There wasn't a grave misdemeanor the faculty surer to vex
Than tossing, in public or private, a smile at the opposite sex;
And always I wondered and wondered--I'll wonder the rest of my life--
How under the moon, while in college, I managed to capture a wife.
But one thing there was uncertain, which now very clearly I see.
That all of these stiff regulations, were truly a blessing to me. [1]
Nearly everyone who has attended a Seventh-day Adventist college can identify heartily with this bit of wisdom and can praise God in retrospect for the "stiff regulations"--and nearly everything else besides--that made his Christian college different.
It may be helpful to review how this difference came about; for at times anyway it came very near not coming about.
All eyes turned toward Sidney Brownsberger.
Ellen White, recently back with her husband from California after starting Signs of the Times, had just finished reading an extensive testimony revealing God's ideals for Adventist education. The first Seventh-day Adventist institution of higher learning, Battle Creek College, was in the processes of birth, its classroom building was under way, and the board of trustees was meeting to develop plans and to hear the word from the Lord. The first principal, Professor Sidney Brownsberger, M.A. (University of Michigan, 1869), had been invited to attend in view of his obvious significance to the success of the venture.
"Well, Brother Brownsberger," one of the board members inquired, "what can we do about this instruction Sister White has just given us?"
Everyone waited expectantly for his response. What they heard was candidly honest: "I do not know anything about the conducting of such a school." [2]
It was not an auspicious way to begin.
This was not, however, the very beginning of Adventist education. In 1852, when parents were neglecting their children's education on the basis that "Christ was so soon coming" that they couldn't accomplish much anyway, James White rebuked them. His own contribution was the denomination's first youth paper, the Youth's Instructor.
In 1853 and 1854 quite a number of Adventist families set up little day schools in their homes. The best known of these was the one conducted by nineteen-year-old Martha Byington In Buck's Bridge, New York. In a year or two, all these home schools died out. This is regrettable, for as a result Sabbath-keeping young people in public schools suffered considerable ridicule on account of their "peculiar" ideas. And though many endured, expecting Jesus to come any minute and take them to heaven, many others gave up and were lost to the cause. [3]
A few years after the Whites moved from Rochester to Michigan in 1855 and the Review and Herald office moved with them, Adventists began a church school in Battle Creek, which they operated under a series of different teachers for about six years. It was abandoned when a fine new public school went up nearby.
Adventist families apparently sent only their elementary children to this public school in Battle Creek. Their teen-agers found jobs, as many as possible of them going to work at the rapidly expanding publishing house and the Western Health Reform Institute.
It was while working at the Review one day that Edson White observed a stranger splitting logs for the woodpile that supplied the ever-hungry fire that heated the boilers that furnished the steam that ran the machinery at the press. After working hours Edson and his friend, George States, and some of the other fellows chatted with this stranger and learned that his name was Goodloe Bell.
A number of years before, Mr. Bell told the boys, he had attended Oberlin College in Ohio, then one of the most revolutionary schools in the country. It was the first to offer coeducation. It stressed the need of having industrial and farm work accompany formal studies. It was also a very religious institution. Bell went on to say that he had taught school in various places for several years, and that when overwork made him ill, he had been pleased to hear about the new Western Health Reform Institute at Battle Creek. It had sounded as "reform" minded as Oberlin.
Sure enough instead of dosing him with calomel and strychnine, the doctors here had prescribed hot-and-cold treatments and assigned him to convalesce at manual labor out of doors. Bell said he liked the Health Reform Institute and that he liked what he had learned about Seventh-day Adventism.
"Would you also like to teach night school for some of us fellows, Mr. Bell?" the boys asked eagerly.
No sooner said than done. In the long warm evenings of the summer of 1868 Goodloe Bell conducted a "select school" for twelve Adventist youth including, besides both of the White boys, two of J. P. Kellogg's sons--John Harvey, the future world-famous physician, and Will K., the future cornflake king. It was a prodigious student body.
And Mr. Bell was a fine teacher, well ahead of the times in his methods. He had his students learn their material solidly, but not by rote. He required them to understand it so thoroughly that they could explain it at a moment's notice.
