Henry F. Cope - Religious Education in the Family

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RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY

by

HENRY F. COPE

General Secretary of the Religious Education Association

The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois
Copyright 1915 by
The University of Chicago
All Rights Reserved
Published April 1915
Second Impression September 1915
Third Impression March 1916
Fourth Impression June 1917
Fifth Impression August 1920
Sixth Impression July 1922
Seventh Impression September 1922
Composed and Printed By
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois

The Baker and Taylor Company
New York

The Cambridge University Press
London

The Maruzen-Kabushiki-Kaisha
Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Sendai

The Mission Book Company
Shanghai

PREFACE

In the work of religious education, with which the present series of
books is concerned, the life of the family rightly occupies a central
place. The church has always realized its duty to exhort parents to
bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, but
very little has ever been done to enable parents to study systematically
and scientifically the problem of religious education in the family.
Today parents' classes are being formed in many churches; Christian
Associations, women's clubs, and institutes are studying the subject;
individual parents are becoming more and more interested in the rational
performance of their high duties. And there is a general desire for
guidance. As the full bibliography at the end of this volume and the
references in connection with each chapter indicate, there is available
a very large literature dealing with the various elements of the
problem. But a guidebook to organize all this material and to stimulate
independent thought and endeavor is desirable.

To afford this guidance the present volume has been prepared. It is
equally adapted for the thoughtful study of the father and mother who
are seeking help in the moral and religious development of their own
family, and for classes in churches, institutes, and neighborhoods,
where the important problems of the family are to be studied and
discussed. It would be well to begin the use of the book by reading the
suggestions for class work at the end of the volume.

With a confident hope that religion in the family is not to be a wistful
memory of the past but a most vital force in the making of the better
day that is coming, this volume is offered as a contribution and a
summons.

The Editors

New Year's Day, 1915

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
I. An Interpretation of the Family 1

II. The Present Status of Family Life 10

III. The Permanent Elements in Family Life 27

IV. The Religious Place of the Family 37

V. The Meaning Of Religious Education in the Family 46

VI. The Child's Religious Ideas 60

VII. Directed Activity 75

VIII. The Home as a School 87

IX. The Child's Ideal Life 101

X. Stories and Reading 110

XI. The Use of the Bible in the Home 119

XII. Family Worship 126

XIII. Sunday in the Home 145

XIV. The Ministry of the Table 164

XV. The Boy and Girl in the Family 173

XVI. The Needs of Youth 183

XVII. The Family and the Church 198

XVIII. Children and the School 212

XIX. Dealing with Moral Crises 218

XX. Dealing with Moral Crises (_Continued_) 231

XXI. Dealing with Moral Crises (_Continued_) 240

XXII. Dealing with Moral Crises (_Concluded_) 249

XXIII. The Personal Factors in Religious Education 259

XXIV. Looking to the Future 268

Suggestions for Class Work 281

A Book List 290

Index 297

CHAPTER I

AN INTERPRETATION OF THE FAMILY

Sec. 1. TAKING THE HOME IN RELIGIOUS TERMS

The ills of the modern home are symptomatic. Divorce, childless
families, irreverent children, and the decadence of the old type of
separate home life are signs of forgotten ideals, lost motives, and
insufficient purposes. Where the home is only an opportunity for
self-indulgence, it easily becomes a cheap boarding-house, a
sleeping-shelf, an implement for social advantage. While it is true that
general economic developments have effected marked changes in domestic
economy, the happiness and efficiency of the family do not depend wholly
on the parlor, the kitchen, or the clothes closet. Rather, everything
depends on whether the home and family are considered in worthy and
adequate terms.

Homes are wrecked because families refuse to take home-living in
religious terms, in social terms of sacrifice and service. In such
homes, organized and conducted to satisfy personal desires rather than
to meet social responsibilities, these desires become ends rather than
agencies and opportunities.

They who marry for lust are divorced for further lust. Selfishness, even
in its form of self-preservation, is an unstable foundation for a home.
It costs too much to maintain a home if you measure it by the personal
advantages of parents. What hope is there for useful and happy family
life if the newly wedded youth have both been educated in selfishness,
habituated to frivolous pleasures, and guided by ideals of success in
terms of garish display? Yet what definite program for any other
training does society provide? Do the schools and colleges, Sunday
schools and churches teach youth a better way? How else shall they be
trained to take the home and family in terms that will make for
happiness and usefulness? It is high time to take seriously the task of
educating people to religious efficiency in the home.

