Principles and Methods by A. W. SPAULDING

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 6, 1907

Principles and Methods

By A. W. SPAULDING

A Lesson Hard to Learn

ORIGINALLY our homes were meant to be schools, sanitariums, and asylums. We were to train our children, and others’ children who should come to us; to receive the fatherless, the sick, and the poor; to shelter, heal, and help them. But, with some noble exceptions, homes have failed in the fulfilment of these their duties.

In the history of our message, the early failure of homes to do this work made evident the necessity for its being done by other means, if our mission was really to be accomplished. Then men and women who had such a love for any of these principles as to wish to put them into practise were associated in groups for the purpose of doing it.

They were meant still to work for individuals, to work for their salvation, as it was possible to do in the home. That was to be their sole purpose and work—to save souls; not merely to give facts, graduate students; to give treatments, make cures; to put out books, make money. But when, for the sake of greater material results, they brought in more members than they could give personal attention to, spiritually, intellectually, and physically, just as the home is intended to do, and by that course were forced to trust in system and routine, then the missionary spirit, the parental spirit, declined, and both overseers and underlings drifted into worldliness—in the printing houses into commercialism, in the sanitariums into strivings for fame, in the school into devotion to form and careers.

Thus, as the home plan and condition disappeared from our institutions and the family spirit declined, their real work naturally was neglected, and the outputs of the institutions alone occupied our people’s minds. Then we ceased to work so much for the salvation of individuals, and endeavored to get results from working with the masses. Our routine work drove us, our multitudinous responsibilities distracted us, and we trusted to the general atmosphere to work out the salvation of our charges. This condition was speedily reached, by the congestion of our institutions with employees, helpers, and students.

To speak specifically of the school, we created this condition by making the class the principal medium of communication between teacher and students, and by making our school homes dormitories, clubs. Now the purpose of our schools is to make character, and in the formation of character, class-room work should count for only its due importance. What does count is the intimate association between the trainers and those to be trained. Thus work in the field, in the shop, and in the home, must be shared by teachers and students, as instructors and learners, if the school is to do its real work—not alone as instructors and as learners of just how to do the task which their hands are doing, but as instructors and learners of the spirit in which it is to be done, of the manner of its doing, and the relation of its doing to the whole life.

But this personal contact can be had only when the students working with the teacher are few enough so that each may receive the personal impress of the teacher’s character. In other words, the school, in its plans for the training of students, must conform to the plan of the home in the relative number of students, as well as in work. Just as much is there need of this in the school home. The proprieties and niceties of social relations can be thoroughly taught only by intimate companionship, and this close companionship can be had only when the teacher has not too many under his charge. This argues the need of every teacher’s being as far as possible in home relations with his students, and of a restriction of the number of students.

Without this condition, we work, not for the individual, but for the mass; we become, not fathers and mothers, but taskmasters; we trust, not to personal communion, but to the general atmosphere of good, for the salvation of our charges. And this last condition is what we commonly find.

If we look for the results of this training en masse, what do we find?—Children with vague and misty notions of truth, young people wishful for righteousness, but too weak to stand for principle; creatures, therefore, who hold a half knowledge of the truth, and, through failure to practise it, only a half knowledge. If you are thoroughly acquainted with your young people, count the number of them who obey the laws of health, who eat, sleep, breathe, bathe, exercise, as they are preached at to do; who hold in practise, from a sturdy sense of Christian principle, the laws and courtesies of social life; who are versed in the lore of the Bible through a practise of its precepts, or who know even the ten commandments. Investigation will astonish.

Emotionalism can never take the place of knowledge. The efforts of the orator before the congregation, the enthusiasm of the teacher before his class, will result in nothing more than a temporary stirring of dry bones, until by daily association with Christian leaders the young have been brought to know by practise the truths we hold. This can be done only by an adoption of home methods, by a return to individual effort and an abandonment of trust in work upon the mass.

All earnest teachers have tried, it is true, to give their lives in personal effort for their students, but the massing of too many to allow of the operation of home methods, prevents the complete success of their efforts. Still we place our trust in the gathering of great numbers into the schools, as if their walls enclosed manufactories of righteousness; still we boast of great attendances—the very thing which will prevent the doing of our real work.

In view of these facts, which the student of the Testimonies and of pedagogic principles knows, do we not see that these conditions have been rebuked by calamity, and is not such calamity a call to the adoption of correct principles? We at Bethel have passed through such trouble; and looking for light,—we trust humbly and teachably,—have seen light, not suddenly revealed, but added to what had already been seen.

It is a lesson hard to learn, for the customs of generations are not easily abandoned in mind or practise. Yet the call for small institutions, the exhortations against centralization and crowding, the appeals for personal piety and personal work among teachers and students, God has clearly made to us for years. When his word has no effect, his hand becomes heavy.

A. W. SPAULDING.