Teaching Children Religion: Can Children Truly Grasp Ideas About God and the Universe?

When examining the religious education of children and young adults, it is clearly necessary to consider the possibility that young students may not be able to understand what they are being taught. In fact, the possibility exists that even the most ardently professed young believers do not have the individuality and experience to truly understand and accept their faith. As various studies have demonstrated (Harms, Goldman, Burt), the ability of children to understand religious concepts is highly dependent on age and mental development. However, this does not necessarily imply that religious education should be reserved until after childhood. On the contrary, this paper will attempt to show that the teaching of religion to children, far from being unsuccessful and fruitless, contributes greatly to the mental and religious development of children.

As the study of religious education has developed in recent years, there has been a marked trend towards the belief that children relate to God and religion on many different levels. This belief has resulted largely from a number of social experiments conducted throughout the last hundred years. In the early 1940's, for example, Ernest Harms examined a group of students, representing a variety of ages and religions, and concluded that children pass through three major phases of religious understanding: a "fairy-tale" stage in the youngest children, followed by a more rational and "realistic" stage, which in turn was followed by a more fully developed "individualistic" stage (Harms 115-118).

Following this study, similar experiments were conducted which made use of different examination techniques. Whereas Harms based his results on pictorial representations of God, for instance, Goldman based his test on comparisons between Biblical stories and Biblical pictures. Interestingly, "in spite of the differences of approach and sampling, studies have shown much consistency" (Pnevmatikos 95). Indeed, most studies tend to agree that children fall into roughly three categories of religious understanding (Nye 138).