Between Authority and Service: The LeBar Sisters

Introduction

American evangelicals have long engendered strict codes of gender hierarchy in their churches, ministries, and related institutions. By the mid-twentieth century, coinciding with the emergence of the Neo-Evangelical movement led by men of high stature like Billy Graham, Harold J. Ockenga, and Carl F. H. Henry, higher education quickly materialized as the prized jewel of public relevancy and cultural influence. In their organizing efforts, institutions like Wheaton College achieved a newfound preeminence within the evangelical subculture while the recently established Fuller Seminary represented a baptized alternative to the increasingly secularized higher education landscape. Although it was men who primarily spearheaded this educational campaign from the top down, evangelical women had by this time already cultivated a lengthy history in the field of education from the bottom up. Indeed, evangelical women educators simultaneously embodied the “fixed” gender role of serving the other and turned it into positions of educational authority.

Lois (1907–1998) and Mary (1910–1982) LeBar, two sisters born and raised in Olean, New York, matriculated into higher education while this time of change was underway.^[1] Their careers reflect a microcosm of the broader phenomenon of evangelical women educators who accommodated the agency of women educators in the predominately male-led spaces of evangelical education. First as students, then as professional educators, both sisters unknowingly negotiated the boundaries between strict gender roles and teaching authority by advancing progressive pedagogical theories. Alongside other countless (and nameless) women educators, the LeBar sisters contributed to the transformation of evangelical education. Employed and tenured at Wheaton College from 1945 to 1975, Lois and Mary trained nearly a thousand prospective Christian educators, gained a distinguished reputation in Christian higher education, and published widely in the evangelical publishing network.^[2]

This article examines the lives and careers of the LeBar sisters and their use of progressive pedagogy in Christian education. Although evangelicals deplored John Dewey, the progressive school reformer, women educators discovered unique ways to adopt and adapt his pedagogical theories. To underscore their vocational ministries as Christian teachers while serving in an educational context, evangelical women labored in the unaccustomed space between authority and service. By the mid-twentieth century, male authority was so enshrined in the evangelical subculture that it placed women educators in liminal positions that transgressed boundaries between the “maleness” of given authority and the subservient nature proper to womanhood. However, what makes this phenomenon even more complicated is that the LeBars not only remained within this strictly gendered paradigm but supported the fundamentalist conceptions of gender role ideology. In this way, the LeBar sisters utilized their role as women and used particular resources from progressive education that buttressed this in-between-ness.^[3]

Dissatisfied with deductive methods stressing a “teacher-centered” pedagogy, both LeBar sisters established an inductive approach emphasizing a “student-centered” pedagogy that flouted traditionalist models of evangelical education. Although Dewey and his epigones prized teaching methods that overcame the “authoritarian” deductive models of traditional education, it was because the LeBars were women that, in part, motivated their use of the inductive method. Dewey’s “child-centered” pedagogy was both effective in the classroom, and it allowed women educators to extend their authority and expertise beyond the domestic realm. Relying on their distinct gender roles as subservient women tasked to center others, the LeBar sisters appropriated Dewey’s progressive educational pedagogy in a style that proved amenable to their dual roles as educators and evangelical women.

In documenting the LeBar sisters’ advances in evangelical education, this article first examines two contemporaries of the LeBars, both Christian teachers who challenged progressive educational reforms on theological grounds, reflecting the broader concerns of evangelical educators. Second, the article follows the educational journey of the LeBar sisters and examines the numerous educators who greatly influenced their philosophy of education. In conclusion, the article discloses the various ways in which the LeBar sisters appropriated progressive pedagogy in service of their roles as teachers. For both, this was as much a theological task as it was a pedagogical one. The legacy of the LeBar sisters complicates and further nuances traditional conceptions of women’s gender roles in the context of twentieth-century American evangelicalism. Strategically embodying their distinct roles as women within evangelical education, both transformed these roles in a surprising fashion between authority and service.^[4]

