Making Thinkers by E. A. Sutherland

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Mar 31, 1904

Making Thinkers

By E. A. Sutherland

“As he [man] thinketh . . . so is he.” During the Dark Ages men were not allowed to think. This is what kept the world in darkness. When men think, they find God reaching after them, and the darkness vanishes before the light.

Luther taught men to think. That brought the Reformation of the sixteenth century. It was thought that made men throw off the shackles of European government, and seek a home of freer thought in America. Men have risked everything for the right to think, and yet to-day, in this year 1904, there are people who will not think. They do not know how to think. If they and their children continue thus, we shall again have a dark age.

It is time for a change. For years our schools turned out students, so called, who did very little thinking, and so God, through the spirit of prophecy, called for a new order of things. He told us to take the Battle Creek College out of Battle Creek, and locate where the students would have a better opportunity to think.

We had but little idea in those days what the change would bring. Even yet we have not begun to see, so the spirit of prophecy tells us, the possibilities before us. But one thing we do see, and that is that the planting of a school in the country; the erection of buildings by students; the teaching of cooking in an actual kitchen in an institution that is struggling for the right of existence; the serving of meals to hungry students; the teaching of sewing in a class, the members of which make their own garments; the union of students and teachers to discipline, finance, and manage a school and a farm,—these things we have found make students think. If any one doubts it, he has only to attend one of the union meetings at Emmanuel Missionary College on Friday morning. He who does will find that manual labor does “encourage close observation and independent thought.”

One phase of the work alone will serve as a concrete illustration of the principle I have given. Day by day for a number of weeks the divine principles of government have been the subject of study.

In God's sight all men are equal. Position does not elevate; it makes a man a servant. The right to lead must come because of advance knowledge, a power that comes from experience in doing; it can not be legislated to a man.

All men are to be dealt with according to Christ's instruction in Matt. 18: 15-17.

There was a time when, as a member of a faculty, I used to help make laws for my students. I no longer do this. I have been a member of a faculty which spent much time in disciplining unruly students. I am no longer called to act this part. When students help to make the regulations by which they are governed, when teachers and students submit to the same ruling, then students will bear a burden of discipline equal to, if not greater than, that carried by any teacher. We have found it so. It does not foster carelessness. It creates painstaking effort, which makes thinking students.

This is the growth of democracy and true Protestantism. But students to-day will be the men of action in the church to-morrow. If they are thinkers to-day, they will be strong thinkers, capable, self-supporting workers to-morrow.

Is not this the province of our schools? Is not this the duty laid upon our educational system?

E. A. SUTHERLAND.