Читать книгу The Choctaw Freedmen and the Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy - Robert Elliott Flickinger - Страница 39

James J. Hill, a prominent railroad president recently made this important statement:

"We are making a mistake to train our young people in various lines of knowledge for undertaking the big tasks of life, without making sure also that those fundamental principles of right and wrong as taught in the Bible, have become a part of their equipment. There is a control of forces and motives, that is essential to the management of the vast affairs of our nation, which comes only through an educated conscience; and to fail to equip young men, who are to manage the great affairs of the future, with this control and direction, is a serious mistake of the age and bears with it a certain menace for the future."

In a recent issue of the Assembly Herald there appeared the following very pertinent paragraphs on this subject, credited to the Synod of Tennessee:

"In common with all good citizens, we rejoice in the progress of the cause of popular education in our land. The intelligence of our citizenship is a bulwark to the country. But unless the education of the future citizen is complete and symmetrical, the body politic becomes a body partly of iron and partly of potter's clay. The education of the head and the hand without the heart is not enough.

"The popular education has no place for the heart in all of its splendid equipment. This is not a reflection on the fine system. It is merely the statement of a melancholy fact. The average state school, high or low, is absolutely colorless as to religion. Even the morality that is taught is not the morality of the Christian religion, but of philosophical ethics that differ but little from the ethics of the pagan.

"Our state schools have no place for the God of the Bible, nor for the Bible of the only living and true God. The poetry of Homer and Horace are sufficiently honored, but the finer poetry of Moses, Job and David are unknown in the courses of study of our schools, except now and then as specimens of Oriental song. The wise sayings of Plato and Socrates are reckoned worthy of profound study, while the vastly greater sayings of our Lord Jesus and Paul are unknown. Cicero and Demosthenes are commended as great models of public address, while Isaiah and Ezekiel are seldom mentioned in the four years of college life, or in the longer years of the secondary schools.

"That education is incomplete and inadequate for life's best, which does not include the whole man, and put first things first. If the heart be not educated and the conscience be not enlightened, the best trained hand may strike in a wrong manner, and the best trained mind pronounce wrong judgments. … Our citizenship must be Christian if it is to promote a Christian civilization."