Evangelicalism and Progressive Education

From the early to mid-twentieth century, evangelicalism prioritized the establishment of educational institutions as a means of training young Christians for evangelization and cultural engagement.^[5] In the wake of World War I, public education underwent massive institutional change. As a result of urbanization and the diversifying trends made possible by European immigration, public schools appeared vastly different from their nineteenth-century counterparts. Educational reformers sought to address these changes by recasting educational institutions as sites of Americanization. By introducing new content that reinforced practical skills, educational reformers encouraged teaching subjects like sex education, social hygiene, home economics, and health.^[6] Moreover, educational reformers formulated progressive pedagogical methods that oriented teaching and lesson planning around the pupil as the center of the classroom environment.

John Dewey framed the core principles of progressive education around their relevance to everyday life. In this way, Dewey and other reformers loosely systematized education with four key concepts.^[7] First, progressive reformers sought to overcome a traditional model of education that emphasized a subject-centered curriculum by introducing a child-centered approach that elicited and accentuated the pupil’s desire to learn content. Second, they stressed the education of the “whole child” rather than the transfer of content knowledge, undermining a mind-body dualism that failed on epistemological grounds to account for a proper anthropology of human learning. Third, progressive educators aspired to allow students flexibility in determining the curricular content of their education. Fourth and last, progressive educators eschewed deductive pedagogies that reflected an authoritarian teacher who demands the obedience of the submissive pupil, and encouraged, to the contrary, inductive social models of enculturated, student learning.^[8]

Evangelical educators grew increasingly concerned over these shifts in public education, challenging the progressive reformers on theological grounds. Charles B. Eavey, an education professor at Wheaton College from 1930 to 1942, warned of the emerging “bureaucracy of educators” who had fallen “under the influence of the naturalistic and relativistic philosophy of John Dewey.” Progressive educators and the pedagogical theories they espoused were skewed toward “socialistic tendencies” that defied the local control of communities and yielded the “centralization of educational power” into the hands of the federal government. Consequently, public education had become “socialized schools” that naturally reflected “the political group that [was] in power” and slavishly advanced the “ideology its leaders support[ed].” According to Eavey, the required response to these educational developments came in the form of well-trained Christian educators and a subculture of evangelical educational institutions, “maintaining that the child belongs, not to the temporal order of Caesar but to the eternal kingdom of God.”^[9]

Eavey’s warning reflects the apprehension many evangelical educators experienced in the face of progressive reforms. Evangelical educators sought to champion traditional models of education dating back to the eighteenth century, emphasizing their importance in rearing Godly children. In fact, Christian education was revered with eternal significance. Eavey and likeminded evangelical educators argued that “the true Christian school instills the Christian faith” whereas the “non-religious state school may not be atheistic in its purpose, but is so in its effects.”^[10] Progressive educators, it was argued, sought to replace God by placing humanity at the center of its pedagogical and curricular initiatives.^[11] Educational theory centered on progressive reforms in which children become the fulcrum of learning calls to question their very soteriological status. By the 1930s, evangelical colleges and Bible Institutes combated these new trends by establishing education programs that equipped young men and women for careers in Christian education. Eavey was one among many evangelical educators who sought to keep progressive education at bay while simultaneously critiquing it from abroad.

Another significant figure in evangelical education who opposed the progressive reforms sweeping across the nation was Clarence H. Benson (1879–1954).^[12] Benson was hired by Moody Bible Institute in 1922 to revamp the educational curriculum for Sunday Schools, a nineteenth-century educational institution that peaked in attendance during the 1880s but had been in decline ever since.^[13] The same year as Benson’s hire to Moody Bible, the International Council of Religious Education (ICRE) formed as a result of a merger between the International Sunday School Association and the Sunday School Council of Evangelical Denominations, which later became the education arm of the Mainline Protestant organization, the National Council of Churches, in the 1950s.^[14] In response to both the decline in attendance and the shortcomings of Sunday Schools, as well as the liberal ICRE, Benson established the Evangelical Teacher Training Association (ETTA) in 1930. Education historian Lawrence Cremin of the Teacher’s College at Columbia University claimed that the ETTA served “as a kind of orthodox evangelical alternative” to the educational initiatives ushered in by progressive education and “was one of the most innovative educational institutions of the era.”^[15]

