The American Missionary — Volume 36, No. 6, June, 1882Various
History
The American Missionary — Volume 36, No. 6, June, 1882
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
The university which missionary effort can make most useful in the
South is one that shall represent, in their most perfect form,
all the successive grades of education from lowest to highest. It
should be prepared to train ordinary pupils of all ages rather than
extraordinary ones of mature age only. It should also provide ample
facilities for normal and industrial training, now so much needed
in all the South. But especially it should magnify and dignify
the work of primary instruction, regarding this as a permanent
feature of its work, and not as an unavoidable evil to be shaken
off as soon as possible. It should neither undervalue nor neglect
the higher education. This should be held up as a worthy object of
aspiration for all who show themselves fitted to receive it, by
thorough work lower down. Such an institution would present, under
one management, a kindergarten, or something like it, a graded
school, a normal school, an industrial department, an academy, a
college, and in course of time the professional schools.
In favor of such a university several reasons may be given. In
the first place, the interests of the higher education would be
better served by such an institution than by one devoted to the
higher education alone. It is taken for granted that the Freedmen
and their descendants, for whom largely our institutions are
established, should, like all other people, have the opportunity
of the higher education given them to the extent of their ability
to receive and use it. The welfare of the masses demands that we
train up leaders of intelligence and principle. That this work is
not being overdone at present is evident from the fact that only
ninety-one college students are reported in all the institutions of
the American Missionary Association put together, and only about
fifty in all have ever been graduated from our college courses
since our work in the South began. Now, the principal reason why
our work in the higher education has been so limited, has been the
great scarcity of suitable material for college classes; and the
reason of this scarcity has been that our preparatory departments
have not been able to get hold of their pupils early enough. Pupils
come to us heavily handicapped by a lack of proper training, moral
and intellectual, in early childhood. Now, who can doubt but that
the universities that are going to have the best college classes
twenty years from now, and do the best work, will be those that
soonest put the kindergarten, or some equivalent of it, underneath
all their present courses of study, and thus manipulate the
entire education of their pupils from the age of five onward? A
thoroughness and symmetry of training could be realized by such an
arrangement which would be scarcely possible under any other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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