# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S163
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

peek S,

SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES 163

enumerated involve certain significant implications which should
be set down and examined with complete candor:

1. The objectives imply that all phases of a student’s ex-
periences in or in connection with a school are important; that
a school must be viewed in terms of, and must be held responsible
for, all aspects of the total conditioning influence to which the
student is subjected; and that it must be held responsible for
providing the conditioning influences necessary for the development
of his whole personality.

2. The objectives imply that extra-curricular influences upon
the student are, to say the least, fully as important as the strictly
curricular influences, and require, therefore, at least as much care
in plan, organization, and control as does the curriculum.

3. The objectives imply that in many of the courses in the
curriculum the teaching and the learning of subject matter must
be subordinated and must be made incidental to other ends.

4, The objectives imply that in all courses conscious attention
must be given to specific ends other than the teaching and the
learning of subject matter.

5. The objectives imply that an extensive development of means
for fostering spiritual growth in students must be undertaken.

6. The objectives imply that among administrators and teachers
there must develop a new and notably, though by no means com-
pletely, revised expression of function.

7. The objectives imply the need for a rapid development of
new techniques for the achievement of certain ends which hereto-
fore have been regarded vaguely, inarticulately, and without much
direct implementation, as desirable but largely unmanageable by-
products of a conditioning program predominantly curricular in
nature, scope, and point of view.

Although it is not possible, in a brief and preliminary state-
ment, to venture a full analysis of the means and methods for
achieving the objectives of Synod’s ministerial schools, the pre-
sentation of a few guiding principles and suggestive observations
may be serviceable.

It must be freely admitted at the outset that substantial progress
toward making the proposed objectives genuinely effective can be
hoped for only through patient and considerate attempts to over-
come a number of impediments and difficulties, some of which
are serious. After all, tradition and habit do have a powerful

grip on school ways. It is not always easy to induce an ad-

ministrator to divest himself of routine matters, the doing of which
yields a comforting sense of achievement, and to address himself

’ to the less demonstrative though vastly more important tasks of