to-day may become the Phillips Brooks, the Henry Ward Beecher, the Livingstone, the Frances Willard, the Luther of to-morrow?  Do you realize the responsibility that one takes upon himself when he undertakes to guide the development of a life?

6.  Can you now make a statement of the measures that you will wish to apply to determine your degree of success as a teacher?  It will be worth your while to try to make a list of the immediate objectives you will seek for your class to attain in their personal lives.  Keep this list and see whether it is modified by the chapters that lie ahead.

FOR FURTHER READING

Harrison, A Study of Child Nature.

Moxcey, Girlhood and Character.

Dawson, The Child and His Religion.

Forbush, The Boy Problem.

Richardson (Editor), The American Home Series.

Richardson, Religious Education of Adolescents.

CHAPTER III

THE FOURFOLD FOUNDATION[1]

[1] The point of view and in some degree the outlines of this and several following chapters have been adapted from the author’s text “Class-Room Method and Management,” by permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Indianapolis.

All good teaching rests on a fourfold foundation of principles.  These principles are the same from the kindergarten to the university, and they apply equally to the teaching of religion in the church school or subjects in the day school.  Every teacher must answer four questions growing out of these principles, or, failing to answer them, classify himself with the unworthy and incompetent.  These are the four supreme questions: 

     1.  What definite aims have I set as the goal of my teaching?  What
     outcomes do I seek?

     2.  What material, or subject matter, will best accomplish these
     aims?  What shall I stress and what shall I omit?

     3.  How can this material best be organized, or arranged, to adapt
     it to the child in his learning?  How shall I plan my material?

     4.  What shall be my plan or method of presentation of this
     material to make it achieve its purpose?  What of my technique of
     instruction?

THE AIM IN TEACHING RELIGION

First of all, the teacher of religion must have an aim; he must know what ends he seeks to accomplish.  Some statistically minded person has computed that, with all the marvelous accuracy of aiming modern guns, more than one thousand shots are fired for every man hit in battle.  One cannot but wonder how many shots would be required to hit a man if the guns were not aimed at anything!

Is the analogy too strong?  Is the teacher more likely than the gunner to reach his objective without consciously aiming at it?  And can the teacher set up for attainment as definite aims as are offered the gunner?  Do we know just what ends we seek in the religious training of our children?