Education for All
Education for Real Life
By Elder Henry B. Eyring
From a talk given on the 75th anniversary of the Institute of Religion program at a Church Educational System fireside in Moscow, Idaho, on 6 May 2001.
Putting spiritual learning first gives our secular learning purpose.
Conversion brings a drive to learn. From the Restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ in the time of Joseph Smith to our own day, you can see evidence of this. Joseph Smith, as a very young man, translated the Book of Mormon from plates inscribed with a language no one on earth understood. He did it by a divine gift of revelation from God. But he later hired a tutor to teach him and other leaders of the Church ancient languages. Joseph Smith had essentially no formal schooling, yet the effect of the gospel of Jesus Christ on him was to make him want to learn more so that he could be more useful to God and to God’s children.
When the Latter-day Saints were driven from Missouri by mobs, they built a city on the banks of the Mississippi River. They named it Nauvoo. In their poverty and on the western edges of the country, they formed a university.
“In 1840, Joseph Smith sought the incorporation of the City of Nauvoo, Illinois, and along with it authority to establish a university. The Nauvoo charter included authority to ‘establish and organize an institution of learning within the limits of the city, for the teaching of the arts, sciences and learned professions, to be called the “University of the City of Nauvoo’” [quoted in H. S. Salisbury, “History of Education in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Journal of History, July 1922, 269].
“The first academic year in Nauvoo was that of 1841–42. The university probably was among the first municipal universities in the United States [see Wendell O. Rich, Distinctive Teachings of the Restoration (1962), 10]. … The curriculum included languages (German, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew), mathematics, chemistry and geology, literature, and
By Elder Henry B. Eyring
From a talk given on the 75th anniversary of the Institute of Religion program at a Church Educational System fireside in Moscow, Idaho, on 6 May 2001.
Putting spiritual learning first gives our secular learning purpose.
Conversion brings a drive to learn. From the Restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ in the time of Joseph Smith to our own day, you can see evidence of this. Joseph Smith, as a very young man, translated the Book of Mormon from plates inscribed with a language no one on earth understood. He did it by a divine gift of revelation from God. But he later hired a tutor to teach him and other leaders of the Church ancient languages. Joseph Smith had essentially no formal schooling, yet the effect of the gospel of Jesus Christ on him was to make him want to learn more so that he could be more useful to God and to God’s children.
When the Latter-day Saints were driven from Missouri by mobs, they built a city on the banks of the Mississippi River. They named it Nauvoo. In their poverty and on the western edges of the country, they formed a university.
“In 1840, Joseph Smith sought the incorporation of the City of Nauvoo, Illinois, and along with it authority to establish a university. The Nauvoo charter included authority to ‘establish and organize an institution of learning within the limits of the city, for the teaching of the arts, sciences and learned professions, to be called the “University of the City of Nauvoo’” [quoted in H. S. Salisbury, “History of Education in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Journal of History, July 1922, 269].
“The first academic year in Nauvoo was that of 1841–42. The university probably was among the first municipal universities in the United States [see Wendell O. Rich, Distinctive Teachings of the Restoration (1962), 10]. … The curriculum included languages (German, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew), mathematics, chemistry and geology, literature, and