Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/386

 372 FOSTEB WATSON : freedom of the teacher combined with the promotion from within of a sense of professional responsibility not to abuse his position by presentation of specialistic denominational views, is the way of solution of the religious problem in the schools. The educational teacher knows : Our little systems have their day, They have their day and cease to be ; They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they. As a matter of fact, the child needs protection ordinarily far more from the parents and the Sunday school teacher than from the day school teacher. For these, I venture to say, also have no " right " educationally to attempt to control the child's intellect by cultivating in the child a " twist " in some denominational direction. They, too, ought to consider the real intellectual, moral, volitional good of the child, but too often they have not even considered the " interest " of the child, nor have they accommodated themselves to his outlook on the world and the universe. They have not attemptec to build up and develop what is already there, but to b a system of doctrines ab extra, and mechanically to super- impose them on his corpus vile or perhaps on his animm purum. The self-activity of the child-mind should be helped by parent and by teacher to its own desire and search for truth in all directions not least in religion. There is one other safeguard against denominationalism- viz., the nature of the child. Complex, abstract, generalise dogma is unsuitable to the child-mind. This may not recognised by those " outside " the art of the teacher, but it forces itself upon the conviction of the educator-teacher. Any one who will read Dr. James Sully's section on the " Theological Ideas of Children " in his Studies of Childhood, pp. 120-33, will see that the attempt to indoctrinate is a gro- tesque failure. Now, of all people, it is the business of the teacher to know this fact, and hence the best safeguard against such teaching is the sound training of the teacher in the limits of his art, and complete freedom to do his best for the child in the whole problem of character-building. An emphatic protest ought to be made against the idea that the day school must be reserved for secular teaching and the Sunday school for the religious teaching. The sug- gestion is an intelligible logical consequence of the special- isation of functions in our time. But the idea in essence amounts to this : that the Sunday school is another of the long list of technical schools of our times, and the possibility