# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1941_S139
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Elementary Education 187

children attend also the Sunday-school and have already been
counted in the 92,479. Others are from non-Lutheran homes.
“And quite a number attend several of these additional part-time
agencies and are therefore counted two or three times. The
enrolment in these agencies may, for this reason, not be subtracted
“from the. 70,095 in the table above who do not attend the Sunday-
school and apparently receive no formal. instruction outside of
. the. confirmation class. It is our opinion and hope that some of
these 70,095 children do receive some kind of formal instruction
not classified under the agencies usually named. But it is impera-
tive that synodical officials.and boards investigate this situation.
What should arrest our attention in particular is the danger
to which 73 per cent. of our children are exposed, whose entire
elementary school-life is spent in a system of education which
must of necessity be secular. Do we fully recognize this danger —
to the individual, the home, the congregation, the Church? Nor is
this all. The great majority of our membership is now being
trained in secular or non-synodical institutions; for in addition to
the 162,574 children attending the public schools before confirma-
tion, we have approximately 100,000 who attend the public high
schools after confirmation and additional thousands in secular or
non-synodical colleges and universities. Many of these have, of
course, attended a parochial school. This is a total of about
270,000 as compared with about 66,000 (65,981, to be exact) in our
elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and seminaries, and
Valparaiso University — a ratio of more than 4to1. Can we expect
- to maintain our truly Lutheran integrity in doctrine and practice
under such conditions? Can we be content when so many %f our
children and youth attend schools where unbelief, materialism,
atheism, and other soul-destroying influences are an ever-present
danger?

We submit that the religious instruction given to those children
and young people is, on the whole, inadequate to counteract the
generally adverse or non-Lutheran influence of their schooling.
Granted that many children in secular schools do not suffer ship-
wreck in the faith, the important point is that such children are
exposed to spiritual dangers and deprived of a Christ-centered
education, of a thorough indoctrination, of adequate training, for
a truly Christian life such as God has enjoined the parents and
the Church to provide for the youth. Besides, it is pedagogically
wrong that a child or youth should receive a wholly non-Lutheran,
non-religious education in the school and the only correct world-
view outside of the regular school hours, often at an hour when
he is not in the mood to learn. It must be remembered that the
majority of our children now receive formal religious instruction
only on Sundays, while during the week their schooling is definitely