THE MEANING OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY
§ 1. THE FUNCTION OF THE FAMILY
With the brief statement of the history of the family and of its
function in society which has already been given we are prepared to put
together the two conclusions: first, that the family has an educational
function, in that it exists as a social institution for the protection,
nurture, development, and training of young lives, and, secondly, that
it is a religious institution, the most influential and important of all
religious institutions, whenever it realizes in any adequate degree its
possibilities, because it is rooted in love and loyalty. It exists for
personal and spiritual ideals and, in Christianity, it is inseparably
connected with the teachings and the ideals of Jesus. It is educational
in function and religious in character, so that it is essentially an
institution for religious education. Religious education is not an
occasional incident in its life; it is the very aim and dominating
purpose of a high-minded family.
§ 2. WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION?
To make this the more clear we may need to clarify our minds as to
certain popular conceptions of education. Education means much more
than instruction; religious education means much more than instruction
in religion. Many habitually think of an educational institution as
necessarily a place where pupils sit at desks and teachers preside over
classes, the teachers imparting information which is to be memorized by
the pupils, so that, from this point of view, a Sunday school would be
almost the only institution for the religious education of children in
existence, because it is the only one exclusively devoted to imparting
instruction to children in specifically religious subjects. Such a view
would limit religious education in the home to the formal teaching of
the Bible and religious dogma by parents. The memorizing of scriptural
passages and of the different catechisms once constituted a regular duty
in almost all well-ordered homes. Today it is rarely attempted. Does
that mean that religious education has ceased in the home?
But education means much more than instruction. Education is the whole
process, of which instruction is only a part. Education is the orderly
development of lives, according to scientific principles, into the
fulness of their powers, the realization of all their possibilities, the
joy of their world, the utmost rendering in efficiency of their service.
It includes the training of powers of thought, feeling, willing, and
doing; it includes the development of abilities to discern,
discriminate, choose, determine, feel, and do. It prepares the life for
living with other lives; it prepares the whole of the life, developing
the higher nature, the life of the spirit, for living in a spiritual
universe.
Religious education, then, means much more than instruction in the
literature, history, and philosophy of religion. It means the kind of
directed development which regards the one who is developing as a
religious person, which seeks to develop that one to fulness of
religious powers and personality, and which uses, as means to that end,
material of religious inspiration and significance and, indeed, regards
all material in that light. Religious education seeks to direct a
religious process of growth with a religious purpose for religious
persons. Religious education is the spirit which characterizes the work
of every educator who looks on the child as a spiritual nature, a
religious person; it is the work of every educator who sees his aim as
that of training this spiritual person to fulness of living in a society
essentially spiritual.
In simplest possible terms, religious education means the training of
persons to live the religious life and to do their work in the world as
religious persons. It must mean, then, the development of character; it
includes the aim, in the parents' minds, to bring their children up to
the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. It is evident that
this is a much greater task, and yet more natural and beautiful, than
mere instruction in formal ideas or words in the Bible or in a
catechism; that it is not and cannot be accomplished in some single
period, some set hour, but is continuous, through all the days; that it
pervades not only the spoken words, but the actions, organization, and
the very atmosphere of the home.
§ 3. THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS
Normal persons never stop growing. Just as children grow all the time in
their bodies, so do adults and all others grow all the time in mind and
will and powers of the higher life whenever they live normally. We grow
spiritually, not only in church and under the stimulus of song and
prayer, but we grow when the beauty of the woods appeals to us, when the
face lightens at the face of a friend, when we meet and master a
temptation, when we brace up under a load, when we do faithfully the
dreary, daily task, when we adjust our thoughts in sympathy to others,
when we move in the crowd, when we think by ourselves. The educational
process is continuous. The children in the home are being moved,
stimulated, every instant, and they are being changed in minute but
nevertheless real and important degrees by each impression. There is
never a moment in which their character is not being developed either
for good or for ill. Religious education--that is, the development of
their lives as religious persons--goes on all the time in the home, and
it is either for good or for ill.
Next to the idea of the continuous and all-pervasive character of this
process of religious development the most important thought for us is
that religious education in the home may be determined by ourselves.
This continuous, fateful process is not a blind, resistless one. It is
our duty to direct it. It is possible for wise parents to determine the
characters of their children. We must not forget this. It cannot be too
strongly insisted on. The development of life is under law. This is an
orderly world. Things do not just happen in it. We believe in a law that
determines the type of a cabbage, the character of a weed. Do we believe
that this universe is so ordered that there is a law for weeds and none
for the higher life of man? Do we hold that cabbages grow by law but
character comes by chance? If there is a law we may find it and must
obey it. If we may know how to develop character, with as great
certainty as we know how to do our daily work, will not this be our
highest task, our greatest joy, the supreme thing to do in life?
