Manuscript Releases, vol. 6 [Nos. 347-418]

Model Church Schools to be Connected with Our Sanitariums

In all our sanitariums the standard is to be kept high. With these institutions should be connected, as physicians, managers, and helpers, only those who keep their households in order. The conduct of the children has an influence that tells upon all who come to these sanitariums. God desires that this influence shall be reformatory. And this can be; but care is required. The father and the mother must give special attention to the training of each child. But you know how the families are up on this hillside. The patients understand how it is. The way it is presented to me is that it is a shame that there is not the influence over the young children that there should be. Every one of them should be employed in doing something that is useful. They have been told what to do. If the father cannot be with them, the mother should be instructed how to teach them. 6MR 351.4

But since I have been here, the light has been given me that the very best thing that can be done is to have a school. I had no thought that the very little ones would be embraced in the school—not the very little ones. But it would be best to have this school for those who can be instructed and have the restraining influence upon them which a school teacher should exert. We have a school here because the Word of God could not be taught in the other [public] school. Our brother that teaches that school is fully capable of carrying a school with teaching the Word. He is fully capable of doing that. He has his position, they have hired him, and as long as they let him stay undisturbed, he had better stay there. 6MR 352.1

But here is a work that must be done for the families, and for the children that are as old as seven years and eight years and nine years. We should have a lower department, that is a second department, where these children could be instructed. They will learn in school that which they frequently do not learn out of school, except by association. 6MR 352.2

There are to be those who are older, that you have confidence in, who are trying to be Christians, as special monitors. Whenever the children are out of the building, these monitors should take charge of a certain company, and see that there are no wrong things carried on among them. That is what we used to have when I went to school. That is what was done when the children were let out at recess or at noon. And then when in the school, the older ones would take charge of the younger ones. The teacher would give them the lesson that they should have, and then the monitors would carry them on in the study, say in spelling, in reading, and such things as that, and they would become educated—the teachers as well as the little children were learners. That is the way the primary schools were carried on when I went to school. 6MR 353.1

I thought it was a little strange that they should have these little classes given into the hands of the students, and I asked the teacher if she would not explain it to me. She said she would. She said that those who were put over these children were learning more in that very discipline of hearing them read and spell and cipher than it was possible for them to obtain in their classes. That is why they were appointed. 6MR 353.2