THE PERSONAL FACTORS IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
Whoever will stop to review his early educational experience will be
impressed with the instantaneous and vivid manner in which certain
teachers spring into memory. They are seen as though actually living
again. We have difficulty in recalling even the subjects they taught,
while of the particulars of their teaching we have absolutely no
recollection. But they continue to influence us; they are like so many
silent forces leading our lives to this day. The teacher is always
greater than his lesson, and what he is, is greater than what he says.
The religious education of the young depends more on the gift of
persons, on contact with lives, than on anything else.
There are instructors and there are teachers; the former impart
information, the latter convey personality; the former deal with
subjects, the latter teach people. The greatest factor in education as a
process of developing persons is the power of stimulating personality.
The power of the family as an educational agency is in the fact that it
is an organization of persons for personal purposes. When you take the
persons away you remove all educational potencies.
The depersonalized home is the modern menace. We have come to think that
provided you throw furniture and food together in proper proportions you
can produce a capable life. So we depend on the home as a piece of
machinery to do its work automatically, forgetting that the working
activity is not the home but the family, not the furniture but people.
Life can only come from life, and lives can only come from lives.
Personality alone can develop personality. By so much as you rob the
family life of your personal presence, as mother or as father, you take
away from its reality as a family, from its force as an educational
agency, from its religious reality.
§ 1. ORPHANED FAMILIES
All that is said here about fathers might well be applied to mothers,
save that they are not as flagrant sinners in this respect, and,
besides, it comes with better grace for a father to speak on the sins of
fathers.
There are too many fathers who are financial and physiological fathers
only. A good father easily grows as crooked as a dollar sign when he is
nurtured only on money. Many, both fathers and mothers, take parenthood
wholly in physiological terms, imagining--if they think about it at
all--that they have fully discharged all possible obligations if only
they know how to bear, feed, and clothe children properly. True, such
duties are fundamental, but no father can be rightly called "a good
provider" who provides only _things_ for his family, no matter with what
generosity he provides these things. Our homes need more of ourselves
first of all.
He makes a capital error of setting first things in secondary places who
willingly permits business to interfere with the pleasure of being with
his children. Our social order fights its own welfare as long as any
father is chained to the wheels of industry through the hours that
belong to his home. But there are just as many who are not chained, but
who enslave themselves to business, and so miss the largest and best
business in the world, the development of children's characters.
Many a good father goes wrong here. Love and ambition prompt him to
provide abundantly for his children; he enslaves himself to give them
those social advantages which he missed in youth.
But it is a short-measure love that gives only gifts and never gives
itself. The heart hungers, not for what you have in your hand, but for
what you are. "The gift without the giver is bare." No amount of
bountiful providing can atone for the loss of the father's personality.
It is easy for the hands to be so engrossed in providing that the home
is left headless and soon heartless. If we at all desire the fruits of
character in the home we must give ourselves personally.
It is not alone the habitué of the saloon or the idler in clubs and
fraternities who is guilty of stealing from the home its rightful share
of his presence. He who gives so much of himself to any object as not to
give the best of himself to his family comes under the apostolic ban of
being worse than an infidel. _A father belongs to his home more than he
belongs to his church._ There have been men, though probably their
number is not legion, who have allowed church duties, meetings, and
obligations so to absorb their time and energy that they have given only
a worn-out, burned-out, and useless fragment of themselves to their
children. Some have found it more attractive to talk of the heavenly
home in prayer-meeting or to be gracious to the stranger and to win the
smile of the neighbor at the church than to take up the by-no-means-easy
task of being godly, sympathetic and cheerful, courteous and kind among
their children and in their homes. No matter what it may be, church or
club, politics or reform organization, we are working at the wrong end
if we are allowing them to take precedence of the home.
§ 2. THE FATHER'S CHANCE
The father owes it to his family _to give himself at his best_, that is,
as far as possible, when his vitality is freshest and his powers
keenest to answer to the young life about him. He owes it to his family
to conserve for it the time to think of its needs, time to listen to the
wife's story of its problems, time to sit and sympathize with children,
time to hear their seemingly idle prattle, time to play with them. Have
you ever noticed this great difference between the father and the
mother, that while the latter always has time to bind up cut fingers and
to hear to its end the story of what the little neighbor, Johnny Smith,
did and said, somehow father's ear seems deaf to such stories and he is
often too busy to sympathize? It might work a vast change in some
families if the "children's hour" had a call to the father as well as to
the mother. Of course we are crowded with social engagements and life is
at high pressure under the enticing obligation of uplifting and
reforming everybody else, yet one hour of every evening held sacred for
the firelight conversation, one in which the children could really get
at our hearts, might be worth more to tomorrow than all our public
propaganda.
