p. 22 | Traditional Versus God-Given Ideals

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

Traditional Versus God-Given Ideals

PHYSICAL work is given of God to produce in man those sturdy, vigorous elements which will serve to stimulate and vivify his faculties of mind and soul. A child is not to be educated in manual labor simply for the sake of dexterity and skilfulness. He is to be thus educated that he may develop a vigorous, energetic, and wholesome life. No manhood or womanhood is complete without the symmetrical development of all physical faculties. Generally speaking, the schools of the world are out of touch with the vital conditions of the life of to-day. We live in a mechanical and commercial age, and he alone is rightly educated who is enabled properly to meet and deal with these present conditions of existence.

It is hard for the teachers of to-day to break away from the traditions of the past. These traditions grew in an age when aristocracy, with no appreciation of its physical responsibilities, ruled supremely over a class of serfs, with no sense of their intellectual responsibilities. Such traditions must not form and govern the educational ideals of the present, but these ideals must be determined by the revelations given to us by God. His high conceptions of manhood and womanhood, practical, alert, and capable of meeting and dealing with present issues, are to be our standards. We are to carry forward the mightiest movement of all times, and our educational ideals must be determined by it.

So, then, we teachers are bound by the vows of our high calling to put forth our strongest endeavors to bring into our work that perfect balance of educational ideals which will develop all the faculties of the being harmoniously. Physical work, skilfully, accurately, energetically performed, is in itself intellectual and spiritual. We should not be held by traditions. We have before us God-given ideals; we should study and continually seek to apprehend them.