At Moody Bible, Benson opposed the ICRE by arguing that it had succumbed to modern, progressive trends in its curricular emphases and development. Instead, he stressed the need for evangelical education to equip Christian educators in a methodology derived from a deductive system that required authoritative teaching and a submissive, obedient student. Benson locates this pedagogy in two principles associated with the learning of the student: interest and apperception.^[16] The duty of the teacher is to sustain the interest of the student through “concentrated consciousness” over the course of the lesson.^[17] After gaining new knowledge in the process of sustained interest, apperception assumes its proper place in which “acquiring new ideas by the aid of [old] knowledge already acquired” automatically transfers into action.^[18]

Although Benson makes no acknowledgment of it, this deductive process of learning acquisition that locates the teacher as the primary actor in the classroom was derived from a pedagogical school of thought called Herbartianism, developed by the early nineteenth-century German philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart.^[19] At the turn of the twentieth century, Herbartianism dominated American public education, not only reflecting the transatlantic influence on common school educators, but also revealing how secular educational resources for twentieth-century evangelical educators, like Benson, became a boon in their opposition to secular progressive reformers.^[20] For Benson, this Herbartian model was as theologically necessary as it was pedagogically effective. In his book titled, The Christian Teacher, Benson theologically grounded this pedagogical theory in contending that a proper Christian anthropology of body, soul, and spirit, constitutes the student’s threefold spheres of mentality, personality, and spirituality.^[21] This being the case, the teacher’s responsibility was to perform a “reaching pedagogy” that penetrated the three interpersonal dimensions of the student.

The teacher who reaches the mentality is preparing the intellect for knowledge, but the teacher who reaches the personality is preparing the pupil for life, while the Christian teacher, in going beyond this and reaching the spirituality, is preparing the pupil for eternity.^[22]

Benson’s pedagogy is theologically grounded in a Christian anthropology that also implicates a soteriology, ultimately placing priority on the deductive action of the teacher.^[23]

As two influential evangelical educators, Eavey and Benson labored tirelessly throughout the course of their careers to combat progressive education and to implement theologically grounded teaching methods. Eavey opposed the progressive reformers because they replaced the teacher and subject-centered curriculum with a child-centered approach. Consequently, this located the student as the central organizing principle of education, supplanting God as the beginning and end of education. Benson argued that presupposing a proper Christian anthropology of the student enabled the teacher to deductively reach beyond the mental and personal and subsequently into their innate spiritual dimension, stimulating the student toward God. Together, both educators envisioned a pedagogy that viewed the teacher as authoritatively embodying God as the central subject of the curriculum, resembling the male clergy who exercises authority in the church.

The LeBar Sisters

The historical development of distinct gender role ideals made the conditions possible for women educators like the LeBar sisters to leverage positions of influence in educational settings. Several historians have argued that particular characteristics of nineteenth-century gender roles associated with “Republican motherhood” or the “cult of domesticity” and “true womanhood,” centering around female responsibility to hearth and home, paradoxically established the impetus for female agency in the realms of politics, social club organization, and reform activism.^[24] In the early twentieth century, an elevation of women’s social agency as a byproduct of their perceived maternal nature, what some historians distinguish as an ideology of “maternalist politics,” transformed their capacity for family nurture and childcare into the conservation of social institutions and the upkeep of public morality.^[25] This development at the turn of the century included evangelical institutions, and most notably, evangelical educational enterprises. Fundamentalists reacted against this elevation of women’s agency in the church and its related ministries, attempting to reclaim proper gender roles in both church and home in the 1920s and 1930s.^[26] Both LeBar sisters implicitly made use of contemporary gender ideology in their surrounding context, assuming authoritative positions as teachers.

