p. 15 | Our Outschool Teacher by Mary E. Ellingworth

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 31, 1914

Our Outschool Teacher

By Mary E. Ellingworth

MARY E. ELLINGWORTH

CONSIDERING his usefulness in our mission work, no one deserves more of our sympathy and care than the village-school teacher in the outstations. He is patient, plodding, and plucky. He often has to stand alone in the fight against the heathen customs which so degrade the village life, and to which the women especially cling tenaciously; and it is the old women who rule the village to a very large extent. Such a teacher has responsibility thrust upon him which might well appall a trained European teacher, and yet we, with our characteristic optimism, expect him to be cheerful through all, and to be ever smiling and hustling when we visit him for inspection.

Consider him! He has contrived to acquire, maybe at intervals, a little learning, and then for want of trained help he is sent out to fill a call. He teaches three or five hours a day, five days a week, sometimes in schools five miles apart. Then on pay day he receives with eager fingers his salary of from four shillings to ten shillings a month. Some little additional inducement he has in the yearly two-month acting-teachers’ course, given under European supervision at the main station school.

Because of the scarcity of trained native teachers, you will find, even here at the station, one hurrying through grade three so that he may be prepared to teach his more ignorant friend in grade two. One is reminded of the village tenor who, when the vicar’s daughter complained to him about the want of harmony in the choir singing, retorted, “What can you expect when I have to hurry through my tenor so that I may go back and help the trebles?”

Here is a typical village school, the average attendance of which is only fifty-seven per cent of the roll. The teacher has had practically no training in method, and has no great natural aptitude; no inspection has been made by a European for perhaps three months; the students are ill-provided with slates, and the vernacular books at the teacher’s command are very scanty and often inappropriate.

Now you will ask, What can be the result of education given by such teachers and under such conditions? With our characteristic optimism again, we expect and get results. We find pupils able to spell and read in the vernacular, able to write and cipher a little (the former often creditably), and with a knowledge of Christ’s life and teachings that would shame many a Sunday school student. What could we not do with trained teachers: systematic European supervision, which would insure a steadier and increased attendance; and a good set of schoolbooks?

Why do we not have these better conditions? — Because there is a shortage of men and means. A small staff, many schools, frequent fever attacks, and a long rainy season all militate against regular visits to the outschools. Again there are always calls for schools in new places, and to fill these we have to send boys who are not trained, always being careful to choose those who we believe will not only teach the gospel to these waiting people, but live it.

Year by year we strive to better the conditions, and little by little we do improve them. We have this for encouragement, that we have many evidences that the Lord is using the boy who is faithful as his coworker to take the gospel to the many in darkness, in spite of the boy’s many disabilities.