Article March 17, 1956 Issue

A Class of Ten-Year-Olds

A teacher in a branch church Sunday School gives the following account of his gaining the confidence of a class of ten-year-old boys and of arousing their interest in putting the lessons into practice.

At the start the pupils seemed to manifest apathy, lack of interest, and often open resistance, with frank statements that they had not come through choice. Earnest efforts to get them interested in the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, and other fundamentals did not seem to make much impression. Soon I recognized that a basis of mutual understanding must be worked out. The situation might be likened to Jesus' parable of the good Samaritan, found in the tenth chapter of Luke. In this parable the priest and the Levite, who considered themselves religious men, doubtless had much of the letter of their religion and probably could talk freely about it, but after they had passed the suffering one on the other side, the sympathetic Samaritan saw the man's needs and "came where he was." That was what I needed to do. I needed to come where the pupils were in order to heal the beliefs of apathy, resistance, and certain traits of character sometimes erroneously attributed to younger children.

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