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June 24th - Education in the Good Old Days

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Canst thou speak Greek? Acts 21:37.

While that might not seem a very good text for a devotional though, it does raise an important issue.

The good old days in education weren't very good. Society did not consider anyone educated unless they were well learned in ancient Greek and Latin and the literature in those languages. Traditional education focused on the ancient classics.

Such an education, of course, had no meaning for the messes who had to work for a living. But that didn't make much difference, since there was no provision for even their elementary and secondary education. To put it in stark terms, formal education in schools for most of history was not open to most people, even in its most rudimentary forms. Schooling was the province of the upper classes, those relatively few who came from moneyed backgrounds and never found themselves forced to earn a living.

As in health care, the good old days in education were terrible. For more than 2,000 years education in the West had focused on ancient languages, words, ideas, and the "great books" of its heritage. The very prestige and longevity of this tradition made it difficult for educators to envision alternative approaches.

But reform would come, climaxing in the nineteenth century at the very time Adventism was rising.

At the cutting edge of the educational reforms in the 1830s were such people s Horace Mann, who led the battle for quality public elementary education for every child. Mann and his friends sought not only to make education available, but also to make it practical and healthy. They knew that it did little good to educate the mind if children's bodies were diseased.

On the higher education front was Oberlin College, an institution that in the 1830s displaced the Latin and Greek classics in the curriculum, centralilized the worldview of the Bible, and developed a manual labor study program to help people acquire useful skills in addition to book learning, thus ensuring a balance between the mental and the physical.

"The system of education in this isntitute," read the prospectus for Oberlin, "will provide for the body and heart as well as the intellect, for it aims at the best education of the whole man."

Adventism's educational ideas arise in a vacuum. We can always, even today, learn from the larger culture as we evaluate traditions and prctices from the perspective of the biblical worldview.

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There is life in the seed, there is power in the soil; but unless an infinite power is exercised day and night, the seed will yield no returns. The showers of rain must be sent to give moisture to the thirsty fields, the sun must impart heat, electricity must be conveyed to the buried seed. The life which the Creator has implanted, He alone can call forth. Every seed grows, every plant develops, by the power of God(COL 63).
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