"RELIGION is a life-long ' search, always incomplete . . .
eminency a personal search, a personal experience and a personal challenge," say& Ronald Goldman in Readiness for Religion (Routledge, Kegan Paul. 18s.). and this book aims to provide well-trained teacher-guides to aid the searchers in their care.
Dr. Goldman understands the need for adapting a lesson to the age of the pupil, sees that religion must permeate all lessons taught and realises the abiding and fundamental necessity for remembering that "Christianity should be taught because it is true, because it answers the deepest needs of human nature, and without a knowledge of the love of God and a relationship with him men and women will live impoverished lives."
He stresses—what worries the wits out of most of us involved —the fact that a teacher of religion must necessarily be a religious teacher, though it is not at all necessary that he or she be a Religious, and that the overall atmosphere of the school can vitally reinforce or almost completely nullify all that is taught in the religious class, that adolescents resent being treated as "information fodder" and that discussion is as essential as indoctrination. He emphasises how much of Our Lord's teaching was done by queNiiiming. Or, as Sis ter Romain I.S. says in Tell My People (Chapman, 10s. 6d.) "To question well is to teach well."
Dr. Goldman's is a wise and helpful book. while Sister Romain's is an answer to prayer and a wonderful aide to all religious teachers, especially as she gives outline lessons which are splendidly adaptable and which most books on religious teaching either avoid or do in such a vague and abstract way that they are of little help. Sister Romain's lessons are truly practical and her advice is loving and enormously helpful.
She, like Dr. Goldman, believes that: "There can be confusion between education in faith and the inculcation of knowledge," and realises too, that, essential though a syllabus is and diocesan examiners are, it is still possible for a slow but holy child to appear less well-equipped than a more intelligent and much less genuinely pious one.
It is hard to teach this, but Sister Romain's easily affordable book will help the teacher who is trying to feel and share this love more than any other book I know.