Some Categories of Pastoral Care

The Importance of Small Class Size

The Importance of Small Class Size 

There are many harms resulting from overcrowding in Church Education school classes with students, especially with regard to children. Therefore, we advise reducing the number of students in the class as much as possible.

This is for the following reasons:

1. The ability to maintain order: The teacher often becomes unable to maintain order in a class crowded with children, especially since the nature of this age encourages movement, talking, and moving about.

2. Facilitating attention to each student individually: It is difficult for a teacher to attend to dozens of students, each individually. In a class with a small number, questions can be distributed among all the students, and the teacher can focus on explaining to each one of them. He can also have them repeat back the information they received, thus reassuring himself of their comprehension and understanding. But if the class is crowded, individual attention is often lost in that vast turmoil. This also applies to monitoring the child’s spiritual life.

3. Facilitating pastoral follow-up: A small number can be followed up. The teacher can know the names of his students one by one, and the condition of each of them, and it will not be difficult for him to follow them up.

4. The possibility of growth: A teacher who has in his class 10–20 students will be concerned to grow their number. Even if they increase and become 30–40, for example, they can be distributed into two classes in the organizational arrangements at the beginning of the year. But if there are forty or fifty or more in the class, it is unreasonable for the teacher to seek to increase the number of students while he is exhausted from their current number.

5. Preserving quietness: If the number of students is small, the teacher can explain in a calm, low voice, and with the same low voice the students respond to him. But if the number increases, the teacher is forced to raise his voice and shout in order for the students to hear him. They also shout with him, and noise prevails in that branch of Church Education, especially if they are in a church with limited space.

6. Preserving the teacher’s humility: So that he does not boast in the large number, while the spiritual condition of the class is weak, and the teacher does not carry out his work with complete faithfulness.

7. Faithfulness in service: In a class with a small number, the teacher can assign homework to the students and organize special notebooks for them that he can review all of, whereas it is difficult to do this with a large number. This also applies to the various aspects of activity that the student can carry out under the supervision of his teacher, such as memorization, receiving hymns, conducting various competitions, and supervising all aspects of the children’s artistic, academic, and spiritual activities, etc.

The necessity of maintaining a small number of students in each class leads us to address another subject, which is the sufficiency of the number of teachers, and this inevitably leads us to giving attention to classes for preparing servants.

We leave this to another opportunity that the Lord prepares.

1. An article by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III – in Al-Keraza Magazine – Second Year – Issue Six, August 1966.

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