The school went so well that in the fall many more boys asked to enroll. It was decided that Mr. Bell could use the original little building that J. P. Kellogg and others had put up to house the Review plant in 1855. To make a home for his wife and four children, Bell patched the cracks in its dilapidated lower walls. His students climbed the rickety outside stairs to attend classes in the long, low-ceilinged room above.
By 1872 the General Conference Committee was so convinced about Bell's ability that they voted to sponsor his select school as the first official Seventh-day Adventist school.
The year 1872 is notable not only for this adoption of Professor Bell's baby, but also for the birth of Ellen White's testimonies on the nature of true education. The first of her many hundreds of pages on the subject appeared that year in Testimony no. 22. [4]
Testimony no. 22 begins with this sentence: "It is the nicest work ever assumed by men and women to deal with youthful minds."
The "nicest" work. Not nicest in the sense of sweetest or most joyous, even though teaching may sometimes certainly be this; but nicest in a nineteenth-century usage of the word: "requiring meticulous choice, tactful handling, careful consideration, or precise and scrupulous conduct." [5]
What Ellen White meant was that education is not a pastime for untrained teachers and unqualified parents, but is a lofty career demanding thorough preparation and intense dedication.
The second sentence in the testimony makes this clear: "The greatest care should be taken in the education of youth to so vary the manner of instruction as to call forth the high and noble powers of the mind."
Please read that again. What is this variety of instruction that she felt must be observed if the "high and noble powers of the mind" are to be adequately called forth?
Her answer follows. The sincere Christian teacher is to be equally interested "in the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual education of his scholars." Teaching is the "nicest" work because it must deal in a balanced way with the "whole" of each student while at the same time taking into account the different temperament that marks each individual. It must pay discriminating attention (1) to the salvation of students, (2) to their health, (3) to the practical knowledge they should acquire in order to be useful in farming, business, household duties, or in whatever career they take up, and (4) to the development of their ability to reason soundly. And it must (5) lead students toward dedicated service for others.
Since this kind of education is essential, it obviously cannot be confined to a classroom. Consequently parents as well as teachers are frequently referred to in this testimony. Parents should make the salvation of their children their "first and highest consideration." They should also make it their "first and constant care" to see that their children have healthy bodies. The two "firsts" are given equal weight, because spiritual health is so greatly influenced by physical health. In view of their responsibilities, mothers should regard their home duties as "sacred," and as being far more important than the work of a stenographer ("copyist") or musician. Indeed there is "no employment more important" than that of homemaking.
A well-organized school (returning now to the role of teachers) is definitely required to provide "agricultural and manufacturing establishments" where students should devote "a portion of the time each day" to active labor. And it's not enough for students merely to put in time at their jobs. They must be given "a thorough education" in the different kinds of work so they can turn out quality products. They should be "taught labor as well as the sciences."
Bible study, of course, should occupy a most prominent position, yet not to the exclusion of the sciences.
And what is the purpose of this balanced, all-embracing education? "The great object of education is to enable us to use the powers which God has given us in such a manner as will best represent the religion of the Bible and promote the glory of God." "The truths of the Divine Word can be best appreciated by an intellectual Christian. Christ can be best glorified by those who serve Him intelligently."
Later, Ellen White summarized and enlarged her philosophy in these famous words: "True education means more than the pursual of a certain course of study. It means more than a preparation for the life that now is. It has to do with the whole being, and with the whole period of existence possible to man. It is the harmonious development of the physical, the mental, and the spiritual powers. It prepares the student for the joy of service in this world, and for the higher joy of wider service in the world to come." [6]
True education is not ordinary education; neither is it something separate from the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The church is to be made up of men and women who understand, believe, and live God's special last-day message and who unite to fulfill their mission of telling it to the world. At best, Seventh-day Adventist education has come to be the church's primary means of achieving this end. It seeks not only to make ministers, doctors, nurses, and teachers, but to prepare every student to be an intelligent soul winner, whatever his calling.
