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The Present Truth

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 4, 1909

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 86, No. 9.

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The Present Truth

God has always had a present truth for the world. The message which John the Baptist gave was not the one which Noah had to give. The message and work of Paul was not that of Nehemiah. Our message is not that of any other people or time, yet it embraces all the great issues of all time.
Our educational effort is to seek to make clear these great vital issues, and to lead each pupil to discern his personal relation to them. Our courses of study,our methods of teaching, our discipline, should all have for their aim the one great purpose of preparing workers whose appreciation of the issues of this message is so great that they may do the work given them in a most effective manner. There is danger, in our efforts to produce good work in any one department,—as, for instance, agriculture, manual training, music, or language,—that we lose sight of the mighty movement of which we are a part; and to just the extent that education thus becomes one-sided, it is useless.
We are not to turn out from our schools farmers, mechanics, linguists, or musicians as such; but we are to seek to develop in our students those elements of character which will best qualify them to be missionaries in heathen lands, ministers in the great cities of our home land, teachers in the preparation of workers, physicians who can bring healing to the soul as well as to the body, business men who can conduct the financial affairs of our great enterprises; and each teacher in each department of a school should have such a broad grasp of the fundamentals of this message and of the needs of the present hour that every effort will be performed with a proper view of all the departments of study, and not simply of his own.
We are not to teach our children to raise cabbages, milk cows, or train vines only, neither are we to teach them to handle verbs and nouns, or demonstrate difficult mathematical and scientific problems merely, or to be able to recall great portions of history, or even understand something of the meaning or philosophy of it, but we are to seek to bring each of these elements into the life of the student in such just and proper proportions as to give him a thoroughly balanced mind.