Children 100 years ago

sound very similar to 60 years ago, or 30 years ago, for that matter, the last time I had experience with the 9-12 age range. This is taken from "Hurlbut's Teacher-Training Lessons for the Sunday School" (1908) by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut, and is a revision of his 1885 leaflets, and was authorized by the International Sunday School Association. The training of Sunday School teachers, he writes in the Preface, was an outgrowth of the Chautauqua Movement, which began in 1874, although there were teachers' guides before that. Sunday schools, not the government, provided the first form of public education in the United States.

These notes are taken from Chapter 42, "The Junior Pupils."

At the age of 8 or 9 a change comes gradually over the child's nature; and a new stage in its history begins. [In Sunday Schools this was called the Junior period.] It lasts about 4 years, from 9 to 12 or 13, and both entering and leaving it, the girls are about a year ahead of the boys in maturity.

Physical Traits--slower growth in the size of body and brain
strong development in strength and firmness of texture
great increase in physical activity--need games and sports
tendency to take risks--especially boys

Mental traits--Curiosity, interest in facts, little interest in abstract
good time for history, biography, adventure
Memory--strong, more accurate, more retentive than at any other period, if they don't memorize now, it will become much more difficult later
Arrangement of Knowledge--learning sequence of events, locality, facts
Love of reading--world of books is opening, reading more rapidly
Acquisitiveness--gathering and hoarding all sorts of things

Social traits--boys and girls no longer want to play together; boys with boys, girls with girls
Friendships--need for a special, constant companion--they never tire of each other
Club-spirit--girls form societies; boys form clubs or gangs; loyalty must be maintained at the sacrifice of truth and morality

Moral traits--sees more strongly the difference between right and wrong, even if they don't follow it in conduct
Sense of Justice--demand "fair play," perceive wrongs and resent them;

Religious traits--admiration for the heroic and noble, usually not doctrinal or emotional
willingness to work for Christ and the church--they have the time and energy, so put them to work--they love accomplishment.

The author suggests same-sex classes of about six, not more than eight, and that the teachers should be different than the ones they had in the primary grades. The author suggests emphasis on history and facts, not theology, but the list to be included was certainly impressive for 30 minutes a week! He suggests avoiding pathetic or suffering pictures, even pictures of Christ. Don't look for emotion or radical transformation, but one might expect a "decision for Christ," between 10 and 12.

This book belonged to my grandparents, who both taught Sunday School many years, and attended special, residential training classes at Bethany Seminary in Chicago. The cover is missing and it has been hand stitched to hold it together, with the back cover from a different source. My children were grown before I inherited this book--I could have saved myself a lot of time and expense if I'd used this instead of some of the trendy, psycho-babble stuff available in the 1970s and 1980s.