CODE IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22533, 15 October 1938, Page 19

CODE IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

♦ "RELIGION AN EXTRA" WARNING GIVEN CONFERENCE " OF CHURCHMEN crmoK oub en eouuroniß.) LONDON, September 8. Mr J. T. Christie, headmaster of Westminster School, addressing the Modern Churchmen's Conference at Loughborough, gave a warning about the wrong emphasis which ] might be imparted to religious teaching, particularly in public schools—the substitution of conduct for religion. He told the conference:— "The public schools, like all thoroughly English institutions, give a vast importance to behaviour. All the powers of religion are enlisted on the side of good conduct, sermons are exhortations to play the game, confirmation is a clearing house for past failures and future resolves, and private prayers are an expended version of 'Please make me a good boy.' '•I know that this state of things is passing away. I also know how unfair it is as a description of what is going on. But much of it is still left, both in schoolboys and adults, and its effects are obvious. It substitutes conduct for religion; it forgets that no religion has ever begun by proclaiming: 'You ought to do so and so'; it centres the mind on self. its failures and successes, and it supersedes the unattainable ideal of the Christian life by the eminently accessible ideal of the good fellow and the gentleman, which may be. low or may be high according to the. varying tone of the community. "Meantime, religion itself is regarded as an extra, a cult for those who like that sort of thing. This substitution of ethics for religion is one of the worst and commonest betrayals of the religious ideal of education." Natural Religion Mr Christie spoke of the need for safeguarding the natural religious instincts of adolescents. There was a religious instinct, he said, in the mind of the very young child, as any visitor to a nursery could testify. "The two nicest people I know," a child of four once said to her mother, "are God and Trotty," Trotty being the nurse. In many homes 30 years ago and in some to-day that remark would

have been branded as irreverent and met with a sort of shocked face. thus suppressing the little growth of religion in a wild state, and possibly the chance would have been taken to impress some fragment of dogmatic theological religion for wfaicii the tender mind was absurdly unprepared. That was the way in which permanent harm was done to the natural growth of a religious ideal. It had two effects. The religious instinct would not find a naturaLoutlet in any religious observance, and mature Christianity as represented by adults would be associated with what was compulsory and full of prohibitions. There were many to-day suffering from repressed religion. Repression and arrested development of this ini sthvt toward the unseen would result quite as surely in frustration and phobia as the repression of other social instincts. '