A Theology of Education

Chauncey Richardson
An Address on Education: Delivered Before the Educational Convention of Texas, in the City of Houston, January, 1846
1846
(New York)

Chauncey Richardson, a Methodist preacher, was the first president of Rutersville College. At Houston in 1846 Richardson presided at what was probably the first educational convention held in the state. The convention published this copy of Richardson’s Address on Education shortly thereafter. Richardson espouses religious education as the key to a stable country, referencing the French as examples of powerful minds without the advantage of religious education, “cut loose from all the restraints of conscience and moral obligation” that “deluged France with an ocean of blood.” Christian education “can look beyond temporary engagements and momentary results,” Richardson expresses. The physical, intellectual, and moral education of its citizens was a marker of permanence and attainment for Methodist Texans.

Orceneth Asbury Fisher
[Sermon on Education Delivered at Paine Female Institute]
18uu 

Orceneth Fisher, circuit preacher and chaplain of the Congress of the Republic of Texas, served as a minister in Texas until 1855 and again from 1870 to his death in 1880. Fisher delivered this sermon on education at Paine Female Institute, a Methodist women’s college chartered in 1852 in Goliad under the direction of the Texas Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Methodist preachers were required by the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Book of Discipline to preach on the value of education at least once a year in areas that were home to colleges. Like Richardson, Fisher also prescribes a balance of physical, intellectual, and moral education; “Physical alone will not do – result in the brutality of the prize ring or the cruelty of the savage,” his sermon notes read.

Francis Asbury Mood
A Theory of Education: an Address Delivered Before the Holston Conference Female College, at Asheville, N.C., May 4th 1859
1859
(Hendersonville: Religious Herald Printers) 

Southwestern University founder F.A. Mood delivered a commencement address before the Holston Conference Female College at Asheville, North Carolina in 1859, published that year as a pamphlet entitled “A theory on education.” Perhaps foreshadowing his later difficulties in Texas, Mood notes “to such a mind [that has learned to think], no time is inopportune, no spot of earth is sterile.” He describes a relationship between modes of education and the state of a nation’s politics, drawing the same conclusions about secular France as Chauncey Richardson: “Separated by a small arm of the sea, both in the highway of nations, with equal national ambition and intellectual power, to-day, while England is educated and free, France is a despotism, with its masses in ignorance.” Such a contrast illustrates Mood’s later vision for what education could achieve in Texas.