By Stacey Kratz
When Welsh immigrant Margaret Powell Evans died, she left her daughter, Jennette, $5,000, directing that “every cent … be used for the education of the children.” Jennette’s four living children, two sons and two daughters, all attended university thanks to their grandmother’s loving forethought and their mother’s faithful acceptance.
Jennette’s children owed their grandmother a debt of gratitude, but so do millions of others: one of those well-educated children was David Oman McKay, longtime apostle and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, deeply influential educator and orator, and namesake of both the McKay School of Education and its main college building.
Education had always been important in the loving Welsh-Scottish family of David and Jennette McKay, and David O., the eldest surviving child, worked hard to set an example for his siblings. Besides excelling in school and working the family farm in Huntsville, Utah, young David took a job delivering newspapers to miners in a nearby town. He used the five-hour one-way trip to read, memorize quotations, and study the scriptures. He later reminisced about occasionally stopping to pray along the way.
Slowly, mile by mile and year by year, David O. McKay gained both spiritual and professional knowledge and came to embody the “double heritage” of learning by faith and practice that embodies a BYU education. As a professional educator, and later as an apostle and revered “Prophet-Teacher,” he often spoke of “true education”—not merely “the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but … the development of character.”
At the dedication of the McKay Building on December 14, 1954, President McKay called the occasion “a soul-stirring hour; in my educational career, the most significant of my life.” He expressed delight that the building would support the studies of “fellow teachers” and spoke earnestly of the responsibility of each person who passed through its doors and classrooms to “instill in the hearts of students a love for truth.”
“Today you place that responsibility not only upon me, but upon those who bear the McKay name,” he told the dedication crowd. Perhaps McKay glimpsed a future in which the college that now bears his name would send its students and faculty across the world wearing shirts and bearing bags emblazoned “McKay,” all of them embodying love for truth and a desire to kindle the light of knowledge in others. On each of their journeys, McKay students honor not just their own light, but the light of 150 years of scholar-disciples as embodied by David O. McKay
“Thousands of students will enter this building seeking truth, and the name that that building connotes carries the responsibility of exemplifying, radiating truth in their lives,” he said in 1954. “Thank you and God bless you, my dear fellow students, and may He direct the thousands who will yet come to this greatest of church universities.”