As students, the LeBars attended Moody Bible Institute in Chicago from 1933 to 1935 where they studied under Benson in the Christian education program.^[27] While under Benson’s tutelage, Mary and Lois developed lesson plans and curricula for the ETTA’s “All-Bible Graded Series,” which paved the way for the establishment of the Sunday School curricula publisher, Scripture Press.^[28] Emphasis on a Sunday School education became a unique avenue for women like the LeBar sisters to theoretically and practically experiment with pedagogical theories. As women, they took advantage of their designated gender roles, shouldering the responsibilities of childcare and family nurture, while extending their agency and authority beyond the domestic sphere into Sunday School classrooms. Early in their careers, it was Sunday School education, their development of curricula, and engagement with children that enabled the LeBar sisters to hone their pedagogical craft, discovering what proved successful and what needed further improvement.

After two years of study with Benson at Moody Bible Institute, Mary and Lois served as Bible teachers in numerous Sunday Schools around Chicago. Over the course of five years, the sisters grew discontent with what they observed as “little learning, much ignorance regarding appropriate age levels, and little pupil activity.”^[29] Convinced that change was greatly needed, both sisters continued their education by enrolling at Chicago’s Pestalozzi-Froebel Teacher’s College in 1941. The College was founded by the American pioneer of the kindergarten movement, Bertha Hofer Hegner, in 1896. Hegner carried out her graduate studies in Europe at the Pestalozzi-Froebel Haus in Berlin, an educational institution named after the Swiss education reformer, Johann Pestalozzi, and the father of the kindergarten movement, Friedrich Froebel.^[30] Inspired by her graduate education, Hegner introduced her newfound pedagogy at the Pestalozzi-Froebel Teacher’s College by emphasizing that kindergarten ought to reflect the home instead of a school to better engage pupils in learning through the familiarity of domestic crafts and projects.^[31] In addition, this pedagogical emphasis of the school environment promoted collaboration between pupils in mutual exchange through active learning so that “through the performing of such [domestic] activities to develop social power and insight…the results in which are for the welfare of the miniature community in which he finds himself.”^[32]

Exercising their skills by serving in Sunday Schools throughout Chicago, the LeBars utilized the pedagogical emphases dependent on the home developed by Hegner and her successors. Domestic space, traditionally viewed as a site reserved for women, became contexts in which women educators derived newfound pedagogical emphases that could then be extended into classrooms. Once the domestic realm became a palimpsest of classroom activities, the LeBars used the institution of Sunday School to centralize their agenda toward educational reform in evangelicalism.^[33] Unchallenged by male authority, women educators strategically occupied their roles by teaching home activities in a classroom context and by centering the children rather than themselves. In this way, the LeBar sisters learned what proved pedagogically applicable for education by fulfilling their gender roles demanded of them by an evangelical gender ideology.

Hegner’s educational and pedagogical advancements in the American kindergarten movement also influenced her young colleague, the educational reformer John Dewey. Dewey had just established the Chicago Laboratory School at the University of Chicago in 1896, the same year Hegner’s Pestalozzi-Froebel Teacher’s College was established, prior to transitioning to the Teacher’s College at Columbia College, New York, in 1904.^[34] Dewey learned from Hegner that implementing collaborative and social projects in the classroom accentuated and capitalized on the student’s ability to learn as a social being. Moreover, the social dimension of a student required their collaboration with others in the spatial environment of the classroom, learning through active engagement with their peers. As Dewey explained in 1897, “This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual’s powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions.”^[35] Thus, “through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together.”^[36]