"One great object of our schools is the training of youth to engage in service in our institutions and in different lines of gospel work"; but all Adventist children should have the benefit of a Christian education, whether they are to become denominational employees or not, so that they can fill "places of responsibility in both private and public life." "True education is missionary training. Every son and daughter of God is called to be a missionary." [7]
Not long after the General Conference adopted Bell's select school, it formed an educational society and set about laying plans for a combination college and secondary school.
Land must be secured. "Let there be land enough for manufacturing and agriculture," Ellen White counseled as the Lord's mouthpiece. She favored moving to a lakeside tract a few miles out of town.
The county fairground nearer town was also on the market--50 acres. She would settle for this piece of ground. The Whites caught the train for California and left the brethren to make the deal.
"If only the fairgrounds were closer to the Health Reform Institute," a timid boardmember worried one day, "then it would be easier for the students to get jobs there." (Actually the distance was only a long block!) "If we locate the school so far out, we'll likely have to move the Institute. Think of the expense!"
And Battle Creek itself seemed rural enough. The streets were unpaved, and the sidewalks were boardwalks. In the fall, turkeys could be heard gobbling in the adjacent woods. Like Lot when he was commanded to flee from city life, the brethren looked to Battle Creek as a Zoar and pleaded with their consciences, "Is it not a little town?"
Suddenly Erastus Hussey offered to sell his 12 acres across the street from the Health Institute! The Board pounced on it--then sold off five acres, leaving seven, and congratulated themselves on how much of the Lord's money they had saved.
Ellen White reflected on how much of the Lord's will they had rejected. But, hiding her sorrow, she appeared at their board meeting in the autumn and outlined again God's plans for His school. It was on that occasion that everyone heard Professor Brownsberger say he knew nothing about running such an institution.
Mr. Bell was in harmony with the new principles, but his talent seemed to lie more in teaching than in administration, [8] so perhaps they had no other choice. At any rate it seemed important to have a man with a university degree. Brownsberger was appointed principal with James White acting nominally as president.
Brownsberger, though dedicated, soon proved his own words, that he truly did not know how to do the job God wanted done. His education was in Greek and Latin classics. Not only did he ignore industries and farming, he scarcely even offered a Bible class. There was a Bible course, a sound but somewhat stuffy one by Editor Uriah Smith that perhaps one fifth of the students attended, and chapel services were often used to teach the Bible. Most students took the "normal" course, leading to public elementary teaching. Others, preparing to be ministers or to fill jobs in conference and association offices, accepted a call as soon as one came along, even in the middle of a term.
God blessed. He did the best He could with the college His people had launched. From time to time thrilling revivals swept the student body. And with several hundred Adventist youth thrown together even for only a few months at a time, a new sense of denominational unity was engendered.
In 1881, mounting problems embarrassed young President Brownsberger. (He had been made full president in 1880.) Regarding himself a failure, he quietly resigned and drifted northward in Michigan to take up logging and teaching. But in 1882 the California Conference called him to head their new Healdsburg Academy and College. He accepted, laid plans at once for industries and Bible courses, and quickly proved that in a few years he had learned a great deal about running God's kind of school. [9]
In selecting its next president, Battle Creek again bypassed Bell in favor of an amiable talker with the likely name of Alexander McLearn. No matter that he was not a Seventh-day Adventist! He kept the Sabbath and attended the Tabernacle, and he had a degree--in theology, indeed.
He lasted one year and, after splitting the student body In two, departed to join the Marion party. [10] (One angry lad is said to have tossed Professor Bell down the stairs.) Battle Creek College closed its doors in June and took a year out to think things through (1882-1883). At the invitation of S. N. Haskell, Bell left to help start South Lancaster Academy (now part of Atlantic Union College).
The crisis that climaxed in closing the school was productive of good. Board, faculty, and student body rethought their regard for educational principles. Attitudes changed. When classes resumed in the fall of 1883, there was an entirely different spirit in the halls--and the church had three schools in place of one: a secondary school in Massachusetts, and two colleges, one in Michigan and one in the Golden West.
