FOR three weeks we have had before us the study of the first chapter of Daniel. What is its lesson to us? for in behalf of us it is written. "For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that thru patience and comfort of the Scriptures we might have hope." Rom. 15:4. The facts of the lesson were lived in the days of Daniel; they were recorded for the benefit of those who should come after; for those who live in "the time of the end." Dan. 2:28, 29; 12:4, 9, 10.
But what is the lesson? It was not written as a mere matter of history to satisfy the curious regarding Daniel's early life; of the early life of the great Elijah we know nothing. It is not recorded for the mere temperance lesson and a record of a noble purpose. These are instructive. They are, in fact, about all the instruction which the chapter has yet furnished, and the lesson in this respect is precious.
But the lesson is larger than these. It is, the contrast between the results of two great systems of education. The one system,—the worldly, the Babylonian,—showing at its best in the very height of Babylon's prosperity, with the learning, the opulence, the resources of a mighty empire at its back; the other, God's plan of education,—a life rather than a system,—manifested in seemingly one of the most discouraging times of earth's history. The people who had upheld that system were apostate and in captivity to an imperious, haughty nation; the system (if so we may call it) was handicapped by its perversions in backslidden Israel, and hindered by the limitations and barriers of apostate, rebellious, and ubiquitously idolatrous Babylon. The Babylonian education was manifested under the best conditions. The Biblical education was manifested in what to all human judgment were as low and mean conditions as would be possible in order that it exist at all.
But behold the results: Four youth, whose early years were spent in war-ravaged and famine-stricken and utterly-defeated Judah, surrounded on every hand by corruption and forbidden idolatry, yet doubtless having godly mothers and hearing the prophet Jeremiah, are placed in competition, so to speak, with the brightest and best young men from Babylon and surrounding countries. The Babylonian youths, many in number, were fed at the king's table, cared for by the king's most trusted servants. The young Hebrews lived in a strange land, were environed by the most untoward circumstances, cared for themselves, subsisted on a simple vegetarian fare of pulse and water ("starvation diet," it would be called by many), yet they surpassed all other students in knowledge and learning, and excelled all the king's counselors in wisdom and understanding. Is there not in this a lesson for the present?
Education To-day.
For what is the worldly educational system of to-day but Babylonian in principle? Let us note some of its most striking defects, recognized by many of the world's best and most earnest educators.
1. It is a one-sided education, in that it aims largely to develop the mental at the expense (not purposely or objectively) of the physical and spiritual. The "cramming" process is in vogue everywhere. Said Mr. Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, after careful investigation:
"Do American men and women realize that in five cities of our country alone, there were, during the last school term, over sixteen thousand children between the ages of eight and fourteen taken out of the public schools because their nervous systems were wrecked, and their minds were incapable of going any further in the infernal cramming system which exists to-day in our schools? And these sixteen thousand helpless little wrecks are simply the children we know about. Conservative medical men who have given their lives to the study of children, place the number whose health is shattered by overstudy at more than fifty thousand each year. It is putting the truth mildly to state that of all American institutions, that which deals with the public education of our children is at once the most faulty, the most unintelligent, and the most cruel."—Ladies' Home Journal, January, 1900.
Dr. George H. Martin, of San Francisco, appeared before a joint session committee of the Senate and Assembly Committees on Education, Jan. 23, 1900, and spoke emphatically against the evils of home study. Among other things he said:
"Every physician has many children under his care, and how many times little ones are brought to us who are beginning to have restless nights, are losing their appetites, growing haggard and old in appearance, with loss of energy and ambition. Upon investigation10we find that they go to school at nine in the morning, stay there until 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon, have numberless exercises and recitations, go home, and at once go to their books and study a good part of the afternoon, then eat their dinner and have more study at night until bedtime. By that time they are feverish and excited; and when they go to sleep they are muttering over their lessons, showing very plainly the trouble that is on their minds. Is it any wonder that they soon break down and have to be taken from school, when they can not sleep or eat properly, and have no time for play? This is all during the formative period of life, when the child is growing, and should be storing up energy, instead of using up all that it gains, and even more."—S. F. "Examiner," Jan. 24, 1900.
Many others—physicians, teachers, and parents—could be quoted to the same effect.
2. It is, to a great extent, an unwise education from a purely worldly point of view. Of what earthly use, to mention but one item, is the effort to fill a child's mind with the tales of myths? Children labor for years to obtain a knowledge of that which is of no benefit in youth, and which at a later date, if it were ever needed, could be learned in a short time from a cyclopedia or a dictionary. Frequently the myths themselves are greatly perverted in adapting them to the child-mind and in omitting the salaciousness and obscenity of their characters; and even then the little one gets very deformed ideas of what is left. Fiction falls in the same category, perverting the judgment of the child with distorted and false views of life, unfitting him to discriminate between the false and the true, and fitting him to be one of those who make up the army of the worthless or to fall among life's pitiful tragedies.
It is conceded that there are many who think that the study of fiction with other things of use will assist in developing imagination and discriminating judgment on the part of the child, but the conception is false. The same ones would not, in educating their children in art, continually keep before them a mixture or blending of the beautiful and ugly. They would not, in their musical education, continually have sounded into their ears a jargon of concord and discord. Eye and ear in such an education would lose the power to discriminate. Even so the child-mind, with its fertile imagination (which needs no feeder), needs to be educated in absolute truthfulness, as far as its parents or guardians can conceive. Let the standards of judgment, of taste, and of morals, be of the highest. The man who discerns the counterfeit is the one who knows the ring and the features of the genuine.
3. The education of the day is wrong in that it does not develop the individual. As Harold E. Gorst expresses it in the "Nineteenth Century and After:"
Babylonian Vase and Drinking Vessels.
"Thousands of young men and women are turned out every year by our schools and universities upon an exact pattern, like sausages from a Chicago factory. Each is provided with precisely the same stock of knowledge, and consequently the market becomes overcrowded with an enormous number of workers, all trained to perform the same set of functions."
Mr. Gorst speaks truly; and the effects of the education are seen in the multitude of graduates from one school or another who are utter failures. But in God's method of education there will be developed in the individual all the possibilities of his received talents and ability. The boy will not be considered as a fraction of a class, but an individual soul, having before himself alone in this sphere the complex problem of life to solve—not alone for the present, but for eternity. And the educational effort will be, not to pass "courses," not to obtain certain meaningless letters to attach to one's name, but to develop men and women, sons and daughters of the Most High, here and hereafter.
4. The worldly system of education leaves the moral and religious side of the child's nature untrained. We presume that the great majority of the readers of this article believe in a hereafter. This life is temporal. Beyond it lies eternity. Whatever that eternity is to be to us depends on the characters we form here. The majority of those who will read this are doubtless believers in the Bible as containing the revealed will of God, the Guide-book to the better world. And yet the sad fact is that almost no attention is given in present-day education to the training for that life that measures with the life of God; and ignorance of the Bible is well-nigh universal. The child's body is fed and clothed. His mind is crammed with every dish of the mental menu of our wonderful school system; but the spiritual faculties, which equally need and demand instruction, are left to starve and die; and the result is the present conscienceless immorality of commercialism and the wide-spread skepticism of the day.
[This article will conclude next week. It gives some strong recognition of the needs in public education and presents the only true remedy to meet the existing ills.]