Hegner and Dewey’s pedagogy contributed greatly to the emerging progressive education, influencing the LeBar sisters as well. Mary completed two years of coursework at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teacher’s College with an emphasis on educational psychology, which prompted her enrollment at Central YMCA College (later Roosevelt University) and earning of a bachelor’s degree in psychology. Lois completed one year of coursework and transferred a year earlier than Mary to Central YMCA College, also graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology.^[37] The educational psychology both sisters received at Pestalozzi-Froebel and YMCA College enriched their understanding of active learning as a cognitive process of discovery. A course catalog from Pestalozzi-Froebel in 1938–39, three years prior to their enrollment, offered twelve different educational psychology courses–a course offering larger than any other discipline at the college.^[38] What is more, it threw in sharp relief the extent to which Benson relied too heavily on a teacher-centered approach.^[39] While Benson’s teacher-centered approach purportedly reached the interpersonal needs of the student’s psychology, it failed to account for the environmental conditions the student inhabits, how to stimulate the student’s interest, and the role community plays in the process of learning.

In 1944, after their graduation from Central YMCA College, the LeBar sisters learned of a new graduate program in Christian education recently formed at Wheaton College. Charles Eavey, the Chair of the Department of Psychology and Education, created an undergraduate program in Christian education in 1930. In 1936, Eavey hired Rebecca R. Price and tasked her to develop a master’s program in Christian education at Wheaton. Credentials now in hand, the LeBar sisters each received scholarships and began graduate work, studying under Price and imbibing her pedagogical methods.

Before earning her PhD from New York University in Religious Education, Price was a graduate of the Biblical Seminary of New York where she studied under Wilbert W. White, a student of William Rainey Harper’s at Yale.^[40] Harper would go on to become one of the founders of the University of Chicago in 1894 and a colleague of John Dewey’s. As a teacher at Yale in 1883, Harper encouraged White, a doctoral student at the time, to consider method in scriptural study in its relation to curricular development.^[41] “The study of the Bible leads you everywhere,” White later claimed, “and the time is coming when the world is going to demand that a radical change be made in the method” of Bible study.^[42] The radical change White spoke of was one that incorporated an inductive approach to studying the Bible that challenged the passive Bible learning so dominant in churches across the United States. “The ministers…are not trained to the use of the Holy Word of God to the extent to which it must be used if it is going to have a dominating influence on the minds and hearts of the rank and file.”^[43]

In contrast, the use of an inductive approach to biblical study positioned the teacher and student on an even plane. Discouraging the use of supplemental commentaries for the text as too deductive, teacher and student examined a biblical passage closely together, jotted down questions invoked by the text, and, in turn, contemplated practical problems to which the text could become a solution.^[44] This method removed the authoritarian disposition of the teacher while eliminating the passivity of the student. Instead, the teacher became a facilitator and guide, leading the student into a process of discovery. Additionally, the method equipped the student with biblical principles that could then be applied in everyday life.^[45] In other words, the student’s appetite for learning was stimulated in the process of discovery, alongside a teacher-companion who circumscribed the lesson plan around the student’s inductive learning. This was a student-oriented method rather than a teacher-oriented method, which gained wide appeal over time. One historian noted of White’s pedagogical influence in Christian education that “through White’s writings and those of his successors at Biblical Seminary, his ideas filtered into many Bible school classes.”^[46]

As a Biblical Seminary graduate, Price brought this inductive Bible study approach with her to Wheaton’s Christian education program and extended its use beyond the reading of scripture. The LeBar sisters and others grew increasingly convinced of the pedagogical effectiveness of the method under Price’s guidance. Beatrice Merzig, a student of Price’s, recalls learning the inductive method “long before other people were even aware that there was such a thing.”^[47] In the absence of evangelical textbooks, “everything that we had to use for reference materials were done by what we still call liberals,” but by employing the inductive method, Price taught students “how to glean what was good from them.”^[48] For Merzig, this enabled her “break” with “a narrow…fundamentalist position.”^[49] One of the LeBars’ classmates at Wheaton in the 1940s, Jane Hollingsworth, came under Price’s influence and later introduced the method to Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, a para-church evangelism ministry for college students with a global following.^[50]

