# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S167
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES 167

(4) That his vitally direct relationship to the objectives of

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

(9)

the school imposes upon him the serious obligation to
exemplify before his students, in his own life, the
objectives of the school, especially those objectives which
describe the Christian virtues, but also those which
designate certain intellectual, social, and physical
achievements.

That the first criterion of his competence as a teacher is
neither erudite scholarship nor personal piety, but skill
as an educational craftsman.

That the first and always the foremost demand of his
call is that he become a master in his craft; and that
mastery can be gained only by persistent self-criti-
cism and the unending study of the art of teaching.
That his relationship to his students is established by
their mutual relationship to the total objectives of the
school — not merely by their incidental relationship to
a particular subject of study; and that this relationship
is so highly personal as to require the intercommuni-
cative opportunities of frequent individual conferences.
That, while academic pursuits naturally tend to en-
courage a highly individualistic and even self-centered
outlook, the call to a professorship must be construed to
imply a demand for the conscious restraint of these
natural tendencies in the teacher and for the practice
of a degree of Christian brotherliness so exceptional
as to weld a faculty into a solidly unified Christian
agency whose common immediate purposes are expressed
in the stated objectives of the school.

That his students are being prepared for the high calling
of the holy ministry; that he, the teacher, is there to
assist in training his students for that calling, whatever
his field of teaching may be; that he must, therefore,
maintain a constant awareness of and a deep sympathy
with the work and the problems of the minister; and
that this suggests the desirability of supplementing his
teaching activities with a reasonably controlled amount
of some other active church work.

. Within a faculty, provision must be made for the thorough

study of the relationship of each subject and course to the
total objectives of the school. The definite outcomes of
this study must be:

(1)

Precise statements of the specific purposes of every

course,