Some of Bell’s first students were two of James and Ellen White’s sons, Willie and Edson. Founder Goodloe Bell’s approach to education fits the description, “wholistic” - that of educating the mind, body, and spirit. Battle Creek Academy students and staff, circa 1945. The elementary and high school levels expanded into a 13-grade school in Battle Creek and today celebrates the one-hundred-fiftieth year of the Seventh-day Adventist education system in 2022.
With that meager start, Bell’s Select School grew into Battle Creek College, which included elementary and high school classes its college classes were moved to Berrien Springs in 1901, becoming at first Emmanuel Missionary College, and now Andrews University. Thus, private tutoring began on the first floor of the Review and Herald Publishing building. It was Willie White who, while not keen on learning English, ended up as the one to challenge Bell to be their teacher. It seems some young boys who wanted school learning begged him. The slender, humbly attired, long-bearded educator, Bell, who started his teaching career at a one-teacher country school at age 19 after a short stint at Oberlin College in Ohio, didn’t apply for the task even though he was out of work. This did not negate that others had tried with homeschools to educate as far back as 1853 with Martha Byington teaching in Bucks Bridge, New York. Up to that time, Adventists, for the most part, did not seriously consider formal education. By 1872, the denomination’s leaders voted to officially support Adventist education. Yet Goodloe Harper Bell, who took up the challenge in 1867, is considered the first of the denomination’s sponsored teachers.
A young widower with four young daughters - largely self-educated, newly introduced to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and a recent patient of the Western Reform Health Institute (forerunner of Battle Creek Sanitarium) - might seem like an unlikely teacher to launch a worldwide, denominationally sponsored education system.
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