# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1947_S173
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES ~ 178

General Education

Perfect success will no doubt continue to elude us, but there is
no doubt that in the past the Church has derived many blessings
from a system which attempted to rigidly exclude secularizing in-
fluence by creating an opportunity for its teaching and administer-
ing personnel to concentrate exclusively upon the task of prepar-
ing the Church’s professional servants. But we must now weigh
the fact that precisely this ability to provide for maximum, ex-
elusive concentration upon the complex problems of ministerial
training no longer exists at many of Synod’s Preparatory Schools.
A basic modification of the traditional objective has resulted from
the introduction of large numbers of non-ministerial students into
Synod’s system of schools. It would be a mistake to ignore the im-
plications of this situation in any comparative evaluation of past
with present achievements or in any estimates of the future
potentialities of our system of ministerial training. The existence of
a non-ministerial education program on the campuses of the ma-
jority of Synod’s ministerial Preparatory Schools is a significant
and crucial factor in the discussion of any proposal to continue or
to change the present system.

During the past triennium this trend toward general education
has gained sufficient momentum to absorb approximately 50 per
cent of all available preparatory facilities. In 1945—46 more than
one half of all the students enrolled in our Preparatory Colleges
were general education students. For the past year (1946—47)
the figures are 1,229 ministerials and 1,186 non-ministerial students.
In evaluating these totals, we need to remember that the vast
majority of non-ministerial students are concentrated in the seven
of the ten Preparatory Schools which have received synodical
sanction for the introduction of general education on their cam-
puses. The following diagrams illustrate graphically the present
enrollment distribution at these seven schools. Graph A shows the
relative proportion of non-ministerials to total enrollments for
1946—47. Graph B shows this same relationship with reference to
new enrollments at these schools in September, 1946.

As the charts illustrate, the proportion of ministerial enroll-
ments is little better than 30 per cent in four of these schools and
approximately only 50 per cent in another. The remaining two
schools are approaching the 50 per cent line.

If the objectives of ministerial training are significantly dif-
ferent from those of general Christian education, then clear rec-
ognition of the implications involved in this situation is imperative,
for it cannot fail to be at least a conditioning factor in the ad-
ministration and the program of the schools involved.

Seventy per..cent of the Preparatory Schools officially offer