MORE ON THAT “NEEDED EDUCATIONAL REFORM.”

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 3, 1900

MORE ON THAT “NEEDED EDUCATIONAL REFORM.”

On the subject of the “Needed Educational Reform,” we have given, on authority, the process of education in general, to the effect that “doubt is the pedagogue that leads to knowledge,” with the consequence that students “lose their religion while gaining an education.”

We have seen that, in the realm of education in theology, the process is still one in which doubt is the means of attaining unto knowledge, and that he makes the most progress who has best learned the art of doubting well; and the admitted consequence is that the one who follows this course, never really knows that he knows anything.

There is yet one other field that is worthy to be noticed, and that is the field where the children are taught until they become old enough to enter upon a course of education, to be finished, perhaps, in theology. And the statement with respect to this field we have upon the highest authority; that is, the authority of the United States Commissioner of Education, Hon. W. T. Harris. In his annual report for the school year, 1896-97, he says:—

The secular school gives positive instruction. It teaches mathematics, natural science, history, and language. Knowledge of the facts can be precise and accurate, and a similar knowledge of the principles can be arrived at. The self-activity of the pupil is before all things demanded by the teacher of the secular school. The pupil must not take things on authority, but, by his own activity, must test and verify what he has been told. He must trace out the mathematical demonstrations, and see their necessity. He must learn the method of investigating facts in the several provinces of science and history. The spirit of the secular school therefore comes to be an enlightening one, although not of the highest order. But its enlightenment tends to make trust in authority more and more difficult for the young mind.

On the other hand, religion, which gives the net result of the wisdom of the race in the form of authority, omits, and must omit, the long lines of proof which have established it. The experience of thousands of years shrinks to a mere point, and is stated in the dogmas which seem to be immediate spiritual facts resting on external authority, the substructures of thousands of years being almost entirely concealed. Not only are these long periods of experience kept out of sight, but also the vast layers of religious thinkers who have grappled with psychology and philosophy, and assisted in making the religious results systematic and without contradiction. Religious education, it is obvious, in giving the highest results of thought and life to the young, must cling to the form of authority, and not attempt to borrow the methods of mathematics, science, and history from the secular school. Such borrowing will result only in giving the young people an overweening confidence in the finality of their own immature judgments. They will become conceited and shallow-minded. It is well that the child should trust his own intellect in dealing with the multiplication table and the rule of three. It is well that he should learn the rules and all the exceptions in Latin syntax, and verify them in the classic authors; but he must not be permitted to summon before him the dogmas of religion, and form pert conclusions regarding their rationality.

All this is an excellent reason why religion can not be taught in the public schools.

To make up for this lack, the Sunday-school has been employed in this field where the children are

taught. But instead of the managers of the Sunday-school really employing the true process of religious education, and so holding the children in the field of religion, they actually adopted the methods of the public school, and made them the process in the Sunday-school: they adopted the secular method in religious education. This, with its results, is also well stated by Commissioner Harris:—

With the spectacle of the systematic organization of the secular schools and the improvement of methods of teaching before them, the leaders in the church have endeavored to perfect the methods of the religious instruction of youth. They have met the following dangers which lay in their path; namely, first, the danger of adopting methods of instruction in religion which were fit and proper only for secular instruction; secondly, the selection of religious matter for the course of study which did not lead in a most direct manner toward vital religion, although it would readily take on a pedagogic form.

Against this danger of sapping or undermining all authority in religion by the introduction of the methods of the secular school, which lay all stress on the self-activity of the child, the Sunday-school has not been sufficiently protected in the more recent years of its history. Large numbers of religious teachers, most intelligent and zealous in their piety, seek a more and more perfect adoption of the secular school method.

On the other hand, the topics of religious instruction have been determined largely by the necessities of the secular school method. That method is not adapted to teach mystic truth. It seeks everywhere definite and especially mathematical results. But these results, although they are found everywhere in science and mathematics, are the farthest possible from being like the subject-matter of religion. Hence it has happened that in improving the methods of the Sunday-school, greater and greater attention has been paid to the history and geography of the Old Testament, and less and less to the doctrinal matters of the New Testament.

And thus the professed Christian church, instead of employing the Christian process in her teaching in the schools designed especially for religious instruction, has adopted and drawn into these schools the secular process. Instead of keeping herself in her own distinct field of religion, and upon her own true Christian foundation, and teaching religion by a distinctly religious process, the church abandoned all that, and stood only on the worldly foundation, and employed a process in religious instruction which is “the farthest possible” from being like the process in religious instruction. And this being so on the part of the church even in the teaching of the children, it is not by any means to be wondered at that it should be continued through the higher education, even to its culmination in the theological seminaries.

Since, therefore, it is upon the highest authority made evident that neither in the public school nor in the Sunday-school do the children receive truly religious teaching, it is equally evident that, for the children, and in the field of the education of the children, there is a sorely needed reform, just as certainly as in the higher education, in the theological colleges and seminaries, there is a much-needed reform, in education.