Departmental
The Seventh-day Adventist Church, through its educational program, wishes to help prepare youth for effective citizenship in this land, and rewarding citizenship in the new land. The educational program gives primary importance to the building of character and the spiritual foundation of the lives of its children and youth. Furthermore, it makes abundant provision for the acquisition and interpretation of what is appropriate from the body of common secular knowledge and skills for mental, social, vocational, and physical development.
Also, given that Adventist education is comprehensive; that is, it encompasses the life of man as a whole. Human works, institutions and history are viewed from the point of view of the divine origin of man and his destiny revealed in the Word of God. Human freedom, both academic and personal, seeks a progressive search and discovery of the truth that existed first in the mind of God and has been allowed to be rediscovered by man through revelation, study, reflection, and investigation. The final product should be, not an isolated intellectual, but a more mature and dedicated Christian.
The Department of Education exists for the purpose of promoting the cause of Christian education and of giving advice in the establishment, supervision, maintenance and operation of the schools, colleges and universities of the denomination in the territory of the Inter-American Division.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church, through its educational program, wishes to help prepare youth for effective citizenship in this land, and rewarding citizenship in the new land. The church’s educational program places primary importance on building the character and spiritual foundation of the lives of its children and youth. Furthermore, it makes abundant provision for the acquisition and interpretation of what is appropriate from the body of common secular knowledge and skills for mental, social, vocational, and physical development.
OBJECTIVES OF ADVENTIST EDUCATION
Elementary and secondary education. The Seventh-day Adventist Church wishes to provide for all its youth a general education that is within the framework of the science of salvation. They have to study the fundamentals and common branches of knowledge in order to acquire skill and maintain a high level of education.
The church elementary school will help each child to develop (1) affection and appreciation for the privileges, rights, and responsibilities guaranteed to each individual and social group and (2) respect and a healthy attitude toward each unit of society—the home. , the church, the school and the government. The elementary school will offer an organized program that ensures adequate development leading to integral health, both spiritually and physically, mentally and emotionally, providing a basic fund of practical and intellectual knowledge for daily life.
The church-dependent secondary school, based on the results obtained by the primary school, has character building as its basic structure and will try to function realistically, raising the level and maintenance of each student in terms of health, mastery of the fundamental processes of learning, dignified conduct at home, vocational skills, civic instruction, proper use of free time, and ethical maturity. The secondary school, as an instrument of the church’s philosophy, will seek to achieve goals of spiritual dedication, self-development, social adjustment, civic responsibility, and economic efficiency.
The institutions dependent on the church, by doing their work of custody, creativity and evaluation help students to develop values. ethical, religious and social compatible with the philosophy and teachings of the church, values that prepare the graduate for the job of his choice or vocation within the organization or outside it. These institutions also help to develop in their students a higher concept of service to God and men.
In these communities of intellectuals, special efforts will be made to foster an inquisitive spirit that is not content to master the known, but diligently explores the unknown. Adventist intellectuals participate in the enlargement of the islands of knowledge that exist in the vast seas of the unknown that surround humanity. Higher education requires the application of research and evaluation techniques existing in the laws of evidence. Both the Christian educator and the advanced student employ the systems of evidence of reason and science, but they also recognize the validity of divine revelation, to which they accord supreme status.