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KINDERGARTEN MAGAZINE

Vol. XV.-APRIL 1903.-No. 8.

TWENTIETH CENTURY SERIES.

THE MODERN CONCEPTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCA-
TION AS CONDITIONED BY THE PRINCIPLES
OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY AND PEDA-

GOGY.*

PROF. JOHN DEWEY, PH. D., Director SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL.

S

O far as I see, psychological theory at present simply emphasizes and reënforces some general principles which accompany a practical movement that is already going on, deriving its main motives from general considerations. Psychology has no peculiar gospel or revelation of its own to deliver. It may, however, serve to interpret and illuminate some aspects of what is already going on, and thereby assist it in directing itself.

I shall endeavor to present simply one principle, which seems to me of help in this interpretation-the stress laid in modern psychological theory upon the principle of growth, and of consequent successive expansions of experience on different levels. Since the mind is a growth it passes thru a series of stages, and only gradually attains to its majority. That the mind of the child is not identical with the mind of the adult is of course no new discovery. After a fashion, everybody has always known it, but for a long, long time the child was treated as if he were only an abbreviated adult, a little man or a little woman. His purposes, interests, and concerns were taken to be about those of the grownup person, unlikeness being emphasized only on the strength and power; but the differences are those of mental and emotional standpoint and outlook rather than of degree. If we assume that the quality of child and adult is the same, and that the only difference is in quantity of capacity, it follows at once that the child

*Address delivered at the convention in the interest of Moral and Religious education, Chicago, February, 1903.

is to be taught down to or talked down to from the standpoint of the adult. This fixed the standard from which altogether too much of education and instruction has been carried on in spiritual, as well as in other matters. But if the differences are those of quality the whole problem is transfigured. It is no longer a question of fixing over ideas and beliefs of the grown-up, until these are reduced down to the lower level of childish apprehension in thought. It is a question of surrounding the child with such conditions of growth that he may be led to appreciate and to grasp the full significance of his own round of experience as that develops in living his own life. When the child is so regarded his capacities in reference to his own peculiar needs and aims are found to be quite parallel to those of the adult, if the latter are measured by similar reference to adult concerns and responsibilities. Unless the world is out of gear the child must have the same kind of power to do what, as a child, he really needs to do, that the mature person has in his sphere of life. In a word, it is a question of bringing the child to appreciate the truly religious aspects of his own growing life, not one of innoculating him externally with beliefs and emotions which adults happen to have found serviceable to themselves.

It cannot be denied that the platform of the views, ideas, and emotions of the grown person has frequently been assumed to supply the standard of the religious nature of the child. The habit of basing religious instruction upon a formulated statement of the doctrines and beliefs of the church is a typical instance. Once admit the rightfulness of the standard, and it follows without argument that since a catechism represents the wisdom and truth of the adult mind the proper course is to give to the child at once the benefit of such adult experience. The only logical change is a possible reduction in size-a shorter catechism-and some concessions (and not a great many) in the language used.

While this illustration is one of the most obvious, it hardly indicates the most serious aspect of the matter. This is found in assuming that the spiritual and emotional experiences of the adult are the proper measures of all religious life; so that if the child is to have any religious life at all he must have it in terms of the same consciousness of sin, repentance, and redemption, etc., which are found familiar to the adult. So far as the profound significance of the idea of growth is ignored, then there are foisted,

or, at least, urged upon the child, copies modeled after adult. thought and emotion of the spiritual relationships of the soul to God. Yet the depth and validity of the consciousness of these realities frequently depends upon aspirations, struggles, and failures, which, by the nature of the case, can come only to one who has entered upon the responsibilities of mature life.

To realize that the child reaches adequacy of religious experience only thru a succession of expressions which parallel his growth, is a return to the ideas of the New Testament: When I was a child I spake as a child; I understood-or looked at thingsas a child; I thought-or reasoned about things-as a child. It is a return to the ideas of Jesus of the successive stages thru the seed corn, the growing blade, and the putting forth of the flower to the ripening of the fruit. Such differences are distinctions of kind or quality, not simply of capacity. Germinating seed, growing leaf, budding flowers, are not miniature fruits reduced in bulk and size. The attaining of perfect fruitage depends upon not only allowing, but encouraging and expanding life to pass thru the stages which are natural and necessary for it, an excess.

To attempt to force prematurely upon the child either the mature ideas or spiritual emotions of the adult is to run the risk of a fundamental danger, that of forestalling future deeper experience which might otherwise be within season personal realities. to him. We may make the child familiar with the form of the soul's great experiences of sin and of reconciliation and peace, of discord and harmony, of the individual being with the deepest forces of the universe, before there is anything in his own needs and relationships in life which permits him to interpret or enjoy the real substance of the form. So far as this happens certain further defects or perversions are almost sure to follow. First, the child may become, as it were, vulgarly blasé. The very familiarity with the outward form of these things may induce a certain distaste for further contact with them. The mind is exhausted by an excessive early familiarity and does not feel the need and possibility of further growth, which always implies novelty and freshness-some experience which is uniquely new, and hitherto untraversed by the soul. Second, this excessive familiarity may breed, if not contempt, at least flippancy and irreverence. Third, this premature acquaintance with matters which are not fully understood or vitally experienced is not without effect in promoting scepticism

and crises of frightful doubt. It is a serious moment when a serious soul wakes up to the fact that it has been passively accepting and reproducing ideas and feelings which it now recognizes are not a vital part of its own being. Losing its hold on the form in which the spiritual truths have been embodied their very substance seems also to be slipping away. The person is plunged into doubt and bitterness regarding the reality of all things which lie beyond his senses, or regarding the very worth of life itself.

Doubtless more sincere and serious souls find their way thru and come to some readjustment of the fundamental conditions of life by which they reattain a working spiritual faith. But even such persons are likely to carry with them scars from the struggles which they have passed thru. They have undergone a shock and upheaval from which every youth ought, if possible, to be spared, and which the due observance of the conditions of growth would avoid. There is some danger that we shall come to regard as perfectly normal, phenomena of adolescent life which are, in truth, symptoms simply of maladjustment, growing out of the premature fixation of intellectual and emotional habits in the earlier years of childhood. Youth as distinct from childhood is doubtless the critical time in spiritual experience, but it would be a calamity to exaggerate the differences, and to fail to insist upon the more fundamental principle of continuity of development.

In other cases there does not seem to be enough fundamental seriousness, or else the youth lives in more distracting circumstances. So, after a brief period of doubt, he turns away somewhat calloused to live on the plane of superficial interests and excitements of the world about him. If none of these extreme evils result, yet something of the bloom of later experience is rubbed off; something of its richness missed because the individual has been introduced into it before he could grasp its deeper significance. Many persons whose religious development has been comparatively uninterrupted find themselves in the habit of taking for granted their own spiritual life. They are so thoroly accustomed to certain forms, emotions, and even turns of expression, that their experience becomes conventionalized. Religion is a part of the ordinances and routine of the day rather than a source of inspiration and renewing of power. It becomes a matter of conformation rather than of transformation.

Accepting the principle of gradual development of religious

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