own.

QUESTIONS

The questions following each lesson are in no sense meant to take the place of an outline, or to serve as a guide for study. You should study the lesson for yourself, making a careful written outline of your After you have mastered it, you may then turn to the questions. They are meant to help you review the main points of the lesson, as a final step in its preparation. The leader of the training class will, of course, make out his own questions.

1. What is the distinction between instruction and training? Show how both are included in the work of the teacher.

2. What do you understand by a law of mental development? How does it differ from a moral law?

3. What is the aim of this book? Of each of its parts?

4. What are some of the ways in which a child differs from an adult?

5. What methods will you use to study children for yourself? What are some of the difficulties of each method?

6. Why ought religion be a part of the education we give our children?

7. Why do not the public schools give any education in religion? Ought they?

8. Do you feel that the Sunday school can adopt the methods of the public schools? Ought it? Give reasons for your answers.

9. Ought the Church make use of the educational method to win the coming generation? Compare the educational and revival methods of propagating Christianity, with a statement of the relative advantages of each.

10. What evidences can you cite of an “educational revival” within the Church?

II. Why is personal consecration the first qualification of the Sunday school teacher?

12. Does God's help make your own careful training for your work any less imperative? Give reasons for your answer.

LESSON II

PHYSICAL ACTIVITY

1. Everyone recognizes that there are certain periods of development through which we all pass in the growth from babyhood to maturity, and that each period has its distinctive characteristics. But there is room for difference of opinion concerning the number of periods which ought to be distinguished, and the ages at which boundary lines may be drawn.

As a matter of fact, there are no hard and fast periods, and no exact boundary lines. Growth is gradual and continuous. The baby enters into sturdy boyhood, and the boy into youth, without our realizing the precise time of transition. Sometimes new powers come suddenly; but the rule is that they ripen more or less gradually. Individual children, moreover, differ greatly. Some enter a given stage earlier, and pass through it more quickly, than others.

The most definite transition is that from childhood to adolescence. It comes usually at thirteen or fourteen, and is marked by deep-seated physical and mental changes.

From the point of view of the Sunday school, we may recognize a subdivision of the years before this transition into three periods, and three periods in the years after. The six periods and the corresponding departments of the Sunday school are:

(1) Early Childhood, under six: Beginners.

(2) Middle Childhood, three years, ages six to eight: Primary.

(3) Later Childhood, four years, ages nine to twelve: Junior.

(4) Early Adolescence, four years, ages thirteen to sixteen: Intermediate.

(5) Later Adolescence, four years, ages seventeen to twenty: Senior.

(6) Manhood and Womanhood, twenty-one and over: Advanced. 2. The most evident characteristic of childhood is its physical activity. Sometimes, annoyed by it, we elders call it restlessness. A little child is incessantly active. His tiny legs travel far in a day's play, and his hands are always busy at something. He is seldom content simply to look or listen; he wants to go to things and handle them. Every impression that goes in at his senses, it seems, comes out at his muscles.

3. It is no accident-this great place that physical activity has in the life of a little child. It is nature's provision for mental as well as physical development. It is essential to the growth of personality. This becomes clear when we think of the results of a child's physical activity:

(1) Physical growth. This is the primary need of the first six years of the child's life. It is the time of most rapid growth. A child's weight doubles during the first six months, and increases fourfold during the first three years, and sixfold during the six. Height increases nearly fifty per cent the first year, and nearly seventy-five per cent within the first three years; while at six it has been more than doubled.* That this growth may be normal, the child needs proper physical conditions-good food, pure air, the light and sunshine of God's out-of-doors, and plenty of sound sleep. And for the best realization of all these conditions, and the assurance of healthy growth, there is constant need of physical activity and exercise.

(2) Physical development. Because growth and development usually take place together, we often use the terms as though they meant the same. But growth means simply increase in size; while development stands for a change in the character of the bodily tissues, making for maturity and strength. Sometimes growth takes place without development, and then the child is fatty, flabby, and apt to be sickly. There is only one way to insure development-through exercise. Food and air and sleep may cause the body to grow, but the only way to get good, hard muscles is to use them. A child craves physical activity because nature wants its body to develop. Such exercise, moreover, develops the nervous system as well as the muscles. Strength and skill, steadiness and self-control, are some of its results.

(3) New sensations. The child is a discoverer in a strange, new world. He does not passively wait for things to force themselves upon him; he pushes out to seek knowledge. Each bit of activity widens his experience. It is really an experiment. It brings new sensations, new information, better understanding; and lays open new possibilities.

