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True Education
is this truer than of history. Let it be considered from the divine
point of view.
As too often taught, history is little more than a record of the rise
and fall of kings, the intrigues of courts, the victories and defeats of
armies—a story of ambition and greed, of deception, cruelty, and
bloodshed. Thus taught, its results cannot but be detrimental. The
heart-sickening reiteration of crimes and atrocities, the enormities,
the cruelties portrayed, plant seeds that in many lives bring forth
fruit in a harvest of evil.
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It is far better to learn, in the light of God’s Word, the causes
that govern the rise and fall of kingdoms. Teach the young to study
these records and see how the true prosperity of nations has been
bound up with an acceptance of divine principles. Let them study
the history of great reformatory movements, and see how often these
principles—though hated and their advocates sent to the dungeon
and the scaffold—triumphed through these very sacrifices.
Such study will give broad, comprehensive views of life. It will
help young people understand something of its relations and depen-
dencies, how wonderfully we are bound together in the great family
of society and nations, and to how great an extent the oppression or
degradation of one member means a loss to all.
In the study of arithmetic and mathematics the work should be
made practical. Children and youth should be taught not merely
to solve imaginary problems but to keep an accurate account of
their own income and outgo. Let them learn the right use of money
by using it. Boys and girls should learn to select and buy their
own clothing, their books, and other necessities, and by keeping
an account of their expenses they will learn, as they could learn in
no other way, the value and use of money. Rightly directed it will
encourage habits of benevolence. It will aid the youth in learning to
give, not from the mere impulse of the moment, as their feelings are
stirred, but regularly and systematically.
In this way every study may become an aid in the solution of
that greatest of all problems, the training of men and women for the
best discharge of life’s responsibilities.
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