# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1878_S28
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 28 —

...time and effort it costs to bring these young men, who arrive with
no preparatory education at all, to the point where they achieve
something solid both in German and in English. Music instruction alone
— which usually must be given to each student individually, or, when
given to several at once, only in quite small groups — takes up, with
the practice it requires, a very considerable part of the seminary's
time. It is therefore a glaring injustice done to the professors when
the blame for the fact that not all demands, especially in English, are
adequately met is laid at their door. Anyone willing to see should have
enough sense of fairness to admit that quite extraordinary things have
been and are being accomplished with the means available, as could be
shown by a great many examples. But it is within the Synod's power to
create the conditions under which the required degree of proficiency
and soundness can also be achieved in English. It has the power to
grant both time and resources sufficiently. If it does not use this
power of its own, and thereby shirks the duty likewise laid upon it,
the consequence will be that our schools move backward instead of
forward, crushed beneath the wheels of this age's machinery as they
roll over them.

The question was raised here whether, for those seminary students who
are expected to be equal to all the demands placed on them in English,
one could not, after they complete their studies at our institutions,
make use of the so-called English normal schools, which would make
such training in English possible at only modest cost. This question
was answered in the negative, since this kind of training would
plunge our seminary students into a danger they might not be equal to.
For, quite apart from the fact that they would be shown, in the most
tempting way, positions open to them after finishing their studies
paying 1000, 1200, even 1500 dollars and more — as a result of which
they might easily lose their taste for the modest position of a
parish schoolteacher — even if they did enter a congregation's school
service, it would be irresponsible of us to have exposed them to the
danger of the spirit prevailing in the normal schools. This path of
training in English we cannot and must not take. Nothing remains for
us, then, but to give our own seminary the teaching staff by which the
set goal can be reached. — "But the cost? How are we to answer to our
congregations when they must hear from us that, having already
appointed two professors, we have now also given our consent to the
appointment of a third?" So it was asked, and the answer given: To be
sure, thrift is required of us. We too want to be thrifty — only not
in the wrong way and in the wrong place. Many a man saves on his
children's education in order to leave them, the