The new college president in Battle Creek was W. H. Littlejohn, a blind pastor whom G. I. Butler, General Conference president, asked to serve until he found his man. His man turned out to be William Warren Prescott.
Prescott had a degree. He also had experience as a newspaper editor and reporter. He had a way of inspiring young people to seek personal dignity and self-control. He was a good Adventist. And he deeply desired to follow Ellen White's inspired ideals.
He made the Bible increasingly prominent, participated in a number of wonderful revivals, and actually inaugurated a number of small industries.
But in 1889 the faculty voted to have no more industries! Soon Ellen White was warning against dangers in the entertainments and competitive sports that were filling the place that manual labor should have occupied. [11]
In 1891 Union College opened in Nebraska and, in 1892, Walla Walla College, in Washington. Prescott served as president of all three--at the same time.
In 1891, also, Prescott helped Ellen White and others conduct in Petoskey, Michigan, the first nation-wide Seventh-day Adventist teachers' institute. About a hundred believers teaching in scattered Adventist schools and in public schools came together to camp in tents and discuss, for the first time, "Christian education." It was a landmark.
In 1894 Prescott was called to travel around the world, and Professor G. W. Caviness succeeded him at Battle Creek College. Probably Caviness, too, wanted to be a reformer; but, if so, like his predecessors, he didn't know how--and what could he have done anyway on so restricted a campus? He did require everyone to take at least one Bible class. But Ellen White wrote from Australia that the shorter the time the students spent at Battle Creek under the present circumstances, the better. A month later she wrote again. If God and the Bible were given the central place in education they were supposed to occupy, then students might pursue their studies as far as they wished. [12]
Now there were a few men in the church who not only wanted to reform Seventh-day Adventist education but had ideas about how to do it and the energy to do it with. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was one of these. Percy Magan, in his late twenties and a member of the college staff, was another. Ed Sutherland, also young, was a third. While teaching history at Battle Creek College in 1892 Sutherland had aroused the students to get meat removed from the college menus. That was an innovation! Now he was president at Walla Walla, founding industries, encouraging religious fervor, and fostering in his students a sincere dedication to the service of God. Down in Australia Ellen White was demonstrating what her testimonies meant, at Avondale carving an exemplar college out of poverty and eucalyptus.
At the 1897 General Conference Ed Sutherland was voted in as the new president of Battle Creek College, with Percy T. Magan as his dean. Kellogg was jubilant.
Changes were made! Classics were out. Degrees were out. Mission-oriented courses were in. The Bible became the textbook above all others; it was used even in certain math classes. In a symbolic gesture, as Sutherland held the handles, Magan guided the team, and 220-pound Professor Lamson sat on the beam, the new administration plowed up the playing field and prepared it for a food crop. Eighty acres in addition were farmed elsewhere; Students enrolled in ministerial and canvassing courses and in other curricula leading toward missionary nursing and missionary medicine, as well as to missionary farming and missionary merchandising, and so on. "Missionary" meant selfless dedication, the willingness and the ability to be self-supporting, and perpetual activity in soul-winning. Many students also enrolled in the one-year "normal" course--but no longer with an eye to teaching public school.
Guided by Ellen White's instruction that every church with six or more children should have its own church school, [13] Sutherland and Magan persuaded their normal students to offer themselves as teachers for Adventist church schools. Somehow they found time and energy to search out a large number of Battle Creek alumni and other Adventists who were scattered around the area teaching in public schools, and appealed to them also to start church schools. Many responded.
And many made real sacrifices. One girl, when she learned that the local church that wanted her could offer neither pay nor privacy and only an outside privy in lieu of a bathroom, did not make the sacrifice. But another girl stepped immediately into her place. She was willing to sleep in the unheated attic of the same home where she taught school and, because there was no money for a library, to use The Desire of Ages and second-hand copies of the Youth's Instructor as her basic textbooks for reading, geography, and English literature. She loved the children, and they and their parents loved her.
