p. 557 | The Sabbath School

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 15, 1881

The Sabbath School.

TELLING IS NOT TEACHING.

ONE of the commonest mistakes of a Sabbath-school teacher is in supposing that telling a thing to a scholar is teaching that thing to the scholar. Telling a thing may be a part of the process of teaching; and again it may not be; but in and of itself telling is never teaching—it cannot be. Until a teacher realizes this truth he is not a teacher; therefore we want to tell this truth to all teachers and to all who want to be teachers, although we are very well aware that telling it in this way will not teach it to anybody.

If the scholar is deaf, and you tell him a truth by word of mouth, with your head down so that he cannot see the movement of your lips, it is very clear that you have not taught him what you have told him. If he has ears, but they are intent on something else than your words while you are talking to him; or if you talk in a language which he does not understand,—it is equally clear that your telling is no teaching to him. So far all will agree at the start, but the principle involved has a profounder reach than this. No person learns at once everything that is told to him; and no person is taught until he learns; nor more than he learns. To tell a child for the first time all the letters of the alphabet does not teach him his alphabet. To tell a scholar in a secular school all the rules of grammar or of arithmetic, all the boundaries of all the States of the Union, or all the principles of natural or moral philosophy, does not, by any means, teach him all those things. Teaching would be a very simple matter, if telling were teaching; but no one thinks of counting the two processes identical—except in the sphere of purely religious truth.

Who would think of teaching an apprentice to shoe a horse, or to set type, or to make a watch, by simply telling him how? Who would expect artists, or authors, or soldiers, to be taught in their profession by the mere telling of their duties? If men and women knew all the valuable truths which have been told them, from the lecture platform, in social converse, and by direct personal instruction, how wise the world would be! If the children had been taught all the good things that have been told to them at home and elsewhere, how much more they would know than their parents—who have not always been taught by simply being told! And what learned congregations we should have, if all that some of these wise and venerable preachers have told their people, had been learned by their people! That telling has not been teaching in every case, all will see at a glance, whether they are ready or not to agree that telling is never teaching, nor ever can be.

The wisest preachers and teachers have recognized this truth, even though it has, by no means, found general acceptance as yet. "Nothing is more absurd," says an eminent English teacher, "than the common notion of instruction, as if science were to be poured into the mind, like water into a cistern." And a well-known American educator has said, in a similar vein, concerning silent pupils in a Sabbath-school class: "You may pour your stream of knowledge upon them till you drown them, or till they run away, and not get a drop of it into them, because their mouths are shut." It is as if in comment on this very figure, that Thomas Carlyle has said: "To sit, as a passive bucket and be pumped into, can in the long run be exhilarating to no creature, how eloquent soever the flood of utterance that is descending."

So brilliant and witty a preacher as Dr. Robert South put the same truth, although by a different figure, two centuries ago, when he described preaching to passive hearers as "a kind of spiritual diet upon which people are always feeding but never full; and many poor souls, God knows too, too like Pharaoh's lean kine, much the leaner for their full feed." And of the teaching or training process in the church, he adds: "To expect that this should be done by preaching or force of lungs, is just as if a smith or artist who works in metal, should expect to form and shape out his work only with his bellows."

A vast deal of what is called "Bible-class teaching" is talking, but not teaching. It might pass for fourth-rate, or third-rate, or second-rate, or at the very best and rarest—as first-rate preaching, or lecturing; but it never ought to be called "teaching." The teacher talks; the scholars listen. The teacher is a gainer in his mind and heart by what he says; but not so his silent scholars. They hear, but do not learn. The "exercise" is an exercise only to the exerciser. The whole thing is a pocket-edition in poor type of a pulpit-led service, with many of the disadvantages and few of the benefits of the full-page edition. And not a little of the ordinary class-teaching in the Sabbath-school is of the same character. The teacher talks; the scholars listen. There is a "teacher," but no teaching. There are "learners," but no learning. It is not a pleasant thing to face such a fact as this; but if it is a fact, it ought to be faced by those interested.

Telling a thing may be an important part of the process of teaching a thing. The telling may in itself interest or impress even where it fails to instruct. A teacher may teach in other ways than by his telling truths that are worthy of his scholars' hearing and learning. However this may be, it is important that every teacher should understand, at the first and at the last, that telling a thing is not in itself teaching a thing; and that if he is a teacher at all it will be through some other agency than merely his talking.—S. S. Times.