Faith and the Primary School Teacher: A Snapshot from 1964

The Pilot, the Magazine of the Anglican Church in Jersey, had a feature in 1964 about different professions, and this one is on teaching. It gives an interesting insight into the mind of a teacher about their faith and teaching back in that decade.


MY FAITH AND MY JOB.
V.—AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHER.

The guide to my career as a teacher has always been my faith in the innate goodness in every child. I have set out to train children, be they boys or girls, to take their place in the world as useful citizens, to be observant of the Creator’s beneficent work, to seek always the good in their fellows.

No one can deny that home is the foundation of the character of each child, and it is therefore necessary for the teacher to have the goodwill of the parents. I dare to state that the atmosphere of the home has been changed for the better by the gradual influence for good exercised by the correct direction of the child-mind.

Education is a slow process—it begins in the cradle and is not fully complete on the death-bed - it cannot be measured in terms of scholarship successes. The happy teacher is one who can watch his former pupils making good in their employment, hear of them as respected business folk, or, what is more important, see them good husbands or wives.

My faith has led me to try to bring a sense of good citizenship into the lives of many children who were getting a tough time of it at home, living two families in one room in a London slum, or waking to find that big brother had not come home, and later learning that he had been “caught,” and was to do penal servitude for being a car-bandit. Life was tough for those children. How pleasant it is for the great majority of youngsters in this island of ours ! And it is perhaps towards the small minority, whose home life is so difficult, that. the teacher finds that the strongest expression of his faith is most needed.

In the schools, still dubbed “Elementary” in Jersey, it is compulsory for Religious Instruction to be given daily. This instruction, where the parent does not wish it to be according to the tenets of any particular faith, is given direct from the Bible - that Great Book with its wealth of stories in such delightful phrasing, that, even solely by the listening to them or the reading of them, the receptive mind of the child is bound to be led to appreciate the beautiful, surely a necessary attribute of all who call themselves Christians.

My job will not allow me to differentiate between those of one faith and another in the class-room or out of it (that being a reason for my refusal to undertake Sunday School duties). Come what may, they are all God’s created beings, and one must surely follow the Great Teacher who suffered little children to go to Him. He did not ask of what sect they were. He blessed them all!

How often, I wonder, do the critics of the teacher in his job as a reader of the Scriptures ponder on the unfortunate fact that Our Lord’s Word is seldom spoken about or read in the home ? Religion is too often taboo. It is kept in the majority of cases for the teaching of a simple prayer or two to the toddler, and then carefully put away, until the subject is broached just before the young toddler-that-was is getting married, and the Prayer Book appears for her to look over with mother, just to see what she has to say.

How can we bring Religion more deeply into the lives of the men and women of the future? This question has we know exercised great religious minds before, but little effect is apparent as_a result of their deliberations. The deepest religious memories of most adults are probably of their school prayers and hymns, and of the stories related to them in their class-rooms.

The question in my opinion is one for frank and open discussion by all interested in the subject, not by the few who, knowing nothing of the subject or being badly informed, remain dumb before the oratorical wisdom of the mighty.

My faith is strong, and it is my belief that, as Professor A. D. Ritchie said in a recent broadcast : “ God requires only three things of men, that they should do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.”