It was not a coincidence that this method became popular in the hands of women Christian educators in the 1930s and 1940s. The method allowed women to hold a form of authority in a classroom context without demanding acknowledgment of that authority from the student. Women educators employed a dynamic movement between maintaining authority and fulfilling the subservient role of centering others rather than themselves–a gendered distinction expected of women–using this method. Inductive pedagogy spread into a vast array of evangelical educational institutions and ministries by the mid-twentieth century. Price brought the method with her to the West Coast after being hired to the newly established Fuller Theological seminary in 1945.^[51] Historian Margaret Lamberts Bendroth notes that this method was perpetuated throughout evangelical education due to Price’s influence and that it provided the very “basis for feminine networks and leadership as well as careers for women in fundamentalist circles.”^[52]

After Price’s departure from Wheaton, the LeBar sisters earned their masters’ degrees in Christian education and both assumed faculty teaching roles to fill Price’s vacancy in 1945. To safeguard these positions with the possibility of tenure, the LeBars followed in their teacher’s footsteps by enrolling at New York University for a PhD in Religious Education beginning in 1946. Once again, both sisters came under the influence of progressive education reformers, including Samuel Hamilton, D. Campbell Wyckoff, and Dewey’s own successor, William Heard Kilpatrick.^[53] Their newfound appreciation for progressive models of education that emphasized stimulating the student’s emotions, desires, needs, and social collaboration with peers persuaded the LeBars to appropriate methods contrary to the predominately male-led educational institutions in the evangelical subculture. Combined with Price’s inductive, student-centered pedagogy, the sisters critically adopted progressive educational methods for evangelical education. The only question that remained was how to theologically ground the progressive reformers’ methods, considering its anathematized perception among their colleagues and peers at Wheaton and within evangelicalism more broadly.

Making Progressive Pedagogy Christian

Wheaton College was a fitting site for the potential flourishing of a Christian education program. Deemed by one commentator as the “Harvard of the Bible Belt,” Wheaton was viewed by the vast majority of twentieth-century evangelicals as the prestigious institution for Christian teacher training.^[54] Moreover, Wheaton was one of few evangelical colleges poised to inundate the evangelical subculture with well-trained Christian educators. Some Protestant colleges were too sectarian and eschewed progressive modes of learning while others had succumbed to progressive educational trends and capitulated to the world of liberalism.^[55] The LeBar sisters managed to balance both worlds, operating between the fundamentalist emphases of Wheaton and imbibing the progressive pedagogy of their graduate education.

Both sisters graduated with their Ph.Ds. from New York University in 1951. Resuming their teaching posts at Wheaton, Mary’s scholarship diverged from her sister’s in that she focused primarily on training teachers for primary school education and children’s Sunday School. Influenced by Hegner’s emphasis on integrating home activities in educational spaces, Mary stressed the same for Sunday Schools and Church schools, and consistently underscored it theologically. “The home is obviously the chief agency in guidance,” she averted, and “one hour, or even a whole morning, is but a minute fraction of the Christian education of the child.”^[56] This is why Mary argued that Christian education ought to be an extension of the home, in effect, blending Christian education and the home. The power of the home as a form of Christian education is the primary site of formation. Thus, “the church should help parents” in this task by encouraging families “to savor its special joys,” for “joy in Christ can be communicated long before the doctrine of Christology” is comprehended.^[57] Indeed, Christian education and the cultivation of a proper educational environment may prepare the child for the “great decision” of being “born again” in their future.^[58]

Mary stressed that the conditions of the educational space ought to express a sense of “belonging,” which is “the very heart of Koinonia (fellowship) of the New Testament Church.”^[59] In this way, the Christian teacher can stimulate the child’s sense of belonging who can already “feel this fellowship long before he understands it.”^[60] Like Hegner and Dewey, Mary also emphasized the importance of social activity with peers through collaboration and group projects that extended into concrete life circumstances. “Application of the truth [scripture] to life for the young child cannot be left in the abstract, but must be translated into the specific and literal.”^[61] Learning the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand, for example, became an opportunity to share snacks with their classmates.^[62]

