How to Teach Religion, page 29 by George Herbert Betts
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iples. These principles are the same from the kindergarten to the university, and they apply equally to the teaching of religion in the church school or subjects in the day school. Every teacher must answer four questions growing out of these principles, or, failing to answer them, classify himself with the unworthy and incompetent. These are the four supreme questions:
1. What definite aims have I set as the goal of my teaching? What outcomes do I seek?
2. What material, or subject matter, will best accomplish these aims? What shall I stress and what shall I omit?
3. How can this material best be organized, or arranged, to adapt it to the child in his learning? How shall I plan my material?
4. What shall be my plan or method of presentation of this material to make it achieve its purpose? What of my technique of instruction?
THE AIM IN TEACHING RELIGION
First of all, the teacher of religion must have an aim; he must know what ends he seeks to accomplish. Some statistically minded person has computed that, with all the marvelous accuracy of aiming modern guns, more than one thousand shots are fired for every man hit in battle. One cannot but wonder how many shots would be required to hit a man if the guns were not aimed at anything!
Is the analogy too strong? Is the teacher more likely than the gunner to reach his objective without consciously aiming at it? And can the teacher set up for attainment as definite aims as are offered the gunner? Do we know just what ends we seek in the religious training of our children?
Life itself sets the aim.--This much at least is certain. We know where to look for the aims that must guide us. We shall not try to formulate an aim for our teaching out of our own thought or reasoning upon the subject. We shall rather look out upon life, the life the child is now living and the later life he is to live, and ask: "_What are the demands that life ma