your instruction is actually carrying over into the immediate life and conduct of your class in their home, school, etc.?  If not to so great an extent as you could wish, are you willing to make this one of the great aims of your teaching from this time on, seeking earnestly throughout this text and in other ways to learn how this may be done?

5.  Do you on the whole feel that the subject matter you are teaching your pupils is adapted to the aims you seek to reach in their lives?  If not, how can you supplement and change to make it more effective?  Have you a broad enough knowledge of such material yourself so that you can select material from other sources for them?

6.  To what extent do you definitely plan each lesson for the particular children you teach so as to make it most accessible to their interest and grasp?  Do you plan each lesson to secure a psychological mode of approach?  How do you know when you have a psychological approach?

FOR FURTHER READING

Betts, Class-Room Method and Management, Part I.

Coe, A Social Theory of Religious Education, Part II.

DuBois, The Point of Contact in Teaching.

CHAPTER IV

RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE OF MOST WORTH

The child comes into the world devoid of all knowledge and understanding.  His mind, though at the beginning a blank, is a potential seedbed in which we may plant what teachings we will.  The babe born into our home to-day can with equal ease be made into a Christian, a Buddhist, or a Mohammedan.  He brings with him the instinct to respond to the appeal religion makes to his life, but the kind and quality of his religion will depend largely on the religious atmosphere he breathes and the religious ideas and concepts placed in his mind through instruction and training.

What, then, shall we teach our children, in religion?  If fruitful knowledge is to be one of the chief aims of our teaching, what knowledge shall we call fruitful?  What are the great foundations on which a Christian life must rest?  Years ago Spencer wrote a brilliant essay on knowledge of most worth in the field of general education.  What knowledge is of most worth in the field of religious education?  For not all knowledge, as we have seen, is of equal value.  Some religious knowledge is fruitful because it can be set at work to shape our attitudes and guide our acts; other religious knowledge is relatively fruitless because it finds no point of contact with experience.