§ 4. THE CONSEQUENT OBLIGATION
This is the first great obligation of parents and of those who are
willing to accept the joys and responsibilities of parenthood. We have
no right to bring into this world lives with all the possibilities that
a religious nature involves unless we know how to develop those lives
for the best and from the worst. When we picture what a little child may
become, from the vile, depraved, despoiling beast or the despicable,
sneaking hypocrite on one extreme, to the upright, God-loving,
man-serving man or woman with the love of purity, honor, truth, and
goodness speaking through the life, we may well pause, realizing we need
more than a sentimental desire that the child may reach the heights of
goodness: we must know the way there and the methods of leading the life
in that way. True devotion to God and to childhood will mean more than
petitions for the salvation of children; it will mean the prayer that is
labor and the labor that is prayer to know how they may attain fulness
of spiritual life; it will mean reverent searching into the divine ways
of growth in grace. The study of the means and methods of religious
education, especially of children, in the home and family, is one of the
most evident and important religious duties resting on parents and all
who contemplate marriage and family life.
§ 5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD?
In discussing the development of character in children one hears often
the question, "Which is the earliest virtue to appear in a child?"
People will debate whether it is truthfulness, reverence, kindness, or
some other virtue. All this implies a picture of the child as a tree
that sends forth shoots of separate virtues one after another. But the
character desired is not a series of branches, it is rather like a
symmetrical tree; it is not certain parts, but it is the whole of a
personality. The development of religious character is not a matter of
consciously separable virtues, but is the determination of the trend and
quality of the whole life. Moral training is not a matter of cultivating
honesty today, purity tomorrow, and kindness the day after. Virtues have
no separate value. Character cannot be disintegrated into a list of
independent qualities. We seek a life that, as a whole life, loves and
follows truth, goodness, and service.
§ 6. EARLY TENDENCIES
But it is wise to inquire as to those manifestations of a pure and
spiritual life which will earliest appear. One does not need to look far
for the answer. Children are always affectionate; they manifest the
possibilities of love. True, this affection is rooted in physiological
experience, based on relations to the mother and on daily propinquity to
the rest of the family, but it is that which may be colored by devotion,
elevated by unselfish service, and may become the first great, ideal
loyalty of the child's life. Little boys will fight and girls will
quarrel more readily over the question of the merits of their respective
parents than over any other issue. Almost as soon as a child can talk he
boasts of the valor of his father, the beauty of his mother. Here is
loyalty at work. He stands for them; he resents the least doubt as to
their superiority, not because they give him food and shelter, but
because they are his, because to him they are worthy; in all things they
have the worth, the highest good; they are, in person, the virtue of
life. Therefore in fighting for the reputation of his parents he is
practicing loyalty to an ideal.
The principle of loyalty is the life-force of virtue; it is like the
power that sends the tree toward the heavens, the upthrust of life. It
may be cultivated in a thousand ways. Provided there is the outreach and
upreach of loyalty within and that there is furnished without the worthy
object, ideal, and aim, the life will grow upward and increase in
character, beauty, and strength.
Next to the affectionate idealization of parents and home-folk one of
the earliest manifestations of the spirit of loyalty in the child is
his desire to have a share in the activities of the home. He would not
only look like those he admires; he would do what they do. This is more
than mere imitation; it is loyalty at work again. The direction of this
tendency is one of the largest opportunities before parents and can make
the most important contribution to character.
The religious life of the child is essentially a matter of loyalty. His
faith, affections, aspirations, and endeavors turn toward persons,
institutions, and concepts which are to him ideal. He does not analyze,
he cannot describe, or even narrate, his religious experiences, but he
affectionately moves, with a sense of pleasure, toward those things
which seem to him ideal, toward parents, customs of the home or school,
the church, his class, his teacher, toward characters in story-books. He
is likely to think of Jesus in just that way, as the one person whom he
would most of all like to know and be with. The life of virtue and the
religious life then will be weak or strong in the measure that the child
has the stimulating ideals which call forth his loyalty and in the
measure that he has opportunity to express that loyalty. His religious
life will consist, not so much in external forms perhaps, still less in
intellectual statements about theology or even about his own
experiences, as in a growing realization of the great ideals, an
increasing sense of their meaning and reality within, and, on the
objective side, a steady moving of his life toward them in action and
habits and therefore in character and quality.
