Save Our Schools: Our Homes Need Them

How much more reason have we to believe that supplemented with the care and love of Christian parents, our Lutheran schools will be a vital power in preserving the Christian home, in welding the family circle, and in strengthening the spirituality of our every day lives.

1921 Walter A. Maier Walther League Messenger

The Country School (1871) by Winslow Homer

The following article by Walter A. Maier is taken from the November 1921 issue of the Walther League Messenger, page 106.

Theodore Roosevelt once said: “When home ties are loosened, when men and women cease to regard a worthy family life with all its duties fully performed and all its responsibilities lived up to, as the life best worth living, then evil days for the commonwealth are at hand.” It must not be branded as an expression of pessimism, when it is stated that we of today are living in the midst of such evil days, that the home and family life which has enraptured poets and inspired artists is changing rapidly into a far less ideal state of living together.

Under the pressure of our swiftly moving world with its cold commercialism and its driving pleasure seeking, the family hearth has often been deserted and the genuine pleasures of the home circle are becoming less attractive and inviting. How many families eat breakfast together? How many Sundays and holidays find our young people in the company of their parents and their brothers and sisters? How often do the members of the family unite in working out some problem or in enjoying some diversion? It is all too plain: family life has dwindled down to a hurried existence with every member for himself.

It cannot but be otherwise, than that under such conditions the family altar has been forgotten and neglected; that the morning and evening devotional exercises are continually becoming fewer and shorter. Not so many years ago it was no unusual occurrence when passing a house to be greeted by hymns and chorals; but today if the automatic piano or the graphaphone is not at work, the raucous and rattling perpetration of the latest jazz monstrosity breaks violently into the evening’s solitude. Not a few of our young people can remember the time when, after the evening dishes had been wiped and put away, father or mother would read from one of our church papers, or from some of the popular devotional books; but now after supper had been gulped down, it’s off to the movies, or away to some party or social gathering. The glitter and tinsel of the attractions which our pleasure-mad world offers has indeed worked with sad and disastrous success.

The only influence which can successfully counteract this away-from-the-home tendency is a sound Christian training and education just along the lines which our parish schools offer. Here children are impressed with the sanctity of the home; here they learn just what the Lord requires of them in the fourth commandment; here they read the scriptural examples of the men of God who in their youth were subject and obedient to their parents; here they are warned against the evil forces which seek to break the ties which bind them to home and hearth; here they receive spiritual instruction which will go far in making them good and happy sons and daughters ready to love and respect their parents.

It is not said or implied that our public schools cannot do much in sustaining within the children a love for home and for parents. We most emphatically disagree with Father Schauer who declared: “The public schools have produced nothing but a godless generation of thieves and blackguards”; nor can we subscribe to the statement which appeared in the Catholic Telegraph, to the effect that the public schools are “nurseries of vice”; that “they are godless and unless suppressed will prove the damnation of the country.” We believe firmly that the public schools in our country are generally doing an admirable piece of work; yet, we deplore the fact that they do not and cannot do enough, that they can never give the only and paramount answer to the greatest question in human life. While, therefore, the public schools turn out well-trained boys and girls, it is quite evident that schools where these boys and girls are daily instructed in the Way of Life will do more: they will turn out Christian, home-loving, respectful and obedient children.

For many years our church has been conducting a mission school in the slum district of St. Louis. More than one thousand children have been graduated from this school in the twenty odd years of its existence. All of the children have come from the poorest district of the city and were reared under the most adverse circumstances. Few had any conception of religion; many came from godless families, where fathers and mothers shifted for themselves and left their children surrounded by poverty and squalor. And yet, of these thousand children who have graduated from our city mission school, not one, according to the follow-up records of the Rev. F. W. Herzberger, who has the distinction of founding this institution, not one has ever been arrested or has ever been involved in public disgrace or scandal. The very environment of the school has been transformed. The policeman patrolling the district assured our pastor: “You can tell that there is a Christian school here,” because of the absence of riotous and disorderly conduct which previously marked that district.

If the blessing of our schools can be so apparent and pronounced under such unfavorable circumstances, how much more reason have we to believe that supplemented with the care and love of Christian parents, our Lutheran schools will be a vital power in preserving the Christian home, in welding the family circle, and in strengthening the spirituality of our every day lives!

W. A. M.