Mary’s attention to the proper conditions for the student’s success in learning and encouragement of the application of lessons to everyday life resonated with the progressive education maxim of a “child-centered” pedagogy both in Hegner and in later educational reformers. Like Mary, Lois also stressed the importance of a “student-centered” approach to teaching. However, Lois centered her own scholarship on educational philosophy and the broader role it played for the teacher in any Christian education setting. After being named chair of the Christian education department in 1952, “she felt a great burden to come up with a text that evangelical educators could hold up as a standard…”^[63] Lois spent the next six years using her course, “Philosophy of Christian Education,” as an experimental laboratory to outline what would later be her major publication, Education That is Christian, in 1958.

Throughout six years of teaching the course, Lois used the inductive method she learned from Price to have her students analyze the Gospels. Examining all the instances in which Jesus is depicted teaching, Lois had her students address two questions. First, how did Jesus implement the lesson? Was the lesson prompted by the pupil, the teacher, or by the content of the teacher? Second, did the lesson place greater stress on outer factors such as environment, deeds, and verbal communication, or did the passages emphasize inner factors like will, emotions, motives, thought, and purpose? As one of her biographers later recounted, “this laboratory method–given as it was to inductive, cooperative study–fit perfectly with LeBar’s desire to create a philosophy from the bottom up.”^[64] In addition, the inductive method allowed Lois the freedom to acquire input from her students’ discoveries, deflating any sense of authority that might cause concern in the context of a teaching environment.

After conducting their analysis, the students concluded that many of the depictions of Jesus teaching were first initiated by those around him rather than by Jesus. Moreover, the students discovered that Jesus approached his lessons “at the level of the present needs and concerns of the individual rather than as a distant, pre-determined body of content.”^[65] Regarding the second question, the students learned, through their own examination, that Jesus utilized both inner and outer factors in his teaching, relying on emotion, will, and desire, as well as verbal communication and the use of material in his physical environment.^[66] In implementing the inductive method of studying the Gospels, Lois facilitated her students’ processes of learning while forming the basis of the Christological foundations of her educational philosophy, also resembling the progressive pedagogy she absorbed from her own graduate studies.

Education That is Christian served as one of the foremost textbooks on Christian educational philosophy in the evangelical subculture.^[67] In it, Lois demonstrated the need for Christian education to take up an emphasis on the students’ inner impulses and desires. At the outset, she quotes a Bible student’s frustration with the conventional mode of Bible teaching who lamented that “the Bible was taught from a heavenly, far-off viewpoint that made it lose much of its earthly, daily value.”^[68] The “distance” described here, characteristic of so much Bible teaching, relied on deductive models that stressed the authority of the teacher as the master and purveyor of the content while the student remained in a passive and obedient state. In response, Lois charged this method as “poor lay preaching” and argued that serious updates were vital if Christian education was to flourish.^[69] Instead, she proposed throughout the book that Christian educators ought to encourage student-oriented methods that borrow explicitly from John Dewey and other educational reformers.^[70] If done well, then every evangelical institution might become “a miniature Bible institute, laboratory for discovering and implementing eternal truth.”^[71]

Along with progressive educational reformers, Lois argued that active learning was more effective in which the teacher dynamically moved the learning process to the student, whereby space was provided for them to make discoveries in their own quests. This maneuver placed the teacher and student on an even ground, establishing an egalitarian mode of discovery and the application of one’s own gifts and strengths. “Whereas the old school trained its pupil in the more passive virtues of obedience and conformity, Dewey’s school sought to develop initiative and responsibility.”^[72] It was precisely this distinction that enabled Lois, as a woman, to enact her authority inside the classroom while dynamically transferring her occupation of the supplemental role traditionally associated with evangelical women. “The hallmark of a mature teacher is…her skill in meeting the pupils where they are, and going forward as fast as they are able to go, guiding them in the use of the content that meets whatever need arises in the process.”^[73]