When she returned the next fall, a stove had been installed, and the attic walls had been papered with the children's precious Instructors. [14]
A young couple in Pennsylvania launched their marriage and their careers in an ancient dwelling that provided shelter not only for themselves and their schoolroom but also for nine of their fifteen pupils, two helpers, and (if you please) the three members of the school board. [15] Between 1897 and 1900 about 150 elementary schools were started, mostly by former students of Battle Creek College, enrolling 4000 children.
In 1901 the college constituency and the General Conference voted to close the college in Battle Creek and move it to the country.
Sutherland and Magan loaded their bikes on a train, took passage to the depot nearest the latest possible site they had heard of, and then hit the roads and trails of southwestern Michigan in search of a truly rural property on which to locate their new school. One day after cycling twenty-five miles northward over sandy trails from South Bend, Indiana, they caught their breath under the big maples that lined Mr. E. F. Garland's apple orchard at the resort town of Berrien Springs, Michigan. Soon Emmanuel Missionary College (now part of Andrews University) was rising there on 272 acres.
Evening classes were conducted that first year in the abandoned Berrien County jail and courthouse, as side by side, students and teachers spent their days working on the farm or constructing the wooden buildings together. Ellen White insisted that such cooperation between faculty and students was so essentially a part of Christian education that it was "in no case" to be neglected. [16]
Curricula were simplified to the point where students took only one solid course during a term. Four main buildings were erected, three of which were scarcely heated, even in winter--so students could accustom themselves to any rigor of mission life. Only two meals a day were served, and, of course, there were again no baccalaureate degrees.
It was a little too much--or perhaps, much too little.
Union College in Nebraska had also tried two meals and no heat, but it was offering degrees to Seventh-day Adventist youth who wanted them; and in 1903 Kellogg, turning his back on the church, reopened Battle Creek College. The enrollment in Berrien Springs remained meager. Criticism mounted. Sutherland and Magan asked Ellen White if they could start a new school in the South, secured her approval, and left, taking some of the faculty with them.
Sutherland and Magan had gone too far. For instance, Ellen White had never spoken against degrees as such; and when the College of Medical Evangelists began at Loma Linda around 1910, she specifically counseled that its graduates be able to meet every reasonable academic qualification. [17] She recommended two meals a day, but she cheerfully allowed the students at Avondale to eat three, and she always made a third meal available to the members of her own staff. [18]
But Sutherland and Magan had manifested incredible courage, faith, and energy, and they had done a good work. They had moved the college to the country. They had begun agriculture and industries in connection with it. They had put Scripture and selfless service into lofty prominence. They had set faculty and students at manual labor together. They had arranged weekly student-faculty conferences for the making and interpreting of rules. [19] They had erected necessary buildings economically. In all, they had achieved a first-rate breakthrough.
The presidents and faculties that followed them at Emmanuel Missionary College completed the process. Under Professor Frederick Griggs (1918-1925) blueprint balance was rather largely accomplished. Agriculture and industries provided income, execise, character building, and student-faculty fellowship. The religion department flourished. Curricula led sensibly to degrees, and at the same time every activity was openly directed toward the salvation of souls.
Students were enthusiastic; and they departed, well educated, with a desire to serve the Lord wherever He called, to go and "tell it to the world."
In 1896 General Conference President O. A. Olsen personally assisted in the physical labor of founding Oakwood College, in a grove of sixty-five oaks on a 360-acre farm near Huntsville, Alabama. Known at first as Oakwood Industrial School, it provided opportunities for practical as well as academic experience right from the start.
About the same time (1892) another college was started in the South as Graysville Academy, which several years later (1916) was moved from Graysville, Tennessee, to Collegedale. The academy soon outgrew junior college status to become another four-year educational institution under the name of Southern Missionary College.
In the meantime many other Adventist colleges had been founded--in Canada, in various European countries, in Africa, South America, India, and elsewhere. In the United States, Healdsburg College had moved out of the little town that had grown around it and had reestablished itself as Pacific Union College in the craterlike depression atop Howell Mountain. Near the new General Conference offices in Takoma Park, Washington Missionary College was designated the official school for preparing overseas workers. In the orange groves of southern California the College of Medical Evangelists (now a part of Loma Linda University) arose to take the place of Dr. Kellogg's American Medical Missionary College of Battle Creek and Chicago.
