IDEAS OF GOD

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 250, 21 October 1937, Page 6

IDEAS OF GOD

CHILDREN’S CONCEPTIONS RESULTS OF AN INQUIRY Some of the results of valuable research work carried out among 300 primary school children by Mr. F. A. Garry, headmaster of the Mount Roskili School, were reported to a conference of Presbyterian Sunday School teachers at Auckland on Saturday afternoon. The conference, which was organised by the Presbyterian Sunday School Teachers’ Association, was held at St. Mungo’s Church, Richmond, and was attended by representatives of 10 city and suburban schools. The subject investigated by Mr. Garry was children’s ideas about God. Speaking on “How a child grows in his conception of God,” Mr. Garry traced five stages of development, pointing out how concrete children were in their thinking and how strongly influenced by pictures. He said he had tested his theories by getting the children from nine years of age and upward to write down for him, under suitable conditions, their ideas about God. “Among all the answers,” said Mr. Garry, “1 did not find anything but the one grand thought that God was a kind, fatherly person who is interested in us and desires of helping us. There was no note of terror in the whole lot of them.” Mr. Garry also inquired about the source of the children’s ideas. Some very crude ones were attributed to the home, but the crudest of all came from their own reading.