A Manual for Teaching Biblical History. Eugene Kohn
quite as intelligible and infinitely more edifying. I have given this instance at some length because it seems to me typical of the mischief that can be done by reading into the Biblical narrative any moral that may come to hand instead of the moral that the Bible itself intended.
Need of Bible study for teacher. This manual will endeavor in each lesson to point out to the best of its author's understanding what the Biblical moral of the lesson is. But, as interpretations are always subject to differences of opinion, a study of the suggestions contained in its chapters cannot relieve the teacher of the responsibility of a careful independent study, before entering the class-room, of the Biblical passages whose story he wishes to teach.
The child as determining method. And after he has mastered for himself the meaning of the Biblical narrative, he must study how to impart this to the child in a way that shall make it not only comprehensible but interesting, and all this without sacrifice of the aim of instruction. An adequate treatment of method in teaching Biblical history from the point of view of the interests and capacities of the Jewish child is at present impossible. We need years of study and experimentation in this direction before we can do it complete justice, but a few universally recognized pedagogic principles may briefly be considered here in their bearing upon our subject. We have spoken of the need of effort on the part of the teacher to make the lesson comprehensible and interesting, and we shall therefore give some attention to two questions: (1) How can the lesson be made comprehensible? (2) How can it be made interesting? We shall treat the questions separately for the sake of convenience, though, as a matter of fact, they are inseparable; for neither can a child be expected to interest himself in what he cannot understand nor can he be made to understand anything that involves the least difficulty without giving that sustained attention which only interest can elicit from him.
How to make lesson comprehensible. Proceed from known to unknown. The most important rule to bear in mind in order to make the teaching comprehensible is the familiar truism that one must proceed from the known to the unknown and keep constantly defining the unknown in terms of what is already known to the child. As is the case with most truisms, the truth of this statement is more frequently recognized than applied. Take for instance the very first sentence in one of the Biblical histories intended for the use of children. It reads, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, that is the whole visible world." Was there ever a human being who did not know what heaven and earth meant and yet knew what the whole visible world meant? Contrast with this the following from another text-book:
"Once a long, long time ago there was no one living on this earth that is now so full of people.
"There were no living things at all here: no cattle, no wild beasts, no birds, no butterflies or insects of any kind and no fishes in the sea.
"Before that there were no green growing things here; no grass, no trees, no flowers.
"In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.
"In the beginning was a time so long ago that no one knows when it was."
How much better is this way of beginning the story of creation from what the child has experienced of created objects than to begin with non existence and chaos. Few of us realize how many terms that are commonplaces with us mean nothing to the child. Particularly is this true of terms used in the Bible and descriptive of things familiar in the primitive orient but little known in the modern occident, such as altar, sacrifice, tabernacle, caravan, to name but a few.
Avoid formal definition. But at this point a word of caution is necessary against a too pedantic application of this principle of defining the terms that are used in the child's instruction. For example one book of Bible stories for young children prefixes to the story of creation a vocabulary which includes explanations of such words as ground, dark, light, sky, under, above, good, rest. But it must be apparent that a child who cannot without previous explanations understand such simple words as these is not in a position to profit by instruction in Biblical history at all. It is possible so to overload a story with definitions that the whole thread of the narrative is lost. We must be cautious lest our pupils fail to see the forest by very reason of the trees. Ample allowance must be made for the constructive imagination of the child, which builds up its own definitions out of the material of the narrative itself. Children have always had an understanding of fairy tales without ever having had the terms fairy, witch, king and princess defined for them. When you tell a child that the king sat on a high throne with his crown on his head, his sceptre in his hand, while all the people bowed down to him, the child, though he has never seen a throne, will recognize that it is something on which kings sit, that a crown is something that a king wears on his head, a sceptre something that a king holds in his hand, and that a king is a man who is distinguished from other men and to whom they bow, a very good working definition of a king which would make quite unnecessary any elaborate attempt to define for a child the concept of royalty. In fact, formal definition should be avoided wherever possible, and the skilful teacher will know how to make a story define its own terms in the same way as the sentence that we just gave as an instance defined for the child the four unknown terms: king, throne, crown, and sceptre. Indeed the most important idea of all, that we have to give to the child cannot be defined otherwise even to ourselves, namely the idea of God. The general rule to be followed may be laid down in these words: Never define for the child any term that the story itself can be made to define but do define every necessary term that the story itself cannot be made to define. It is worth while noting in this connection that the best definition for a concrete object is the object itself or a picture of it.
How to make the lesson interesting. Oral instruction preferable. So much for the question how to make the lesson comprehensible to the child. As has already been said, this in itself goes a great way toward answering as well our second question, how to make it interesting, but other considerations must also be taken into account. The art of teaching history is in great part the art of story telling. Children love stories and particularly true stories if they are well told, but this love of a child for a good story is limited, especially in earlier years, to a story that is told. The mere technical difficulties of reading, the physical inconvenience of the posture demanded, the absence of that commentary which voice and gesture supply to the story, the impossibility of asking a book questions, and a number of other similar considerations make it undesirable that the first acquaintance of a child with a lesson shall come from a text-book. Text-books have their uses, particularly in the higher grades, for purposes of review, to aid the memory in retaining what has already been taught by word of mouth, but the practice that obtains in some schools of expecting the child to learn the lesson from the book before he comes to class is bad and should be avoided.
Some suggestions as to story telling. If then the first presentation of a lesson must be given orally by the teacher, it follows that the teacher has to perfect himself in the art of story telling. Like all other arts, the art of story telling cannot be imparted by rule and particularly not within the small scope of this introduction. A few suggestions however may be helpful. Lewis Carrol, whose Alice in Wonderland shows a rare insight into the childish mind, makes his Alice express a preference for books with plenty of illustrations and conversation. There are two hints here that are of value to the teacher of Biblical history, the first is to use pictures to illustrate a story and the second always to prefer direct discourse to indirect. To take up the second of these suggestions first, compare the following accounts of the same event and ask yourself which appeals more to you:
1. Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all them that stood by him and he ordered every man to leave him. And there stood no man with him while Joseph made himself known to his brethren. And he wept aloud and the Egyptians heard and the house of Pharaoh heard. And Joseph told his brethren who he was and asked whether his father was yet alive. And his brethren could not answer him, for they were affrighted at his presence. Joseph told them to come near, and they came near, and he told them that he was Joseph whom they had sold into Egypt and that they should not be grieved nor angry with themselves for having sold him thither, for it was in order to preserve life that God had sent him before them. For the famine had been in the land for two years and there yet remained five years during which there would be neither plowing nor harvest, and so God had sent him before