Sec. 2. THE RELIGIOUS MOTIVE

The family needs a religious motive. More potent for happiness than
courses in domestic economy will be training in sufficient domestic
motives. It will take much more than modern conveniences, bigger
apartments, or even better kitchens to make the new home. Essentially
the problem is not one of mechanics but of persons. What we call the
home problem is more truly a _family_ problem. It centers in persons;
the solution awaits a race with new ideals, educated to live as more
than dust, for more than dirt, for personality rather than for
possessions. We need young people who establish homes, not simply
because they feel miserable when separated, nor because one needs a
place in which to board and the other needs a boarder, but because the
largest duty and joy of life is to enrich the world with other lives and
to give themselves in high love to making those other lives of the
greatest possible worth to the world.

The family must come to a recognition of social obligations. We all hope
for the coming ideal day. Everywhere men and women are answering to
higher ideals of life. But the new day waits for a new race. Modern
emphasis on the child is a part of present reaction from materialism.
New social ideals are personal. We seek a better world for the sake of a
higher race. The emphasis on child-welfare has a social rather than a
sentimental basis. The family is our great chance to determine childhood
and so to make the future. The child of today is basic to the social
welfare of tomorrow. He is our chance to pay to tomorrow all that we owe
to yesterday. The family as the child's life-school is thus central to
every social program and problem.

Sec. 3. WIDER CHILD-WELFARE

This age knows that man does not live by bread alone. Interest in
child-welfare is for the sake of the child himself, not for the sake of
his clothes or his physical condition. Concern about soap and
sanitation, hygiene and the conveniences of life grows because these all
go to make up the soil in which the person grows. There is danger that
our emphasis on child-welfare may be that of the tools instead of the
man; that we may become enmeshed in the mechanism of well-being and lose
sight of the being who should be well. To fail at the point of character
is to fail all along the line. And we fail altogether, no matter how
many bathtubs we give a child, how many playgrounds, medical
inspections, and inoculations, unless that child be in himself strong
and high-minded, loving truth, hating a lie, and habituated to live in
good-will with his fellows and with high ideals for the universe. Modern
interest in the material factors of life is on account of their potency
in making real selfhood; we acknowledge the importance of the physical
as the very soil in which life grows. But the fruits are more than the
soil, and a home exists for higher purposes than physical conveniences;
these are but its tools to its great end. Somehow for purposes of social
well-being we must raise our thinking of the family to the aim of the
development of efficient, rightly minded character. The family must be
seen as making spiritual persons.

Sec. 4. THE COST OF A FAMILY

Taking the home in religious terms will mean, then, conceiving it as an
institution with a religious purpose, namely, that of giving to the
world children who are adequately trained and sufficiently motived to
live the social life of good-will. The family exists to give society
developed, efficient children. It fails if it does not have a religious,
a spiritual product. It cannot succeed except by the willing
self-devotion of adult lives to this spiritual, personal purpose.

A family is the primary social organization for the elementary purpose
of breeding the species, nurturing and training the young. This is its
physiological basis. But its duties cannot be discharged on the
physiological plane alone. This elementary physiological function is
lifted to a spiritual level by the aim of character and the motive of
love. Families cannot be measured by their size; they must be measured
by the character of their products. If quality counts anywhere it counts
here, though it is well to remember that it takes some reasonable
quantity to make right quality in each.

The family needs a religious motive. It demands sacrifice. To follow
lower impulses is to invite disaster. The home breeds bitterness and
sorrow wherever men and women court for lust, marry for social standing,
and maintain an establishment only as a part of the game of social
competition. To sow the winds of passion, ease, idle luxury, pride, and
greed is to reap the whirlwind. Moreover, it is to miss the great
chance of life, the chance to find that short cut to happiness which
men call pain and suffering.

A family is humanity's great opportunity to walk the way of the cross.
Mothers know that; some fathers know it; some children grow up to learn
it. In homes where this is true, where all other aims are subordinated
to this one of making the home count for high character, to training
lives into right social adjustment and service, the primary emphasis is
not on times and seasons for religion; religion is the life of that
home, and in all its common living every child learns the way of the
great Life of all. In vain do we torture children with adult religious
penances, long prayers, and homilies, thinking thereby to give them
religious training. The good man comes out of the good home, the home
that is good in character, aim, and organization, not sporadically but
permanently, the home where the religious spirit, the spirit of
idealism, and the sense of the infinite and divine are diffused rather
than injected. The inhuman, antisocial vampires, who suck their
brothers' blood, whether they be called magnates or mob-leaders,
grafters or gutter thieves, often learned to take life in terms of graft
by the attitude and atmosphere of their homes.[1]

Sec. 5. MOTIVES FOR A STUDY OF THE FAMILY

The modern family is worthy of our careful study. It demands painstaking
attention, both because of its immediate importance to human happiness
and because of its potentiality for the future of society. The kind of
home and the character of family life which will best serve the world
and fulfil the will of God cannot be determined by sentiment or
supposition. We are under the highest and sternest obligation to
discover the laws of the family, those social laws which are determined
by its nature and purpose, to find right standards for family life, to
discriminate between the things that are permanent and those that are
passing, between those we must conserve and those we must discard, to be
prepared to fit children for the finer and higher type of family life
that must come in the future.

