1946 – 2026 Watching Steinbach Grow: P.S. Guenther taught 1,807 during his 41-year career

Friday afternoon, June 29, 1962, P.S. Guenther left his Grade 7 classroom at Elmdale School in Steinbach for the final time as a teacher, marking the end of 41 years of administering the essentials of education to a grand total of 1,807 elementary school pupils.

Reflecting on a career spanning more than four decades, Guenther said if he were a young man, just graduating from high school, and had it to do all over again, he would still become a school teacher.

“There is no greater satisfaction in life than knowing a person has contributed something lasting and beneficial to the life of someone else. The teaching profession offers an incomparable opportunity to make this sort of contribution.”

Starting out at Randolph School at Chortitz in the fall of 1920, Guenther took up teaching more or less just as a matter of earning a little money on a permit-teaching basis. He didn’t know whether he would like it or not, but thought he would give it a try anyway.

He liked the job, and the people of Randolph apparently liked him too, as they boosted his salary to encourage him to return for a second year. The following year, Guenther went to Normal School in Winnipeg to become a full-fledged schoolmaster.

Looking back on his 41 years as a teacher, Guenther said he learned many valuable lessons himself, while trying to teach others.

Asked what changes he witnessed both in students and their parents, over the years, Guenther noted a marked change from the former bilingual outlook of the Mennonite people.

“When I started, there were pupils in my classes without any knowledge of English at all. Although German was taught for only half an hour a day, before long, students in the more advanced grades could read German as well as they could read English.”

That changed after the war, Guenther said. Then students came to school who knew scarcely a word of German.

“People thought that because Hitler was German, Mennonites, who had no connection with Hitler, should drop their mother tongue. The German language never recovered the position it once had in schools, and that is regrettable.”

The attitude of parents towards their teachers also changed over the years. There was a time when, if a child had to be disciplined at school, the parents would take the part of the teacher over a child’s complaints. Today, there are parents who will take the side of the child, without investigating at all.

P.S. Guenther is a great believer in the “drill” as an effective method of teaching, saying no child will remember anything from hearing it just once.

“It takes drill, drill, drill until the facts sink in.”

Another thing to which Guenther feels strongly is that every child should have a good religious training.

“Many today are not taught respect for God and later fall by the wayside. The Bible should be the basic textbook of all textbooks.”

But teaching, for Guenther, was not his only profession. Early in his career, Guenther acquired a piece of land on which he grew potatoes to busy himself and his boys during the two months of summer holidays.

Over the years, he enlarged his farm to 140 acres and built up quite a potato and sugar-beet growing business in combination with teaching school.

Guenther found that working on his field was a welcome method of relaxation after a day at school.

“I could leave school dead tired at 4 p.m., but when I got on the tractor or spend time in the root room, I found it had both a relaxing and stimulating effect.”

Now that he has retired from teaching, Guenther says he would consider selling his potato farm, to a suitable buyer. Otherwise, he will continue to farm for the foreseeable future.