Teaching for the Future – Sunday, April 28, 1940
A so-called modern thinker is responsible for the statement that it is no use to educate our children for the worlds today because the world twenty years from now will be different; and it is no use to educate our children for the world twenty years from now, because no one knows what it will be like.
Suppose that our parents had taken a similar attitude with respect to us a generation ago. They could have done so with fully as much justification as could we today. It is quite true that many of the tentative teachings of science are sure to be altered or discarded. It is quite true that the social, economic and political order at no time remains constant or fixed. It is quite probable that many of the phases of our living and many of the material things with which we surround ourselves will be very much altered twenty years from now. But that does not relieve us of the responsibility of teaching our children the best of what we know today, and it does not relieve any parent or home or society from instilling into the lives of each generation and each child, those fundamental laws and virtues and truths which will be the same twenty years from now or twenty hundred or twenty ages – such things as the literal realty of a living God in whose image all men were created – such unalterable things as the reward of virtue, the necessity for honesty, the blessing of work, the indisputable axiom that nothing worth while can be had without effort, the joy of service, the practice of prayer, the meaning of honor and loyalty and the eternal permanence of human intelligence and personality. It doesn’t matter what the world will be like twenty years from now- If a man has these eternal verities fixed in his soul, he can adjust himself to any kind of world and he can help to make it a better one – and it is toward this end that more of our education should be directed.
Looking back upon the record of Scripture and of history, it becomes apparent that men of the past, even as many of our own day, have followed after false gods, and have gloried in their own strength. Time and the immutable laws of living have taken care of all such in the past, but our own generation we would persuade against such folly. Even as the Lord said upon Sinai: “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,” So is the same voice and the same commandment unto this day and unto this people. And each generation has found the cure for its plagues only when men could say, with the ancients of Israel., “Thou, even thou, are Lord alone.” (Nehemiah 9:6)
April 28, 1940
Broadcast Number 0,558