Fathers owe their brains as well as their hands to their families.
Competent and efficient fatherhood does not come by accident. We are
learning that children cannot be understood merely by loving them, that
two things must be held in balance: the scientific and the sympathetic
study of childhood. Is there any good reason why, while so readily
granting that mothers should belong to mothers' clubs, study child
psychology, the hygiene of infancy, domestic science, and eugenics, we
should assume that fathers may safely dispense with all such knowledge?
There are men who sit up nights studying how to grow the biggest
radishes in the block, there are men who toil through technical
handbooks on the game of golf, who would look at you in open-eyed wonder
if you should suggest the duty of studying their children with equal
scientific patience. They of course desire to have ideal children but
they are not willing to learn how to grow them.
§ 3. FATHERING AS A MAN'S TASK
It takes intelligence and burns up brain power to keep the confidence of
your boy so that he will freely talk of his own life and needs to you.
Those much-to-be-desired open doors are kept open, not by accident, nor
by our sentiments or wishes alone. A boy changes so fast that a man has
to be alert, thinking and trying to understand and sympathize all the
time. The boy sees through all sleepy pretenses of understanding. We
keep the open door of confidence only as by steady endeavor we keep in
real touch with the boy's world.
Fathers are ignorant of the problems of family training; they oscillate
between the wishy-washy sentimentality that permits anarchy in the home
and the harsh, unthinking despotism that breeds hatred and rebellion.
Fathers criticize the public schools but never take the time to go and
look inside one. They laugh at women's clubs because they are too lazy
to make a like investment in the patient study of some of their
problems. They affect indifference to the parent-teacher clubs while
remaining ignorant of the significant things they have already
accomplished for the schools. If we were to make an inventory of what
the women, the mothers, have accomplished by study, agitation, and
legislation for social, civic, ethical, and religious betterment, we
proud lords of creation would, or ought to, hang our heads in shame.
Fatherhood is our chance to become. It is our chance to grow into our
finest selves. The measure of its gains to us depends upon the measure
of our gifts to its opportunities and duties. It is our chance to be
what we should like our children to be, our chance to find ourselves.
All that it costs, all the self-denial, labor, and often pain it must
mean, is just the process of developing a fine, rich life. Now, that
life is just the greatest gift that any man can make to his home and his
world. We can never give any more than ourselves or any other than
ourselves, and this pathway of sacrifice, this costly way of
home-making, is a man's chance to become Godlike. The race has come
upward in this way. It needs the masculine in its ideal self as well as
the feminine. There is no race salvation without constant individual
self-giving. That self-giving must be balanced equally on the part of
the man and the woman. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is just our chance
to learn life's best lesson, that there is a certain short path to
happiness which men have called the way of pain and God calls the way of
peace.
Motherhood is a sacred portion, but so is fatherhood. Its calls are just
as high, its service just as holy, its opportunities just as large, its
meaning just as divine. How worse than empty are all our pratings about
divine fatherhood if we illustrate its meaning only degradingly or
misleadingly! And just as the life of the spirit is the gift of that
divine fatherhood, so for us the gift of our lives, ourselves, is the
largest and richest contribution we can make to the religious lives of
our children.
The father as a teacher teaches by what he is. The classes in the home
have no set lessons, for the text is written in lives and the word is
spoken and taught in personality. You effect the religious education of
your children in the degree that you give yourself as a simple religious
person to them.
I. References for Study
Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. vii. Appleton,
$1.50.
K.G. Busby, _Home Life in America_, chaps. i, ii. Macmillan,
$2.00.
II. Further Reading
E.A. Abbott, _On the Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
$1.00.
Allen, _Making the Most of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00
each.
Wilm, _The Culture of Religion_, chap. ii. Pilgrim Press, $0.75
III. Topics for Discussion
1. Which do you remember best, your teachers or your lessons? Why?
2. Describe, from your memory, some of the influences of
personality?
3. Are these influences greater or less with parents on children?
4. What are the causes that separate parents and children?
5. How shall we define duties to business, to society, and to the
family?
6. Under what circumstances is one justified in refusing time to
the church for the sake of the family?
7. What are the best times and opportunities for the strengthening
of the personal bonds between children and parents?
8. How shall we overcome the apparent difficulty of maintaining the
confidence of children?