Sunday-school Museum. Read description of one at Akron, in "The Modern Sunday School," p. 301.
Illustrative Blackboard Sketching, by W. Bertha Hintz. E. L. Kellogg & Co. 53 pp. 30 cents.
A helpful guide designed for those entirely ignorant of the art of drawing, who nevertheless like to work out their own way of putting a lesson, for the eye as well as for the ear, in preference to ready-made blackboard exercises and "pictured truth" at second hand.
IX.
FALSE PICTURE-WORK.
A book on helps, to be truly helpful, must deal with negative as well as with positive matters—those things which we ought to leave undone as well as those we ought to do. Any treatment of true picture-work is lacking in completeness, not to say in candor, which does not say a word about false picture-work.
If there were only some way of crawling into the inside of the children's brains, and marking the effect of the alliterations, juxtapositions, and symbolisms of what goes by the name of picture-work! Can't we devise a meter for estimating the precise emotional and spiritual value of a board filled with marks in various colors in the form of anchors, hearts, keys, crosses, not to mention other less sacred things?
I once saw a "chalk talk" given to two hundred Sunday-school children. Dramatis personæ: three parrots; one unrecognizable, it was so badly drawn; a second, indifferent; the third, capital, a speaking likeness. The last was perched on S. T. Moral: "Honesty is the best policy." The children were as delighted as if the text had been taken from the Bible and as interested in the display as if it had possessed the slightest value.
"But," it is urged, "the children are always interested in such things." Yes, and they would be more interested still if you showed them a monkey or displayed red, green, and blue lights. The law of interest tells us what shall not be placed before the children—"Nothing that is not interesting"—but as a guide to what we shall give them it tells but half the story. The other half is, "Not everything that is interesting, and not anything just because it is interesting."
Let this caution not be misunderstood. The children must use their eyes. To expect children to follow your stories by ear, and make up their mind-pictures out of whole cloth or from the few objects and pictures that can be shown them, or to remember texts and lesson points out of hand, is to suppose them ready to graduate into the senior department. Let us have more blackboards. An individual board for every pupil, if possible, and the more use—wise use—of blackboards the better. But many "blackboardists" have yet to learn that it is possible to be apt without being alliterative, that one may be extravagant without being effective, sensational without being spiritual. In short, they seem not to understand that common sense applies even to blackboard work.