Article June 1, 1987 Issue

Peace in the schoolroom

When schools become battlegrounds, can a teacher's silent prayer help restore peace?

Bess G. Ward

One morning after a vacation break, just when my first-grade class had happily settled down to work, Sam walked in. From his previous record, I found that he'd been held back in his former school for two years because of his ungovernable behavior. In all my years of public-school teaching I'd never been faced with a child who had this kind of background. His needs proved to be a definite challenge—not only to my classroom skills but to my understanding of the goodness of God and man, which I had been gaining through the study of Christian Science.

I should explain that from the beginning of each school year, I would pray every day to establish in my own thought the fact that God's government is all-encompassing. His government includes the fathering and mothering of Love, the harmony and order of Principle, and the intelligent unfolding of divine Mind. In my classroom work with the children as well as in my other contacts, I made an effort to express these spiritual qualities and, to the best of my ability, to nurture them in others. Through my prayer, I was seeing more and more that each of us is actually God's spiritual creation, not a material personality with personal abilities and inabilities.

Now I asked myself, "Can God's government be threatened?" When I acknowledged the spiritual fact that God is the only Mind and man is God's spiritual idea, His image, or expression, I knew there could be no threat. I recalled that the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, writes, "The children of God have but one Mind." Science and Health, p. 470. If in reality we are all the children of God, we cannot be products of racial groups, environment, or educational background. Man naturally expresses God's goodness and intelligence. Each day I continued to pray to perceive everyone in the classroom as he or she truly was—as the spiritual idea of Mind in perfect relationship to God, living in harmony. The spiritual idea of God could not include ignorance, injustice, or lack of love, because man reflects God, perfect Mind, divine Love.

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