The Fruit of Modern Teaching by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 10, 1907

The Fruit of Modern Teaching

By C. M. S.

One of the most deplorable features of modern times is the frivolous, unreal, and even skeptical conception of life so frequently met, especially on the part of those who have but recently come to the estate of manhood and womanhood—who have but recently been graduated from our higher schools. This unreal, air-castle conception of life is carried into the married life, when these young people have settled in homes of their own, and becomes a fomenter of all kinds of domestic discord. The husband or wife is not like the pen creation of the story-book, which the other had adopted as his or her ideal, and all dissimilar traits are marked and magnified, till separation comes in one way or another.

But the delusion does not end in the sundering of these sacred ties. It is not aimed at that alone. The transactions of every-day life, the purpose of life, the object in living, the conception of God, and the work of the gospel—all are colored, disarranged, metamorphosed, by this lens of unreality through which the young of to-day are taught to look. The mirage is taken for the real, and the real is shrouded in a mist of unreality designed by Satan to confuse, blind, and destroy.

One of the chief feeders of this dangerous stream is the fictitious literature which the pupils of our public schools are compelled to read and assimilate. Many thoughtful parents of all shades of religious belief, and some who have none, realize the grave danger in this modern method of giving pupils a “literary education.” Much of the sophistry, mythology, and carnal philosophy of the ancients is bundled into the curriculum of our schools, till the minds of the children, in this their most plastic period, are stuffed and clogged with these worse than useless husks, and their fermentation is breeding the bacilli of insanity, suicide, recklessness, domestic discord, skepticism, and the theorizing of theosophy and evolution. The tendency is recognized and deplored by many who feel their utter helplessness against it, knowing that this beneficent institution, the public school, is being turned away from its legitimate work, and is being made a source of real harm by the mass of fiction that is being crowded into the reading and study of the child.

But the encouragement of this harmful tendency is not confined to the school. A prominent religious journal recently advocated editorially, that each of the various periods in the child’s life should be provided with its appropriate grade of fiction. The editor advocated that upon parents rested the responsibility of seeing to it that their children were provided with these “classics.” Other prominent religious journals are running novels serially, and others give a whole issue to review notices and editorial commendation of the most notable fiction of the year. One journal, however, has felt it necessary to protest editorially against a certain serial story which has been running through the year in other journals—a story whose only virtue is its probable power to hold subscribers.

These conditions emphasize the wisdom of maintaining schools under the management of conscientious Christian teachers who know and deplore the tendency of the times in such matters as that above referred to, and who manifest the principles of the gospel, even the third angel’s message, in their daily lives. How few indeed will be the number of earnest Christian missionaries that will be recruited from the ranks of pupils nurtured in the fiction atmosphere of the public schools as conducted to-day! God designs that the children shall be brought up “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord;” that they shall be taught the truths of the gospel and the love of God. It will be only natural that children so taught, and who yield to that teaching, will become soul winners for God. In view of the nearness of our Lord’s return, the needs of the mission fields, and the numerous schemes of the adversary to ensnare the souls of the youth, a most weighty responsibility rests upon Christian parents. In view of the great truth of the third angel’s message committed to us as a people, what a responsibility rests upon Seventh-day Adventist parents in this matter!

C. M. S.