# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1956_S154
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

{54 SEMINARIES AND COLLEGES

be enforced state by state at the earliest opportunity because ed-
ucational leaders believe that young men and women will not be
attracted to the profession until higher standards have been at-
tained.

Regarding teachers who are not professionally trained at its
institutions, Synod urges “that congregations engage only such
men and women as teachers in their schools as have been trained
in Synod’s teachers colleges or have the equivalent qualifications
both with respect to character and professional training.” Hand-
book, 7.05, c. Synod is thus increasingly compelled to concern it-
self with a larger and more highly qualified supply of synodically
trained teachers as well as with the supply that is not furnished
by the annual assignment of graduate and undergraduate teachers.

Recommendations

The following recommendations are offered with such com-
ment as is deemed necessary to evaluate them:

1. That Synod enroll in its teacher-training program the largest
possible number of qualified men students.

In 1955, teacher training at all synodical schools enrolled 751 men
and 1,057 women. No judgment is intended as to the comparative value
of men and women teachers, but it is a statistical fact that men teachers
serve longer, much longer, than women teachers. It thus becomes a
matter of the efficient use of Synod’s money and equipment to train and
use more men teachers.

2. That Synod endorse the selective recruitment of students
and encourage the Districts, congregations, and organizations
within Synod to implement selective recruitment by expanding
student and scholarship aid.

Also this recommendation is an efficiency factor. Selective recruit-
ment is intended to reduce student dropout as well as teacher dropout.
No dropout figures of teacher students are available that are sufficiently
complete to determine what the dropout is for teacher-trainees at all
synodical colleges. In 1955, 75 River Forest and Seward student teachers
resigned, sixty-two of whom were women; that is to say, they did not
go back to college, neither did they continue to teach. Selective recruit-
ment will not correct the dropout of women; it will help to some extent
in increasing the tenure of teachers.

Selective recruitment might well begin in Synod’s elementary
schools. Not only can the conviction there be planted that teaching in
the church is a high calling, but children who manifest talent for
teaching can be earmarked and conditioned for a teaching career. It is
also important that the desire of the parents be enlisted. We are also
thinking in terms of a device such as public education employs in fos-
tering “Future Teachers of America.”

In advancing selective recruitment, Synod should not overlook the
need for more intensive indoctrination concerning the meaning of
Christian vocation and of the stewardship of talent.

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