More Teachers and Better Teachers
By E. A. Sutherland
“The school will be found to be the means which God has chosen for the regeneration of the world,” said Horace Mann, when in the midst of his educational reform in the State of Massachusetts. It stands as a truth to-day. The church is beginning to awake to the fact that it must do its first work, that is, train its children. We have been preaching the gospel to those who sit in darkness. This is a work of liberation. It is the emancipation proclamation to the world. It corresponds to the work done in the early sixties for the negroes of the South. When those slaves had been liberated, the people thought their duty was accomplished. To-day the South, and the North as well, realizes that the real work of reconstruction was left undone, because the negroes, although free, did not have the advantages of education. Men are now beginning to spend money and much thought on the subject of the education of the Southern children. The same thing is true in the work of the church ministry. The church has liberated souls from the bondage of sin, and then it has left those liberated souls to themselves. The second generation has grown up worse than the parents, and they are returning to the state from which the parents came. This has been the weakness of the entire system. The establishment of schools is the only remedy. When the subject of education is approached, the church pleads poverty. The South made the same plea when reproached because the negroes were uneducated. But what has been the result? The South might be far ahead of its present situation had it done forty years ago what it is beginning to do at the present time. The same is true of the church. “Too poor to maintain schools?” asks Walter Page. “The man who says it, is the perpetuator of poverty. It is the doctrine that has kept us poor. It smells of the almshouse and the hovel. The ability to maintain schools is in proportion rather to the appreciation of education than to the amount of wealth. We pay for schools, not so much out of our purses, as out of our state of mind.” Let us get our minds in the right condition. In the South there has been a great awakening. The Southern Education Board, composed of many prominent men, is hard at work. It is placing literature in the hands of people all over this country. It receives donations. It agitates an increase of the school tax. It is training teachers. It is making its strongest appeals to vigorous young people to work for the education of the children. The Seventh-day Adventist Church has also begun to sense the need of the hour. It is organizing for the education of its children. Already a few schools have been started, but there are still within the church thirty thousand children who are unprovided for. Two thousand teachers are needed for these children. Add to this number the hundreds who should be prepared to open mission schools in our cities and in foreign countries. Is it not time to agitate this question? It is time to issue literature on the subject and spread it broadcast. It is time to decide on the proper means of support for Christian schools; to raise the taxes, as it were, or to persuade Christians to pay their just proportion. It is time to train teachers; time for parents to lead their children and youth to decide upon a life work. What are the churches doing to help young people to prepare for this work? What we should do is plainly indicated in the following paragraphs:— “As people who claim to have advanced light, we are to devise ways and means by which to bring forth a corps of educated workmen for the various departments of the work of God. We need a well-disciplined, cultivated class of young men and women. . . . As a church, as individuals, if we would stand clear in the judgment, we must make more liberal efforts for the training of our young people, that they may be better fitted for the various branches of the great work committed to our hands. “There is a great necessity of making plans, that there may be a large number of competent workers, and many should fit themselves as teachers, that others may be trained and disciplined for the great work of the future. The church should take in the situation, and by its influence and means seek to bring about this much desired end. Let a fund be created by generous contributions for the establishment of schools for the advancement of educational work.” There is no question but that hundreds of young people should be preparing to teach the children. The summer offers the best opportunity of the whole year for the training of teachers. Summer schools are held for this special purpose. The Teachers’ Assembly to be held at Berrien Springs, Mich., June 24 to August 30, will afford an opportunity for thorough work in the principles of Christian education and methods of teaching in primary, intermediate, and training schools. Need the thought be further emphasized that now is the time to enter this work, and that delay is fatal?—fatal to the children who should have a teacher, but do not have one because somebody fails to do his duty,—fatal to the one who should teach, but does not; for the opportune time of action comes but once in a lifetime. “We must have more teachers and better teachers.” Why not join the ranks now? E. A. SUTHERLAND.