TYPES OF ORGANIZATION

Haphazard organization.—­The haphazard plan, which is really no plan at all, is, of course, wholly indefensible.  No teacher has a right to go before his class with his material in so nebulous a state that it lacks coordination and purpose.  It is this that results in chance and unrelated questions, irrelevant discussions, and fruitless wanderings without definite purpose over the field of the lesson, such as may sometimes be seen in church classes.

The outcome of such instruction hardly can be more than occasional, disconnected scraps of information, or fragmentary impressions which are never gathered up and bound together into completed ideals and convictions.  The haphazard type of organization may result from incompetence, indifference, and failure to prepare, or from taking a ready-made and poorly prepared plan from the “lesson helps” which is not adapted to our class.  Pity the child assigned to a class presided over by a teacher who esteems his privilege so lightly as not to make ready for his task by careful planning.

Logical organization.—­In the logical arrangement of material, the first care is not given to planning it in the most favorable way for the one who studies and learns it, but, rather, to fit together the different parts of the subject matter in the way best suited to its logical relationships.  The child is pedagogically ignored; the material receives primary consideration.  The logical order of material fits the mind of the adult, the scholar, the expert, the master in his field of knowledge; it begins with the most general and abstract truths.  But the child naturally starts with the particular and the concrete.  It gives rules, principles, definitions, while the child asks for illustrations, applications, real instances, and actual cases.

The logical method is adapted to the trained explorer in the fields of learning, to one who has been over the ground and knows all of its details, and not to the young novice just starting his discoveries in regions that are strange to him.  The logical plan will teach the young child the general plan of salvation, man’s fall and need of redemption, the wonder and significance of the atonement, and gracious effects of divine regeneration working in the heart—­all of which he needs finally to know—­but not as a child just beginning the study of religion.  The child must arrive at the general plan of salvation through realizing the saving power at work in his own life; he must come to understand the fall of man and his need of redemption through meeting his own childhood temptations and through seeing the effects of sin at work around him; he must understand the atonement and regeneration through the present and growing consciousness of a living Christ daily strengthening and redeeming his life.

Chronological organization.—­The chronological order of material is desirable at the later stages of the child’s growth and development.  But in earlier years the time sequence is not the chief consideration.  This is because the child’s historical sense is not yet ready for the concept of cause and effect at work to produce certain inevitable results in the lives of men or nations.