Johnny Goes to School – Sunday, September 10, 1944
The annual return to school of millions of our youth has become an oft-repeated routine, now more or less taken for granted. Indeed, so accustomed have we become to the procedure, that in answer to the question “What is Johnny doing these days?” we think it sufficient merely to reply that “Johnny is going to school.”
It seldom occurs to most of us to ask ourselves or anyone else why Johnny is going to school, or what he is learning when he gets there, or by whom his studies are directed, and toward what end. And yet it startles us when we remember that elsewhere, where other ideas are prevalent—ideas which are not compatible with our way of life, not compatible with freedom or individual responsibility or individual conscience—millions of other Johnnies are also going to school, and what some of them have been taught, and what some of them have failed to be taught, has proved not to be good for them or for our generation or our world. Learning is not learning at all, in a real and honest sense, if it is dictated by expediency rather than truth, or by the controlled agencies of a directed propaganda.
Warped and twisted learning, Johnny would be better off without—as events of the present and immediate past have proved and will yet further prove. Better that Johnny were left unschooled in some matters than that he be misshapen by the positive ignorance of knowing too much about things that aren’t so. Adulterated truth is often more dangerous than honest ignorance. He who teaches the youth of any nation has one of the gravest of all responsibilities because behind all the visible forces of this world, is the greater force of ideas and ideals, ,and to mislead men in mind or in spirit is perhaps an even greater wrong than to regiment them physically. And so again, it isn’t enough to know merely that Johnny is going to school, because whole generations of Johnnies have been going to school in many lands for a long time, some of whom have been taught truth and some of whom have had their minds deliberately warped to further the purposes of evil and conspiring men.
The fact that it has happened means that it can happen—and against such encroachment as this we must ever be mindful and vigilant. We are grateful that Johnny can go to school again this year. We are grateful that truth may be taught in those schools to which our Johnny is going, and we give reminder to those who teach the youth of all nations, that a city or the material’ structure of a country may be rebuilt, but a mind distorted by false teaching is a tragedy, the effect of which and the end of which no man can know.
Heard over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System, from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, Sept. 10, 1944. Copyright – 1944.
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September 10, 1944
Broadcast Number 0,786