CAN the graded system be successfully used in small Sunday schools? The
plan described in this article has been in successful operation for
several years in the Central Methodist Episcopal Sunday school in
Chicopee, Mass., in which the membership during that time has averaged
200 and the average attendance has been about 150.
Before describing in detail the plan it may be well to stale three
principles on which the plan is based:
1. A school, in order to be such, must be instructive as well as
evangelistic, and if instruction is to be given there are many
principles of instruction which have been worked out in our system of
public schools and which have come to be accepted as right principles of
teaching anything, and these principles cannot be ignored in teaching
in the Sunday schools any more than they can in the day schools without
impairment of the results desired.
2. In general terms, the most important principle of successful teaching
is that it should be progressive and adapted in succeeding years to the
normal development of the mind of the average child, and this relates to
the method of teaching a given subject as well as to the selection of
the subjects which shall be taught.
3. Another principle of successful teaching which is of almost as much
importance as the one just alluded to is that there shall be one person
at the head with a definite plan of work.
Applying these principles to Sunday school work, this school supposes
that there is certain instruction which properly belongs to the Sunday
school to give; that there is no reason why the Sunday school should not
make use of the best methods of instruction which are known to educators
so far as applicable; and that when the superintendent is elected to his
place the church in effect commits to him or her the entire care of that
part of the work of the church, and that it is perfectly proper for him
to direct his teachers in the work which he will have done in his school
during his term of office.