(4) Use and meaning. The child's physical activity does more than bring sensations; it determines their meaning. The meaning which anything has for a child depends upon what he can do with it. He is not ready to appreciate the structure of things, to discriminate

* The best statement of the facts of growth, with a discussion of their bearing upon education, is Tyler's "Growth and Education." Here, and in succeeding chapters, we make a rough use of figures which he gives exactly.

forms and textures, or to comprehend definitions. He is interested primarily in the use which a thing may have, and especially in that use to which he himself may put it. Ask any child to tell you what some familiar nouns stand for, and his answer will bear witness to this fact. "A knife is to cut," "Coffee is what papa drinks," "A circus is to see the elephant"-are typical children's definitions. Professor Barnes found that 80 per cent of the definitions of a list of common nouns which six-year old children gave him, were in terms of activity and use. This percentage decreased to 63 per cent for children of seven and eight, 57 per cent for those of nine, 43 per cent for those of ten and eleven, and about 30 per cent for those of twelve to fourteen.*

(5) Habits. A thing done once is easier to do again. What a child does becomes a very part of himself through the working of the law of habit. Grouping these last three results-new sensations, meanings and habits—we see that the child's mental and moral development is in a great degree dependent upon his physical activity.

4. The causes of a child's physical activity are to be found in deep inner laws of his being. He is so made that he must be active.

(1) He is impelled to act by the energy that is being constantly generated within him. Energy always seeks an outlet. The heat of a firebox begets the steam which drives a dynamo, and the electric current gives forth light throughout a great city. Human energy is no exception. It finds its natural outlet in physical activity. Much of the child's activity is the spontaneous expression of the bounding life that quickens every fiber of his being.

(2) He is impelled to act by the sensations he gets. He reaches for everything he sees, turns toward the sound he hears, plays with what he touches. His senses rouse his muscles. His impressions call forth reactions.

We can see why this should be so if we think for a moment of the structure of the nervous system. It is made up of three classes of cells-sensory, associative and motor. The sensory cells receive impressions; the motor cells impel the muscles to act. The associative cells connect the sensory with the motor, and so connect impressions and actions. These three classes of cells may be coupled up in a myriad intricate ways, yet they are always so related that the goal of a sensory current is an associative cell, and that of an associative current is ultimately motor. The natural result of every sensation, therefore, is an action. Every nerve current tends to go the whole way, and so to issue in activity.

* Quoted by Bagley: "The Educative Process," p. 80.

The nervous system has been well defined as a mechanism for translating sensations into movements. Its function is to receive impressions from the outside world, and to respond to them with appropriate actions. Strike at the fly that annoys you, and he is gone before your hand touches him. His nervous system received an impression from the movement of air and responded with an action that took him out of danger. Strike laughingly at a friend, and he will dodge the blow before he thinks-his nervous system has connected action with the sight of the threatening arm. The nervous system is made for action-and to adapt actions to situations. Every sensation becomes an impulse.

(3) The child is impelled to act by his instincts. His nervous system contains certain pre-established pathways which incoming currents are sure to follow, as they go on to discharge themselves in action. These pathways are natural and hereditary. They constitute great inborn tendencies to act and feel in certain ways. Fear, shyness, curiosity, imitation, play, acquisitiveness-these are only a few of the natural tendencies which every child possesses, which determine the character of his reactions to the things that present themselves to him. Not all of these tendencies, of course, are present at birth; but they manifest themselves in the course of the natural growth and development of the nervous system. Each stage of development has its own dominant instincts, naturally and inevitably determining its actions and attitudes. A young child is just as certain to carry things to its mouth as is the little chick to peck at any small object within range. And at a certain age a child will fear the dark, a boy will love to fight, and a youth will conceive a tender passion, just as naturally and with as little consciousness of the reason why.

(4) The child is impelled to act by his ideas. For him, as a rule, to think is to act. He says whatever comes into his mind; he goes at once to seek the toy of which he happens to think. He reacts as directly to the presence of an idea or memory in his mind as to his sensations. It matters nothing where the idea has come from. We express it by saying that a child is naturally impulsive; or, if the idea has come to him from someone else, that he is very suggestible.

We can see why this should be so if we think again of what we just learned about the nervous system. Ideas and memories are always accompanied by nerve-action within the associative cells which make up the gray matter of the brain. And a nerve-current in the associative cells, we saw, tends naturally to run over into the motor cells,