The Junior Teacher
Personality
A great deal is said about the characteristics of the Junior pupils and how these affect the plans that are made for their instruction. They also have a bearing upon the type of adult who should deal with the children in this formative period. It should not be necessary to say that the teacher must be a Christian and a church member, for consistency and common sense alike would demand that he who seeks to prepare recruits for the army of the Lord must be in active service himself. He cannot say, “Go”; he must be able to say, as the Master did, “Come, follow me.” The blind cannot be leaders of the blind. But there are many kinds of Christians and church members-persons who differ in temperament and in ways of looking at religious truth.
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.
The best teacher is one in whom the pupil feels the presence of religion as a concrete, natural thing. The best Sunday-school teaching is an initiation of the pupil into sacred things, and initiation is a process of admitting one to a society of persons and fellowship. Many persons have been asked to say what in their experience as Sunday-school pupils most influenced them for good. The reply, apparently the invariable reply, has been, “The personality of the teacher rather than the content of formal instruction.” Nothing in the way of methods or advice can take the place of wholesome, winning personality that actually lives in the realities of the Christian experience and truly admits pupils into the fellowship of this life.[1]
Opportunity
It is the aim of the Sunday school “gradually to bring to completeness or perfection the worthy qualities and characteristics of each pupil, and repress the unworthy, to the end that he may do the work and exert the influence of a true Christian in his environment.” The Junior period is a time when the Sunday-school teacher is given a unique opportunity for helping to realize this aim. In the child’s physical life this is a time of slow growth and bodily vigor, which makes possible a degree of concentration in work and study not to be expected in the earlier years. It is a time when the memory is both strong and retentive, and the child may make the greatest treasures of holy writ his own for all time if he learns them in these years.
The brain cells are still plastic, though hardening rapidly. It is therefore easy to get the child to act along suggested lines, and through incentives and rewards to secure that regular, voluntary repetition of the right act which is necessary for the formation of a habit. The fact that this is the great habit forming and fixing period of life makes evident at once the large opportunity and the corresponding responsibility of the Sunday school in its relation to Junior children.
Teachers, while endeavoring to exemplify the virtues which they inculcate, should constantly aim to help their pupils to form such habits as regular Bible reading and study, church attendance and attention (which is even more important), punctuality, cooperation, industry, thoroughness, perseverance; cheerful, systematic, intelligent giving, reverence and orderliness. It is tremendously important that the children shall form character building habits at this time; for “whatever is found in the life as habits of thought, feeling, and action at the dawn of adolescence will then be greatly magnified and strengthened.”
Another fact which emphasizes the opportunity this period presents is that at some time during these years, usually toward the end of the period, comes the first great age of spiritual awakening, when the child may be expected to become conscious of his relationship to Christ, and proclaim his newly realized loyalty. In the eyes of the church the child is a member of the kingdom of heaven. It now becomes the duty of the church “to see that the child does not lose his spiritual inheritance; that he is kept in the kingdom and so trained that at the time when he becomes fully conscious of his relationship to the Divine, he will choose to claim his inheritance as a child of God and lead the life for which it calls.”
It is sometimes said that Junior children are “trying,” and this is absolutely true. Each class tries its teacher, not because the children wish to be aggravating, but because it is ordained that they shall gain their knowledge and experience by testing each new situation in which they find themselves, and each new person with whom they are brought into close contact. What they are seeking is reality, and they will experiment until they find out what is true about their teacher. They are not endeavoring to get their own way, though that may often seem to be the case. They never like a teacher who is weak and vacillating, but if in the testing process they discover a teacher who knows what he tries to teach, who is firm and kind, impartial, just, and loving, they will yield to that teacher the truest respect, admiration, loyalty, and affection. The Junior teacher should rejoice in the opportunity that his task affords. There is no other time in the life of a Sunday-school pupil when such a ready response will be made to the right influence, example, and instruction.