However, Lois did not simply regurgitate Dewey and his constituency but also incorporated an overarching theology that grounded her educational philosophy. In addition to the Christological foundations of the Gospels, Lois undergirded the combination of the inner and outer factors at play in the student’s active learning process by highlighting the dynamism of the Holy Spirit in the process. “As God’s active agent or method, the Spirit does subjectively within the pupil all that Christ has done objectively without.”^[74] The interplay between both factors requires the “human teacher” to operate in conjunction with the “divine teacher” in stirring the pupil’s heart toward the inner and outer content of the learning environment.^[75] Furthermore, Lois theologically unseats the teacher who operates from a position of authority, asserting that “the third member of the Trinity acts as Expediter to remove obstructions so that both written and living Word may have free course in the life.”^[76] Hinting that the teacher oftentimes becomes this obstruction, she reminds the reader that “the human teacher is merely a humble apprentice for the divine Executive,” someone who is simply “an understudy who likewise seeks to get the pupil interacting with the Word.”^[77] For the Christian educator, this applies to both men and women.

Conclusion

Far from Feminist aspirations of liberation, the LeBar sisters remained squarely within the parameters of evangelicalism and its related gender role ideology. Instead, both used their role as women in an ironic style that transformed what was otherwise seen as inhibiting to women’s agency as educators and, in turn, conferred a sense of authority in educational space. This demonstrates what theologian Kathryn Tanner has argued in that “no particular context has an absolute hold” on what prevailing theologies and ideologies are touted.^[78] In the case of the LeBar sisters, their reliance on fundamentalist gender ideals underscores Tanner’s contention that “the meanings and associations of terms tend to drift with the changing circumstances of their use and the differently situated persons employing them.”^[79] What an ideological imposition is meant in one context always contains the potential to run in divergent directions after insertion into a new context, a task the LeBar sisters both enacted pedagogically and theologically.

Despite the time period in which evangelical women were limited primarily to the domestic realm, educational institutions within the evangelical subculture served as laboratories in which the LeBars theoretically experimented and freely applied pedagogical theory. Mary’s critical use of blending the Christian home and the school forged the two into a site that was charged with deep theological values and undertones. Utilizing progressive pedagogy by means of domestic activities, Mary argued that this method allowed students to continue their Christian education beyond the home. The Christian values learned and embodied in the oversight of the home was now extended into the space of the classroom, paving the way for what later became an emphasis on “family values” and the homeschool movement.^[80] Moreover, since the primary responsibility of properly rearing Christian children begins with parents in the comfort of the home, Mary viewed the task of the Christian educator to be responsible for preparing the student for salvation in the classroom. Teaching practical skills through domestic practices not only proved pedagogically effective, as the progressive reformers suggested it would, it also engendered an educational environment in which the soteriological question persisted outside of the home. For Mary, these progressive pedagogical methods actually undergirded theological emphases demanded of a proper Christian education.

In addition to teaching prospective Christian educators on the merits of blending the Christian home with the school, as Mary stressed, Lois LeBar implemented the inductive method of studying texts. Establishing Christological foundations for this approach based on the Gospel depictions of Jesus, Lois theologically underscored the progressive pedagogy of a pupil-centered classroom. Such a method also proved amenable for Lois as a women educator who could at once assume the authoritative role of a teacher and fulfill the gender role of a woman who embodied serving those around them. Furthermore, the inductive method undermined the authoritarian posture of the teacher as the center of the classroom and, in turn, allowed flexibility in the teacher’s guidance of the student’s own learning and discovery. For Lois, this accorded well with the pneumatological conception of the Spirit who mysteriously operates in hidden and surprising ways. Likewise, in emulating the Spirit at work in the educational process, Lois suggested that “because pupils are full of surprises, we should always be ready to shift gears, moving flexibly toward our goals.”^[81] Precisely this flexibility made the conditions possible to imagine subtle and strategic transgressions between inhabiting authority and service. As women educators at Wheaton College, the LeBars theologically honed these progressive pedagogical skills over many years of service in the field of Christian education, a field that continues to be disproportionately male-led in evangelicalism.