Education at Too High a Price by Charles M. Stone

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 17, 1913

Education at Too High a Price

By Charles M. Stone

WHILE it is in the order of the Lord that children should be educated in those things which are essential to comfort and happiness and usefulness in this life, it never was designed that their education should become a matter of parental pride. As soon as it becomes such, the real purpose is lost, and a door is opened to the introduction of many evils.

Systems of education have been built up, which have been made, through parental pride, the instruments of torture and death to the children that have been forced into and through the system. There are continually coming to our attention illustrations of the pitiless struggle between children who are constitutionally or mentally weak and the present educational system. Children have been required within a certain definite time to master a given amount of learning. They have done so; and when the examinations were past, they have dropped into a mental lassitude due to brain-fag, from which they have never recovered. The thought of taking up a book for study is as rasping on their nerves as the scraping of a fire-shovel on a stove bottom is to a nervous wreck. There have been a strain and a lesion of brain tissue which have never mended.

One has said that "the world is going university mad;" and with the hundreds of victims that are every year offered on the altar of parental pride in the shrine of enforced education, it certainly looks as if the speaker had grounds for his declaration.

An education is a blessing if the principles learned are in harmony with the principles of divine truth. The educated mind, with the same degree of spirituality, will accomplish more for God than the mind that is not educated. But the physical and spiritual welfare of the child should be a matter of far greater consideration than the acquirement of a certain amount of book-learning in a specified length of time. The pitiful little wrecks that have been laid away this year as the result of educational strain should forever settle in the parent's mind what his duty is in this matter. The ambitious parent who drives his child through a certain course of study at the expense of health and life or of future usefulness, is guilty before God.

The fact that a certain course is marked out and that the majority, perhaps, accomplish it without apparent injury to themselves, is no excuse for any parent's allowing his child to wreck its life or usefulness in the attempt to master the task. Thousands are doing it because they do not want it to appear that their child is not so "smart" as their neighbor's. Many who have done so are now wondering why their children are not able to accomplish anything above the most ordinary in life. We have heard the remark, "John and Mary have had the very best education the schools could give them; but the Smith children who have no better education are all doing well, and mine are doing nothing. I don't understand it." Brain-fag, mental lassitude, mental debility, are written all over the lives of such children; and they are not to blame for it, either. Their brains have become like the stomach that has been gorged and its muscles stretched beyond power to return to their proper shape and functions, or like the steam-boiler that has been weakened by excessive pressure until only a small head of steam can be carried.

Life is more important than the deepest philosophy the child can be forced to learn; health is more precious than the solutions of the problems of Euclid or the declensions and conjugations of Greek and Latin. The full, symmetrical, perfect development of an entire human life is of infinitely greater importance than all the philosophies and mythologies and aphorisms of the ancients, or the heaped-up and pressed-down wisdom

of modern economics, psychology, and commercialism. Let the child and the man be educated; but never permit that education to become the shroud or the grave that shall hide away the little lives entrusted to your keeping. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;" and they in whose hearts the fear of the Lord reigns will not yield to the temptation to sacrifice their little ones on the altar of pride. C. M. S.