“Industrial instruction should include the keeping of accounts, carpentry, and everything that is comprehended in farming. Preparation should also be made for teaching blacksmithing, painting, shoemaking, cooking, baking, laundering, mending, typewriting, and printing. Every power at our command is to be brought into this training work, that students may go out, equipped for the duties of practical life.” “While attending school, the youth should have an opportunity for learning the use of tools. Under the guidance of experienced workmen, carpenters who are apt to teach, patient, and kind, the students themselves should erect buildings on the school grounds, and make needed improvements, thus by practical lessons learning to build economically. The students should also be trained to manage all the different kinds of work connected with printing, such as typesetting, press work, and bookbinding, together with tent making and other useful lines of work. Small fruits should be planted, and vegetables and flowers cultivated, and this work the lady students may be called out of doors to do.” “Whether men or women, they should learn to mend, wash, and keep their own clothes in order. They should be able to cook their own meals. They should be familiar with agriculture and mechanical pursuits.” “There should have been experienced teachers also of household labor. . . . There should have been teachers to give lessons to young ladies in the cooking department. Young girls should have been instructed in manufacturing wearing apparel, to cut, make, and mend garments, and thus become educated for the practical duties of life.”
“Schools should be established for the purpose of obtaining, not only knowledge from books, but knowledge of practical industry.” “The students, every one, need a most thorough education in practical duties. All kinds of labor must be connected with our schools.”
And now comes the reason why all these things are to be taught: “God’s people are not to crowd into the cities. He wants them to take their families out of the cities, that they may be better prepared for eternal life. In a little while they will have to leave the cities. Get out of the cities as soon as possible, and purchase a little piece of land, where your children can watch the flowers growing, and learn from them lessons of simplicity and purity.” “Fathers and mothers who possess a piece of land and a comfortable home are kings and queens.”
Indeed, we have reached that period in history when only those parents who live in the country can be kings and queens in their own little kingdoms, provinces, realms, or homes. The farm is not the cure-all, but many of the constitutional maladies peculiar to mankind can not live in the pure empyrean air of country life.
The cure for unnatural excitement, and the only cure for it, is honest, faithful toil. It is a fact that where the trades and agriculture have been introduced along with book study, the continual craving for amusement—football, baseball, cricket, and lawn tennis—is literally choked to death. It also cures, under the operation and teaching of the Spirit of God, that sickly sentimental desire for reading novels, myths, and fables, pagan and infidel authors, whether in the ancient or modern languages, as well as gives strength to resist the scientific foibles and philosophic sophistries of the would-be wise men of our great colleges and universities all over the world. Useful industry kills the bookworm, and cures the mental inebriate, restoring them to the healthful employment of all their mental faculties to the very best advantage. When physical, mental, and spiritual education go hand in hand, each one strengthens the others; and they all rise as they otherwise could not, with a symmetry, a beauty, and a power unknown to those who obtain an education without this heaven-ordained combination.
Our schools, I repeat, have entered upon this work. They have entered upon it under divine direction; they have the divine credentials; they can not, and while they continue to follow their Leader, will not, take a backward step. That furrow of land which established the Avondale school will go on plowing deeper and deeper until this third element in the great threefold education has demonstrated to this people, to the world, and to the universe, the true dignity of labor. It is the A B C of health of body, of mind, and of soul. It leads, with Abraham, away from the city to the holy land; with Moses and John the Baptist, into the land of Midian or into the wilderness, to sit neither upon the throne of Egypt nor at the feet of Gamaliel; with Jesus Christ, humbly to the mother’s knee, or to the carpenter’s bench in some Nazareth or Galilee, and not to the schools of the rabbis at Jerusalem, the metropolis of the nation. It is time, then, that there be a trembling among the dry bones; it is time for flesh to come upon them; and it is high time for life to enter the dead bodies. And this is made possible only by our following the order of the two great commands, the natural order, the order of the dispensations, the divine order, the biddings of our Commander-in-chief. So, then, while the world is saying, “Go to, let us do this,” and “Go to, let us do that,” let us say, “Go toil,” “Go teach.”