§ 7. IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS
It is worth while to insist upon two important considerations. Parents
who stand as gardeners watching the growth of the tender plant of
child-character may be looking for developments that never ought to come
and will be disappointed because they were looking for the wrong thing.
First, in watching for the beginnings of the religious life of the child
in the family we are not expecting some new addition to the life, but
rather the development of this whole life as a unity in a definite
direction which we call religious. It is the first and most important
consideration that religious education is not something added to the
life as an extra subject of interest, but the development of the whole
life into religious character and usefulness. Secondly, this growth of
religious character is going on all the time. It is not separable into
pious periods; it is a part of the very life of the family. Perhaps this
increases the difficulty of our task, for it removes it from the realm
of the mechanical, from that which is easily apprehended and estimated.
It takes the task of the religious education of children out of the
statistical into the vital, and reminds us that we are growing life
every second, that there is never a moment when religious education is
not in operation. This demands a consideration, not alone of lessons, of
periods of worship and instruction, but of every influence, activity,
and agency in all the family life that in any way affects the thinking,
feeling, and action of the child. We are thinking of something more
important than organizing instruction and exercises in religion in the
home; we are thinking of organizing the family life for religious
purposes, for the purpose of growing lives into their spiritual fulness.
Perhaps the capital mistake in the religious education of the family is
that we overemphasize this or the other method and mechanism instead of
bending every effort to secure a real religious atmosphere and soil in
which young souls can really grow while we leave the process of growth
more largely to the great husbandman. And the second great mistake is
that we are looking for mechanical evidence of a religious life instead
of for the development of a whole person. We must reinterpret the family
to ourselves and see it as the one great opportunity life affords us to
grow other lives and to bring them to spiritual fulness by providing a
social atmosphere of the spirit and a constant, normal presentation of
social living in spiritual terms.
§ 8. THE ORGANIZATION OF LOYALTY
When parents conceive the family in these terms and so organize the life
of the home, the child becomes conscious of the fact, and at once the
life of the family furnishes him with his first, his nearest, and most
satisfactory appeal to loyalty. He feels that which he cannot analyze or
express, the spiritual beauty and loyalty of family life. That life
furnishes a soil and atmosphere for his soul. It is an atmosphere made
of many elements: the primary and dominating purpose of parents and
older persons, the habitual life of service and love, the consciousness
of the reality of the Divine Presence, the fragrance of chastened
character and experience, the customs of worship and affections. These
things are not easily created, they cannot be readily defined, nor can
directions be given in a facile manner for their cultivation. They are
the elements most difficult to describe, hardest of all to secure when
lacking, least easily labeled, not to be purchased ready-made, and yet
without them religious education is wholly impossible in the family.
Without this immediate appeal to loyalty the loyalties of the child
toward higher and divine aims do not develop early; they are retarded
and often remain dormant. For us all scarcely any more important
question can be presented than this: What appeals to spiritual idealism
and loyalty does our family life present to the child? What quickening
of love for goodness and purity, truth and service, is there in the home
and its conduct?
I. References for Study
G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, chaps. i, ii, xii,
xiii. Revell, $1.35.
George Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chaps. i, ii.
Appleton, $1.50.
J.T. McFarland, _Preservation versus Resurrection_. Eaton & Mains,
$0.07.
II. Further Reading
C.W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
American Home_. Religious Education Association, $0.25.
George Hodges, _Training of Children_, chaps. i, ii, xv. Appleton,
$1.50.
G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, chaps. i, iv, xvi.
Revell, $1.35.
E.C. Wilm, _Culture of Religion_, chaps. i, ii. Pilgrim Press,
$0.75.
C.W. Rischell, _The Child as God's Child_. Methodist Book Concern,
$0.75.
E.E. Read Mumford, _The Dawn of Character_. Longmans, Green & Co.,
$1.20. See especially chap. xii on "The Dawn of Religion."
III. Topics for Discussion
1. How would you define education?
2. What is the difference between education and religious
education?
3. What makes the home especially effective in education?
4. Is it true that it is possible to discover the laws of growth
and so determine the development of character?
5. Recall any very early manifestations of religious character in
small children. What would you regard as the best kind of
manifestation?
6. What is the essential principle of the right life? How may we
develop this in childhood?
7. What are the things which most of all impress children?
8. Would you think it wise to bring a child under the influence of
a religious revival?