In 1874, the year that Battle Creek College opened its doors, James White, with characteristic vision, called for four other colleges as soon as possible, sprinkled all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific. [20] Had he lived till 1920 he would have seen his dream fulfilled many times over in lands circling the globe. He would have been pleased.
In the 1920s some Adventist colleges in North America, in order to undergird Loma Linda's standing with the American Medical Association, secured junior-college accreditation for their premedical program. A few faculty members, mature and experienced, were sent for this purpose to universities to earn doctor's degrees. In the 1930s, after much soul-searching, several colleges earned senior-college accreditation. Also in the 1930s, Pacific Union College saw the birth of a General Conference institution that later developed into the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary.
In the 1940s great changes occurred in Adventist colleges in America with the influx of Girls--mature, married, and driving cars--after World War II. The 1950s were notable for the large number of faculty members sent off to earn doctorates. In the early 1960s Emmanuel Missionary College was enlarged into Andrews University; and the College of Medical Evangelists was merged with La Sierra College and with schools of nursing, dentistry, and others to become Loma Linda University.
No other denomination does so much for its young people as does the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Since 1852 it has provided youth publications now numbering scores around the world. Its Sabbath School, Youth, and Education Departments exist largely or entirely for youth. And today it provides the largest Protestant system of elementary and secondary education in the world. In the mid-1970s, Seventh-day Adventists operate 4300 schools and employ 19,500 teachers serving 437,000 students.
Today the Seventh-day Adventist denomination continues to pour millions of dollars into its youth programs, convinced that its young people are the hope of its future, and that men and women must understand, live, and tell God's special truth for this time.
Notes:
- D. K. Nicola, in Everett N. Dick, Union College, Fifty Years of Service (Lincoln, Neb.: Union College Press, 1941), p. 45
- Many unfootnoted data in this chapter are taken from E. K. Vande Vere, Wisdom Seekers. This work on the early history of SDA education in general and the history of Andrews University in particular supersedes Spalding's history in Origin and History, vol. 2, ch. 6
- Review and Herald, August 19, 1852, p.63; November 6, 1888, pp. 689, 690; July 7, 1927, p. 2
- The material in the nine volumes of Testimonies for the Church is made up of thirty-seven individually numbered Testimonies, the first thirty-four of which were originally issued as separate pamphlets. The section of Testimony no. 22 under discussion here now appears in Testimonies, vol. 3, pp. 131-160, and has been republished in Fundamentals of Christian Education (Nashville, Tenn.: Southern Publishing Association, 1923), pp. 15-46
- Webster's Third New International Dictionary
- Ellen G. White, Education (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1903, 1952), p. 13
- Ellen G. White, Testimonies, vol. 6, p. 133; Counsels to Teachers, p. 44; The Ministry of Healing, p. 395
- Ellen G. White, Testimony to the Church at Battle Creek, pp.1-8
- Vande Vere, Wisdom Seekers, pp. 20-22; H. O. McCumber, The Advent Message in the Golden West (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1946, 1968), pp. 129-132
- Review and Herald, August 14, 1883, p. 528. Later McLearn joined the Seventh Day Baptists
- Ellen G. White, Fundamentals of Christian Education, p. 378
- Ibid., pp. 334-367 (dated March 21, 1895) and pp. 368-380 (dated April 22, 1895)
- Ellen G. White, Testimonies, vol. 6, p. 199
- Youth's Instructor, February 21, 1956
- Student (a publication of Battle Creek College), January 1898, p. 65
- Ellen G. White. Counsels to Parents, Teachers, and Students (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1913, 1943), p. 211
- Ellen G. White, Manuscript 7, 1910
- Ellen G. White, Counsels on Diet and Foods, pp. 173-178, 491
- Ellen G. White, Education, p. 290
- Signs of the Times, August 13, 1874, p.44