The motto of an old-fashioned Sunday-school teacher, recalls A. V. Washburn of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board, was: "You sit still while I instill." The modern version might be: "In God we trust that you'll adjust." Sunday schools still struggle, with varying success, to form religious people in a doggedly secular world, but the setting and philosophy are changing fast.
In many Protestant churches, even the name has changed; extension into weeknights makes "church school" a more accurate term. The oldtime room in the church basement has been replaced, in many cases, by a bright new building.
Modern Sunday school has attempted to adjust to modern students, whose minds have been honed on improved public schooling. "You can't sit them on a chair and pour it in any more," warns Mrs.
Harold Luellan, a Sunday-school administrator at Kansas City's Roanoke Presbyterian Church.
Ethical Education. The new emphasis is on attitudes rather than erudition, on acting like a Christian as well as knowing about Christianity. "I'd much rather my children show kindness than be able to recite 'Be ye kind, one to another,' " says Mrs. Lawton Kiser of Atlanta's Wieuca Road Baptist Church—and most parents and teachers agree.
To provide this type of ethical education, many Sunday schools attempt to ground their lessons in real-life relevance.
Through elaborate tape-recorded research, the Protestant Episcopal Church's Department of Christian Education, for example, has found that the issue most confusing to fourth-graders is the difference between right and wrong—and in that grade, one-half of U.S. Episcopal Sunday-school pupils now discuss morals as well as Bible stories. The new program, says Department Director David Hunter, is based on a "vigorous attempt to do something in the children's lives." Magic Tricks. In teaching methods, a new ingenuity is visible everywhere. The Massachusetts Council of Churches is studying a plan to tie in Sunday-school lessons with subjects being taught in public schools at the same time, so that a study of Paul's travels, for example, could draw on the familiarity of a world geography course. Personal relations are often studied through "role-playing" typical situations, and Maryland eighth-graders use modern language to act out Biblical stories such as the Prodigal Son ("Look, Dad, I'm leaving home"). Teachers regularly use film strips, cartoons, flannel boards, charades—even magic tricks. The Methodists are featuring Patty Duke in a new film series that will be shown in Sunday schools.
The machinery that supports these innovations has all the trappings of modern education: school boards, superintendents, team teaching, study groups. No longer does a teacher go into class armed only with the Good Book and a supply of patience built up over the previous six days.
He is likely to have a skeleton text, a book of suggested activities, a visual-aid kit, and the advice of a child psychologist.