Methods of securing family efficiency will not be discovered by
accident. If it is worth while to study the minor details, such as
baking cakes and sweeping floors, surely it is even more important to
study the larger problems of organization and discipline. There is a
science of home-direction and an art of family living; both must be
learned with patient study.

It is a costly thing to keep a home where honor, the joy of love, and
high ideals dwell ever. It costs time, pleasures, and so-called social
advantages, as well as money and labor. It must cost thought, study,
and investigation. It demands and deserves sacrifice; it is too sacred
to be cheap. The building of a home is a work that endures to eternity,
and that kind of work never was done with ease or without pain and loss
and the investment of much time. Patient study of the problems of the
family is a part of the price which all may pay.

No nobler social work, no deeper religious work, no higher educational
work is done anywhere than that of the men and women, high or humble,
who set themselves to the fitting of their children for life's business,
equipping them with principles and habits upon which they may fall back
in trying hours, and making of home the sweetest, strongest, holiest,
happiest place on earth.

Heaven only knows the price that must be paid for that; heaven only
knows the worth of that work. But if we are wise we shall each take up
our work for our world where it lies nearest to us, in co-operation with
parents, in service and sacrifice as parents or kin, our work in the
shop where manhood is in the making, where it is being made fit to dwell
long in the land, in the family at home.

I. References for Study

Edward Lyttleton, _The Corner-Stone of Education_, chaps. i, vii.
Putnam, $1.50.

A. Gandier, "Religious Education in the Home," _Religious
Education_, June, 1914, pp. 233-42.

II. Further Reading

_The Family a Religious Agency_

C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The Family_. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.

J.D. Folsom, _Religious Education in the Home_. Eaton & Mains,
$0.75.

G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_. Revell, $1.35.

_The Place of the Family_

A.J. Todd, _The Family as an Educational Agency_. Putnam, $2.00.

W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_. Hodder & Stoughton, $2.50.

J.B. Robins, _The Family a Necessity_. Revell, $1.25.

III. Topics for Discussion

1. Describe the changes within recent times in the conditions of
the home, its work, housing, and supplies. How far have these
changes affected the community of the family, the continuity of its
personal relationships, and its religious service?

2. What are the fundamental causes of family disasters? Admitting
that there are sufficient grounds for divorce in numerous
instances, what other causes enter into the high number of
divorces?

3. State in your own terms the ultimate reasons for the maintenance
of a family.

4. What are the motives which would make people willing to bear the
high cost of founding and conducting a home?

5. What points of emphasis does this study suggest in the matter of
the education of public opinion?

6. State your distinction between the family and the home; which is
the more important and why?

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _The Corner-Stone of Education_, by Edward Lyttleton, headmaster of
Eton, is a striking argument on the determinative influence of parental
habits and attitudes of mind.

CHAPTER II

THE PRESENT STATUS OF FAMILY LIFE

Sec. 1. CONTRASTED TYPES

In a beautiful village, in one of the farther western states, two men
were discussing the possible future of the home and of family life.
Sitting in the brilliant moonlight, looking through the leafy shades,
watching the lights of a score of homes, each surrounded by lawn and
shade trees, each with its group on the front porch, where vines trailed
and flowers bloomed, listening to the hum of conversation and the
strains of music in one home and another, it seemed, to at least one of
these men, that this type of living could hardly pass away. The separate
home, each family a complete social integer, each with its own circle of
activities and interests, its own group, and its own table and fireside,
seemed too fine and beautiful, too fair and helpful, to perish under
economic pressure. Indeed, one felt that the village home furnished a
setting for life and a soil for character development far higher and
more efficient than could be afforded by any other domestic
arrangement--that it approached the ideal.

But two weeks later two men sat in an upper room, in the second largest
city in America, discussing again the future of the family. Instead of
the quiet music of the village, the clang of street cars filled the
ears, trains rushed by, children shouted from the paved highway,
families were seated by open windows in crowded apartments, seeking cool
air; the total impression was that of being placed in a pigeonhole in a
huge, heated, filing-case, where each separate space was occupied by a
family. One felt the pressure of heated, crowded kitchens, suffocating
little dining-rooms; one knew that the babies lay crying in their beds
at night, gasping their very lives away, and that the young folks were
wandering off to amusement parks and moving-picture shows. Here was an
entirely different picture. How long could family life persist under
these conditions where privacy was almost gone and comfort almost
unknown?

In the village separate home integers appear ideal; in the city they are
possible only to the few. The many, at present, find them a crushing
burden. Desirable as privacy is, it can be purchased at too high a
price. It costs too much to maintain separate kitchens and dining-rooms
under city conditions.

