How to Interest Our Young People in Education—2
By M. E. Kern
My second suggestion is a vigorous effort to interest our young people in education through the medium of the Young People's work. It is an essential thing to always keep some great purpose before our young people. That kind of leadership in the Young People's work which stifles ambition for higher attainments, and arrests mental development, is a positive harm. “God does not bid the youth to be less aspiring. The elements of character that make a man successful and honored among men,—the irrepressible desire for some greater good, the indomitable will, the strenuous exertion, the untiring perseverance,—are not to be crushed out.” This vigorous effort to interest our young people in education should be carried on also through the medium of our school faculties by means of a vigorous correspondence work throughout the field, and through active work by the teachers in the field during the vacations. I know from experience that a vigorous correspondence work carried on by one who is imbued with a love for young people, and a desire to hunt for the goodly pearls scattered here and there, that they may be polished for the Master's work, is a wonderful help in turning the attention of our young people toward the training-school, and will pay for itself financially in an increased attendance. And it will pay for itself many times in the production of good workers. A bright, active girl who came to one of our training-schools the past year, and who gives promise of becoming a good worker, said that she had no idea that she would have come to school had it not been for the interest that was taken in her by certain ones who wrote to her several times, urging the necessity of a training in our schools. There are several others of like nature as a result of the very limited work of this kind done at this school. These young people, many of whom feel very backward about going away from home among strangers, feel, after such correspondence, that they have a friend at the school to whom they can go for advice and counsel. This work is especially effective when supplemented by vigorous work during the vacations by the teachers in the field. The corresponding secretary, who is in touch with the whole field, can furnish these field workers with valuable data, and as they go from camp-meeting to camp-meeting, or better, from church to church, they can search out and interview these interested young people, while at the same time they can labor continually to awaken an interest in education among all. The work should extend further than the camp-meeting; for some of our brightest young people, and those who are able to attend the school, do not often go to camp-meeting. There is all the more need, therefore, of a vigorous effort for them. Such personal contact of the teachers and young people in their homes has a wonderful effect in drawing the youth to the school,22and a most beneficial effect upon such students when they come; for in most cases they will make these teachers their especial advisers, and if there is one thing more than another lacking in our larger schools, it is the personal heart-to-heart contact of teachers and students. Many sad occurrences might never have come if there had been that close friendship and personal and social contact between teachers and students that ought to exist. There is another feature of this plan; for work done by the teachers in the interest of the young people in the field has a most salutary and beneficial effect on the teachers themselves, and hence upon the school. School life, at the best, is apt to be somewhat artificial, and if teachers never meet their pupils in their own homes and surroundings, they are apt to be ignorant of the very training those pupils need. It also has a very desirable effect for our teachers to unite with our ministers and other workers in earnest labor for souls. It helps them to understand one another better, and to sympathize with one another, and to appreciate the burdens which all are carrying, and hence reduces the tendency to criticize. Some one is asking, Can the teachers do this work? I answer, They ought to be able to do it. I do not advocate that all teachers should be preachers; but if they are suited to teach in the "schools of the prophets," they are soul winners, and are skilled in the art of dealing with our young people, and presenting to them the claims of God upon them. It is customary nowadays for schools to make a specialty of some one line. It has often occurred to me that the specialty of every Seventh-day Adventist school is the science and art of soul winning; and the teachers in such schools must understand it. This great fact makes every true teacher tremble with the responsibility, and leads him to devote his life's energies to this one thing.