is also physical expression, and the mental
and spiritual in the boy and his home, school, and church life are not
vitally affected directly.
All three types, however, have done splendid work in the past, and are
rendering good service in the present as they will in the future. The
success of each depends entirely on its leadership. If a leader be
steeped in the Idylls of the King, the Knights of King Arthur will be
popular with the boys and the church. If the superintendent of the
brotherhood or society be human and magnetic, the church and the boy
will sing its praises. If the scoutmaster is an out-of-door man and has
a point of contact with the boy, the Boy Scouts will be the solution of
all our difficulties. Here lies the crux of the whole matter. If boys
are added to the church through any organization, it is not because of
the method, but because of the worker of the method. The method counts
because it is part of the worker--is in his blood.
=Method=
The aim of all church work should be the production not merely of
manhood but _Christian manhood_. The vision is to see the boy a
Christ-like boy--a physically, socially, mentally and spiritually
balanced man in the making. The organizations used, then, in boys' work
should be selected with this aim in mind.
Again, modern psychology has demonstrated to us that all boy activities
must be graded according to each stage of a boy's development, and that
there are several such stages. In the adolescent boy these may roughly
be classed as the heroic and reflective stages, or as early, middle, and
late adolescence. Boy activities, then, must group themselves to
minister to the needs of each separate stage in order to work
effectively. But psychology has also shown us that the activities of any
one stage must also be graded to meet the needs of that one stage. Thus
the heroic may run from the twelfth to the fifteenth year, and the
activities of this phase should be graded to meet the development of the
phase. This is well illustrated by the Tenderfoot Second Class Scout and
First Class Scout degrees of the Boy Scouts which operate in this
period.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account