Training the Teacher

by A. F. Schauffler; Martin Grove Brumbaugh; Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux; Marion Lawrance

Junior Age (Concluded)

19. Opportunities of the Junior Age.—No period offers opportunities bearing more directly and openly upon the formation of character than the Junior period, when manhood- and womanhood-to-be are so rapidly determining. Out of these opportunities five may be selected as most significant:

(1) The opportunity to gain spiritual ends through social means. The more a teacher can enter into the fun-loving, companionship-craving side of the pupil's heart, the greater his power over that life for distinctly spiritual things. It is after the party or the picnic or the tramp together that the personal message can be spoken.

(2) The opportunity to arouse and to guide the pupil's effort through heroic ideals. Sermonizing on what they should do is practically valueless with boys and girls of this age, for considerations of duty weigh little until the larger moral consciousness of the next period. Furthermore, they live but for the day, and do not appreciate the relationship between present action and future character. What they may do later as a result of their own convictions and understanding, they may be inspired to do now through the hero who has aroused their admiration and desire of imitation.

(3) The opportunity to establish right habits of life. The pathways of service through which the Christian life ought to express itself must be definitely and painstakingly traced in this period and the next. Motives for the action may not be the highest, and must often be supplied by another. For example, the daily Bible reading that ought to be prompted by real love for the Word later may now be done for love of the teacher—or because the promise was given, but in any event it is leaving its indelible impress—and making the "Quiet Hour" more assured in the future.

(4) The opportunity to build Bible knowledge into character. Impressions are necessary and effective in their place, but something more definite is needed for stability of character. The opportunity of supplementing impressions with facts is the one offered by this Golden Memory period. Two points should be noted:

(a) The mind is growing in its power to associate facts. The association of events around a person or a place is easily made now, and toward the end of the period sequences of time and cause and effect are grasped.

(b) The Holy Spirit can bring to the remembrance only that which has been in the mind. Therefore the teacher who stores the memory at this time with Scripture passages makes it possible for God to speak to the heart in later years.

(5) The opportunity to lead to open confession of Jesus Christ. This is not to force, it is not to play upon the child's emotions, and lead him to do that which has no foundation in a consciousness of his own relation to Christ, but something is radically wrong in the home and something lacking in the teacher's work, if the boys and girls do not really love the Lord Jesus in this period. They do not understand it all, but the essentials of a Christian life they may have,—love, faith, penitence for wrongdoing, and the desire to serve Christ. Their experience cannot be that of an adult, for they have not his insight. But just as surely as the love and caress of the child is precious and acceptable to a mother even before there can be any comprehension on his part of the sacrificial character of mother-love, so is child-love precious and accepted with the Master even before the child grasps the great spiritual contents.

20. Needs of the Junior Age.

(1) The presentation of Christianity as something to do rather than to be. The boys and girls do not live in inner experiences in these years, but in outward, energetic action; therefore, what they may do for Jesus Christ and others needs emphasis. This presentation also includes a Christ who appeals to boyhood and girlhood, the wonder-worker of Mark, the God-Man of Matthew and Luke, and the victorious King of Revelation.

(2) Opportunities for service. These must be carefully devised by the teacher, with the twofold purpose of giving immediate expression to the desire to do something and leading to the formation of habits of Christian activity.

(3) Christian heroes. The teacher ought to be a Christian hero himself. Out of missionary literature, out of the lives of great men who have lived, out of Bible characters, heroes must be multiplied. The Sunday-school lessons ought to be hero studies, not sermons. Heroic literature ought to be put into the hands of the children—either directly or through indirect suggestion in some curiosity-arousing reference to the story. This means the most effective type of instruction during all the week as well as Sunday.

(4) A lesson requiring work on the part of the pupil. Telling a Junior class primary stories will deplete it in numbers and weaken it in strength. Assigned work to be prepared at home, questions, note-books, map-making, anything to stimulate and utilize the activity of mind and body through interest, not compulsion, is the great necessity of the lesson hour.

21. Difficulties of the Junior Age.—Three difficulties may be encountered.

(1) A misdirected energy. Energy means finest growth and development if it is under direction and control, but devastation otherwise. The key to the situation is in the teacher's personality, plus a plan for the hour's work, appealing to interest and calling for constant activity, either mental or physical, on the part of the pupil.

(2) Evil associates. The teacher cannot guard the child through the seven days of a week; often the home does not, and in this new social interest there is a danger from evil associates. Better pastoral work by the teacher, a closer co-operation with the home, and substitutive—not prohibitive—measures avail much in meeting this difficulty.

(3) The enticement of bad literature. This period and the next are the time of greatest hunger for reading and there is a real danger from the temptations of pernicious books. Satan has emissaries on the school-grounds and in the candy store, and boys and girls are his shining marks. The substitutive measures here again are the only wise and effective ones.

22. Results to be Expected in the Junior Age.—The results of work in this period ought to appear in an increase in Bible knowledge, the strengthening of right habits and manly ideals of life, and back of it all the warm love of boyhood and girlhood for the Lord Jesus Christ.