Sec. 2. COMMUNAL TENDENCIES

Present conditions spell waste, inefficiency, discomfort. The woman
lives all day in stifling rooms, poorly lighted, with the nerve-racking
life of neighbors pouring itself through walls and windows. The men
come from crowded shops and the children from crowded schoolrooms to
crowd themselves into these rooms, to snatch a meal, or to sleep. How
can there be real family life? What joy can there be or what ideals
created in daily discomfort and distress? Little wonder that such homes
are sleeping-places only, that there is no sense of family intercourse
and unity. Little wonder that restaurant life has succeeded family life.

Many hold that we are ready for a movement into community living, that
just as the social life of the separate house porches in the villages
has become communized into the amusement parks in the cities, so all the
activities of the family will move in the same direction. How long could
the family as a unit continue under these conditions?

The village life will persist for a long time; it may be that, when we
apply scientific methods to the transportation of human beings in the
same measure as we have to the moving of pig iron, we can develop large
belts of real village life all around our industrial centers. But more
and more the village tends to become like the city; in other words,
highly organized communal life is the dominant trend today. Just as
business tends to do on a large scale all that can be more economically
done in larger units, so does the home. We must look for the increasing
prevalence of the city type of life for men and women and for families.

Sec. 3. THE ECONOMICAL DEVELOPMENT

It is worth while to note, in some brief detail, just what changes are
involved in the tendency toward communal living. At the beginning of the
industrial revolution which ushered in the factory period, each family
was a fairly complete unit in itself. The village was little more than a
nucleus of farmhouses, with a few differing types of units, such as
workers in wood, in wearing apparel, and in tools. The home furnished
nearly all its own food, spun and made its clothes, trained its own
children, and knew scarcely any community endeavor or any syndication of
effort except in the church.

The industrial revolution took labor largely out of the home into the
factory. Except for farm life, the husband became an outside worker and
the older boys followed him to the distant shop or factory. Earning a
living ceased to be a family act and became a social act in a larger
sphere. But in this change it ceased to be a part of the family
educational process. Boys who, from childhood up, had gradually learned
their father's trade in the shop or workroom, which was part of the
house, where they played as children in the shavings, or watched the
glowing sparks in the smithy, now missed the process of a father's
discipline and guidance as their hands acquired facility for their
tasks. The home lost the male adults for from nine to twelve hours of
each day, more than two-thirds of the waking period, and thus it lost a
large share of disciplinary guidance. In the rise of the factory system,
to a large extent the family lost the father.

When the workshop left the home its most efficient school was taken from
it. The lessons may have been limited, crude, and deadly practical, but
the method approximated to the ideals which modern pedagogy seeks to
realize. Among the shavings children learned by doing; schooling was
perfectly natural; it involved all the powers; it had the incalculable
value of informality and reality. The father gone and the mother still
fully occupied with her tasks, the children lost that practical training
for life which home industry had afforded. On the one hand, the young
became the victims of idleness and, on the other, the prey of the
voracious factory system.

This condition gave rise to the public-school system. It appealed to
Robert Raikes and others. The school appeared and took over the child.
Of course schools had existed, here and there, long before this, but now
they had an enlarged responsibility; they must act almost in the place
of the parents for the formal training of children. Having lost the
father and older males for the greater portion of the day, the home now
loses the children of from seven to the "'teen" years for five or six
hours of the day. The mother is left at home with the babies. The
family, once living under one roof, now is found scattered; it has
reached out into factory and school. Its hours of unified life have been
markedly reduced.

But the factory system soon had a reflex influence on the home. That
which was made in the factory came back into the home, not only in the
form of the articles formerly made by the men, but in those made by the
women. Clothes, candles, butter, cheese, preserves, and meat--all
formerly home products for the use of the family producing them--now
were prepared in larger quantities, by mechanical processes, and were
brought back into the home. Woman's labor was lightened; the older girls
were liberated from the loom and they began to seek occupation,
education, and diversion according to their opportunities in life.

That last step made it possible for people to think of the communization
of home industry, to think of eating food cooked in other ovens than
their own, to think of one oven large enough for a whole village. Many
interesting experiments in co-operative living immediately sprang up.
But the next step came slowly and, even now, is only firmly established
in the cities, in the actual abandonment of the family kitchen for the
community kitchen in the form of the restaurant. In such families we
have unity only in the hours of sleep and recreation.

Along with abandonment of the separate kitchen there has proceeded
the abandonment of the parlor in the homes of the middle classes.
To lose the old, mournful front room may be no subject for tears,
but the loss of the evening family group, about the fireside or
the reading-lamp, is a real and sad loss. The commercialized amusements
have offered greater attractions to vigorous youth. The theater and
its lesser satellites, amusements, entertainments, lectures, the
lyceum, and recreation-by-proxy in ball games and matches have taken
the place of united family recreation. Of course this has been a
natural development of the older village play-life and has been by
no means an unmixed ill.

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