Additional coverage of the annual Campus Education Week will appear in the Aug. 28 issue of the Church News.

PROVO, Utah — "Youth is the time for easy learning, and that is why the teachers of children and youth have been a concern for Church leaders from the very beginning," President Boyd K. Packer said at the commencement of the 77th annual Campus Education Week at BYU Aug. 17.

Attending with his wife, Donna, President Packer, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve, declared to the Marriott Center audience, "It is consummately important to teach the gospel and life's lessons to children and youth. The Lord places the first responsibility upon parents. . . . It is the basic purpose of this Church to teach the youth: first in the home and then in Church."

"Knowledge stored in young minds may wait many years for the moment when it might be needed," President Packer observed.

To illustrate, he repeated the story he told in the last general conference to explain the dedication of bishops. The story came to his mind 50 years after he heard it in a conversation with a fellow high councilor in a stake where he lived. It was about Emery Wight, a bishop in Harper Ward in rural Box Elder County, Utah. A neighbor, noting that Bishop Wight's team of horses had been standing idle, hitched to a plow in a field, with Bishop Wight nowhere in sight, had become alarmed. Alerting Bishop Wight's wife, Lucille, he was told, "Oh, don't be alarmed. No doubt someone is in trouble and came to get the bishop."

"The image of that team of horses standing for hours in the field symbolizes the dedication of the bishops of the Church and of the counselors who stand by their side," President Packer said in that general conference address.

Recalling the sermon, he said to the Education Week attenders that he had never before used that experience in a talk, but it occurred to him at the moment he needed it and served his purpose as a teacher.

In preparation for the talk and to fix the story in his mind, he said, he asked a daughter of Emery Wight to meet him at the family's old home and show him the field where her father would have been plowing that day. One of President Packer's sons took a number of pictures of the spot.

That experience and some of the events that grew out of it caused President Packer to reflect on another lesson.

While his children were growing, he devoted his time to teaching them things he had learned about life and about carving and painting pictures when he was a boy.

"The ability to carve now is largely lost to me, but not to our children," he said. "We taught them when they were young."

President Packer hesitantly undertook to paint the image of the team standing idle in the field, even though it had been nine years since he had painted a picture. From his sons — the one who took the photographs and another one who decided to do a bronze sculpture based upon President Packer's painting — he "could draw back from our children something they had learned when they were young," he said.

"And so there came back that which we had given to those sons in their youth," he explained. "As with our other children, they have improved upon that which we as parents taught them when they were very young."

Teaching children brings its own reward, President Packer noted, adding, "Have you learned that when you teach you learn more from teaching than do your children from learning?"

He said there is a difference between acquiring temporal knowledge and acquiring spiritual knowledge: With temporal knowledge one cannot remember what one has not learned in the first place. "But spiritually, we can draw on a memory that goes back beyond our birth. We may develop a sensitivity to things that were not understood when we were younger."

While some wait for compelling spiritual experiences to confirm their testimony, "it doesn't work that way," he said. "It is the quiet promptings and impressions of ordinary things that give us the assurance of our identity as children of God. We live far below our privileges when we seek after signs and look 'beyond the mark' for marvelous events."

Noting that revelations about "who we are and of our place in the eternal scheme of things" come when one is teaching, he quoted President Marion G. Romney as saying, "I always know when I am speaking under the influence of the Holy Ghost, because I always learn something from what I have said."

President Packer said he occasionally receives letters of apology from people who have initially felt resentful about something he has said in a public talk. "Then, out of struggles, there emerges an insight, an inspiration, an understanding of causes and effects. Finally comes the understanding of why the gospel is as it is.

"I mention one among several subjects. A sister may finally come to see why we stress the importance of mothers staying at home with their children. She understands that no service equals the exalting refinement which comes through unselfish motherhood. Nor does she need to forgo intellectual, social or cultural refinement. Those things are fitted in — in proper time — for they attend the everlasting virtue which comes from teaching children."

He added that no teaching is equal to, more spiritually rewarding, or more exalting than that of a mother teaching her children, though the mother may feel inadequate in scripture scholarship because she is occupied in leading her family.

"She will not receive a lesser reward," President Packer declared. "A man will be hard-pressed to equal that measure of spiritual refinement which accrues naturally to his wife as she teaches their children. If he understands the gospel at all, he knows that he cannot be exalted without her."

He pointed out that the promise in D&C 88:78 is to the teacher rather than the student.

" 'Teach ye diligently and my grace shall attend you [who teach your children or Primary, Sunday School, Young Women and Young Men, priesthood, seminary, Relief Society]," President Packer quoted.