VII

THE DISCIPLINE AND THE PRACTICE

I

N sincerity and with fervor the preacher de-
livers a sermon from Paul's text, "And, ye

fathers, provoke not your children to wrath; but nurture them in the chastening and admonition of the Lord." In the very act he may provoke child-nature and violate the essential laws of the nurture that he is advocating. He may preach on the Saviour's setting the child in the midst and yet himself keep the child on the outer circle or in a lonely corner.

Here is a zealous writer who gives a store of impracticable advice to primary teachers, and adds, "Teach with blackboard, chart, or sand, as circumstances and ability dictate, but let the illustrating be lost in the glow of divine truth." What do the "circumstances dictate” and what is it to have the illustrating "lost in the glow of divine truth"?

Here is another who discourses earnestly on the "religious nurture of childhood," saying that a "true nurture begun in time and steadily maintained, in which the power of prayer, the attraction of holy example, the assistance of grace by judicious instruction, and the energy of an intelligent faith have chief place, parents and the

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Church may look for the early appearance of the essential qualities of Christian experience and character, evidencing an unquestionable title to membership in the divine kingdom." What he says of prayer and example is right, but what is "judicious instruction"? This is the very point. Nothing sounds better than to advise nurture; it is Pauline in strength and tenderness, but no advice is likely to be more "icily regular," more "splendidly null,"-because the real significance of nurture is not thought of in terms of soul-nutrition, after the manner of nature in the bodily nutrition.

From the purely human point of view, then, the remedy for this ineffectual vagueness lies in the discipline of an educational consciousness. As a practical mode of inducing this consciousness, acquire the habit of thinking in educational values; and as a standard by which such values are to be estimated and as a mode by which they are to be realized, think in terms of nutrition or Nurture. All education must come back to this It is the natural way

idea of response to need.

to growth.

This is the discipline. Interrogate your problem in terms of nurture values. To be explicit let us take an illustration from a suggestive article, by a devoted teacher, in the Sunday School Times. The writer thus reports her expe

rience:

"Two comical instances of the persistency of children to adhere to the ideas which they have

gained from a hurried and unexplained reading
of the Bible story to them, occurred recently in
my class. A good name is rather to be chosen
than great riches' was the text. The child
learned by ear, 'A good name is rather to be
chosen than gray breeches.' It was almost im-
possible to get her to change those last two
words, or to make her see that the text as it
stands in the original made better sense.
words of introduction regarding riches, and how
much people thought of them, etc., would have
prevented this absurd concept."

A few

Interrogate: Did the text furnish a single mental image or picture to the child? No. The child's eye is unsatisfied and makes up the best picture that association can find. In this case the sound of the abstract or general term, "great riches" easily led the mind to a concrete image probably already quite familiar to it" gray breeches." Observe we are now thinking in terms of our second mode of nurture (Chapter IV). The image having been formed, of course it is difficult to obliterate it. That the text "great riches" made better sense to the adult did not at all affect the law of light, the persistence of vision in the child. It is doubtful whether the "words of introduction regarding riches" would have prevented "this absurd concept," unless some vivid picture in connection with the abstract term "riches" had invaded the child's mind, and probably that would have been just as absurd. The whole text was too abstract.

The interrogation might even proceed farther, into the realm of the first mode, in which the child's fondness or antipathy for gray breeches might find a part; or it might proceed into the realm of the fourth mode if through association with a working father it stimulated his activity, etc. The text being unpictorial its educational value was small-or worse.

The same writer gives another capital instance. "We were having for our lesson the Israelites leaving Egypt. Ten or twelve in the class had heard the passage read at home, probably without comment. As a unit they had taken the word 'pillar' to mean 'pillow,' and when I asked how God led these people, who had never been out of Egypt so far before, one of them replied, By a yellow cushion, which showed them the way.' And another added, 'It was yellow on one side and black on the other.' It took me a few seconds to see the steps in the syllogism which had led to this absurd conclusion. I began a most cautious presentation of my lesson truth, avoiding the word 'pillar,' using 'bright cloud' and 'dark cloud,' and describing it as reaching from far up in the sky down to the very ground,―my central lesson being that those who were doing right were in the brightness of God's loving care, and enjoying his smile of approval. For home work I suggested that they draw a cloud with crayons, making half of bright crayon and half of black, and that they put some marks for people on the bright side of the cloud-as

many people as they saw doing kind, loving things that week, which showed that they were living in the brightness of God's smile and following his leading. The home work came back, and, to my dismay, every one of those who had gotten that first idea of a 'yellow cushion' (but only those few) had drawn a square sofa-pillow, orange on one side and black on the other."

This being not an abstract text but a story, we naturally think first to the second mode (Chapter V), and being a prescribed lesson we think to the third mode (Chapter VI). As a story it ought to carry its own moral, or at least it ought to with very little suggestion. The teacher's moral-that of "living in the brightness of God's smile," itself was too far out of the realm of conscious child-hunger to be assimilable and too much out of the focus of child-vision to make an apt or vivid picture—especially against such a vividly familiar suggestion as a sofa pillow! The idea of being led by a cloud instead of by the hand, being out of the ordinary experience probably left the minds in suspense until that one youngster, up to this age of luxury, relieved the situation by throwing a sofa pillow before the mind's eye. The result was inevitable and yellow and black crayons doubtless aided the pillowy conception. The whole case shows the truth of Dewey's law that what a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it.