Criteria for Curricula
Caught up in the push to build a total church program of education, pastors have sometimes been caught with their educational slip showing. Ministerial training courses have not always helped them tool up for their teaching tasks. Pressed by program demands, pastors look desperately about for some help in selecting curricular resources for classes, courses, and programs. Some rely on the recommendations of denominational leaders. Others put themselves on the mercy of the advertisements.
Not a few pastors have grown dissatisfied with standard materials available from publishing houses and have cranked up the mimeograph machine to produce their own. Many of these are woefully inadequate, consisting of little more than rehashed homilies. The lessons are neither educationally nor theologically sound. Other men keep shopping around for materials, changing curricular horses in midstream, ending up with a wide array of quarterlies, teacher’s guides, and visual aids for their bewildered teachers.
What guidelines can pastors use in selecting instructional tools for teaching the Bible? A practical starting point would be to become familiar with material currently in use in the classroom. It is safe to say that many pastors do not know what their laymen are teaching. A bookseller told of a minister who phoned in an order for Sunday-school materials. When asked to identify the publisher, the minister replied, “I can’t say for sure, but the junior material has a blue cover!” Recently a pastor told me that upon assuming the leadership of a church he found one class studying material published by a sect, unaware of what it was. Teachers may be teaching things that border on heresy simply because they are untrained and unsupervised.
Most churches have discovered that use of the material of one publishing company throughout all age levels gives continuity. Adaptations can be made to meet particular needs. No one teacher, however, should be allowed to dictate what he will or will not teach on a regular basis.
Pastors can also become familiar with curricular structure. Considerable innovation is going on at all levels, and a little awareness of curriculum scope and design is in order.
There are three basic types of Sunday-school literature: uniform lesson series, department or group graded lessons, and closely graded lessons. In the uniform series the same Bible content is taught at every level. An adaptation of this is the thematic development of content so that each level studies the same theme, but a variety of biblical material is used. Departmentally graded materials provide a two-or three-year cycle of materials with a different theme for each department. In closely graded materials, a one-year cycle is used with a single theme for each age or grade level.
Various attempts have been made to change curricula from the traditional quarterly basis. The United Church Curriculum, to cite an example, provides for two five-month semesters and a ten-week summer term. This corresponds with the public-school term and allows promotion at the end of the second semester. Other publishing houses may well follow that plan in the future, but for now the quarterly system prevails among both the interdenominational independents and most denominational systems.
The real excitement in curriculum development is taking place within the content itself. The impact of Piaget, Brunner, and Skinner is being felt in educational theory, and a closer link is being established with the theological disciplines. Beginning with the Faith and Life Curriculum of the United Presbyterians in the fifties, a radical departure from traditionalism took place in curriculum development. Material was organized along theological lines. This was followed by the Seabury Series with its clusters of existential questions. Up to now curricular innovation has been rather unilateral, but the 1960 Curriculum Project, recently completed by sixteen cooperating denominations, has begun to color the approaches to curricular development among large segments of American Christianity. The trend is definitely away from direct study of the Scriptures as the basic diet of Sunday schools. This may well be the greatest tragedy of our time.
A long hard look at content is in order to determine the theological, psychological, and pedagogical soundness of curricular materials. How is the Bible included in the curriculum? Is a high view of the Scriptures maintained? Are extrabiblical materials used wisely? Are essential doctrines emphasized and are the lessons doctrinally accurate? Do the lessons fit the age level? Do the materials emphasize the discovery of truth and not just the transmission of truth? How are pupil books or materials used? Are adequate aids available to the teacher for building a lesson plan?
How the material relates the learner to life is tremendously important. What attitudes are fostered toward God, the church, man, and society? Is a narrow provincialism toward one particular Christian life-stance fostered, or is there a recognition that fundamental faith may express itself in genuine Christian liberty? Does the material tend to emphasize one particular socio-economic level to the exclusion of others? Is a paternalistic spirit fostered toward all who are “different”?
The primacy of the home as the first teacher of values and character must not be overlooked. Does the curriculum relate to the home and enlist its cooperation? At this point pastors may want to supplement the courses with other materials that deal with the problems of teen-agers and the home.
When a pastor is satisfied that the materials selected are sound, the larger part of his problem still remains: what to do about the untrained teacher. In the hands of incompetent teachers, the finest curricular materials are like precision tools in the hands of children. Unless something specific is done to help the worker use the tools, little is gained. The Southern Baptists and the Bible Baptists, to cite notable examples, are working on the problem. Regular teachers’ meetings (“We meet every week because we teach every week”) help teachers meet the challenges of the classroom.—EDWARD L. HAYES, associate professor of Christian education, Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado
