(e) Careful treatment of difficulties.Keeping the spiritual aim in view would assist in dealing with some of the critical difficulties which beset a thoughtful teacher. It is most important not to give mature food to an immature mind, or to bring before the child, who has not realised any difficulties, the critic’s suspension of judgment, which is such a comfort to the teacher. But though we should avoid giving an impression that facts and authorship are moot points, still we can avoid putting up stones of stumbling which will afterwards have to be cleared away. Children need the old stories told in all simplicity, the stories of the childhood of the race, but if we keep before them “the one far-off Divine event,” towards which all those stories pointed, if we teach them Jewish history in the light of the Divine education of the human race, instead of treating the Flood and Jael and Joshua’s wars, etc., as finished episodes which stand on their own merits, so to speak, surely then there will be little or nothing in the best modern lines of thought to upset their faith, and much to enrich it.
Summary.To sum up shortly, the following are the main points I would seek to impress on a young teacher, in considering the moral side of education. First and foremost the heavy responsibility attached to the teacher’s office—an office which combines the functions of clergyman, doctor and instructor. Next, the personal qualifications required of the teacher, holiness, serenity, insight into character, knowledge of the world; then the aims of the teacher’s work, the building up a sound mind in a sound body, by the help of the good habits arising from right conditions of school life, most of all by the help of the Bible lesson, which must be the inspiration of the whole school course.
I should like to end by quoting some words of William Law, the great mystic of the last century, which put before us the true ends of education. In his Treatise on Christian Perfection he says: “Show me a learning that makes man truly sensible of his duty: that fills the mind with true light: that makes us more reasonable in all our actions: that inspires us with fortitude, humility and devotion”.
SECTION III.
CULTIVATION OF THE BODY.
By Jane Frances Dove, Certificated Student of Girton College, Cambridge, 1874; Head Mistress of Wycombe Abbey School, Bucks; previously Head Mistress of St. Leonard’s School, St. Andrews, N.B.
So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer bodie doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairely dight
With chearefull grace and amiable sight;