9. He Should Know His Bible.—What do we wish the pupil to learn? Answering this will answer in part the question, What should the teacher know? Manifestly, then, the teacher should be familiar with the Bible. How very fragmentary and unsatisfactory our knowledge of the great Book is until we have studied it in a definite and systematic way—in the way we study our history or our geography. The teacher should at least know the salient features of the incomparable Text and should have well fixed in memory many of the great utterances that lie like flecks of gold upon its sunny pages.
10. Clear and Related Knowledge.—But the teacher should know in a more connected and also in a more detailed way the truths of the Book. The pupil's knowledge should be clear, by which one means that he should know a thing and not some other thing in its stead; and a teacher's knowledge should be not only clear but related, by which one means that he should know a thing in its relation to all other things with which it is vitally connected. This makes for system in knowledge, and gives the teacher the power to teach each fact with its due emphasis, no more and no less. Some writers on education call this kind of knowing apperception, by which they mean seeing a thing in its proper system and in its due relations. To say that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, that he lived in Nazareth, that he was crucified on Calvary, and that he arose from the dead on the third day, as he said he would, is clear knowledge. To see Jesus as the fulfilment of prophecy, as the promised King, as the leader of his people, as a teacher with more than human insight, as the founder of a church, and as the pattern and perfection of all endeavor, is related knowledge; it is seeing Jesus as part of a great system of purpose that swept into time by the will of God.
11. It is well also for the teacher to possess adequate knowledge; he should be able to separate a fact into its parts; that is, analyze it. This analytic power makes for vivid teaching but it is a power that the pupil in his early years cannot acquire. Only the mature mind is analytic, and the teacher who knows how to analyze a fact or a lesson knows the secret of proportion in teaching, the power to know what to make emphatic, what to make subordinate. It is a poor teacher who is unable to distinguish between a vital element and a non-vital element.
12. Related Subjects.—The teacher should also know such related subjects as will best enable him to make clear each point under treatment in the lesson. A teacher should have a working knowledge of biblical geography and of sacred antiquities. He should know how to use a concordance, how to work up cross-references, how to interpret peculiar idioms, and in general how to use the text of the Bible in the most effective manner. He should know the general principles of organization pursued in a modern Sunday-school, together with the outlines of the history of the church, and should have a general knowledge of the translations of the Bible into the English language.
13. Thinking Principles.—In addition to the subject-matter, the teacher should know something of the laws of thought, and the best way to use knowledge as an agency in forming these laws of thought. All these laws are scheduled in any elementary treatise on psychology, and the best method of using knowledge to train the soul is set forth in any good treatise on pedagogy. Thus to a knowledge of the subject-matter the teacher must add a knowledge of psychology and of pedagogy. Scholarship alone is not the test of a good teacher.
14. If one reflects for a time upon his own methods of acquiring knowledge, he will begin to understand the operations of the human soul. When one reads that knowledge enters the soul only through the special senses, or that ideas may be recalled by memory, it is of the utmost importance that he should ask himself the question: What do these statements mean? An illustration will help to answer this question: I know that fire will burn my hand; the knowledge of this fact entered my consciousness through the sense of touch, and my memory recalls it.
15. Teaching Principles.—When the laws of soul growth are fairly well understood, it is time to investigate the principles of pedagogy, the laws that govern the teacher in the act of using knowledge to occasion activity in the soul of a learner. For the laws of teaching rest upon the laws of the soul. We cannot know how to proceed in the teaching process until we know how the soul acts under given conditions.
16. This act of teaching is a vastly significant one. It results in changing the viewpoint of the pupil's life. It should produce in his soul new knowledge, or power, or skill, or all of these combined. Consider well, teacher, what this means. How the child is taught determines in no small way how he will in the years to come regard his fellow-man, his country, his church, his own duty, and his loyalty to all that makes for progress in the life that is hid with Christ in God.
17. There are certain educational principles of great value to the teacher. Consider what it means to adapt knowledge to the capacity of the learner, or what it means to secure interest in the learner, or what it means to proceed from the simple to the complex in teaching, and you will begin to understand something of the power of right activities in the recitation.