RELIGION IN EDUCATION

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27992, 12 June 1956, Page 8

RELIGION IN EDUCATION

APPLICATION TO ALL SUBJECTS COMMENT BY BISHOP WARREN The importance of a religious education was emphasised by the Bishop of Christchurch, the Rt. Rev. A. K. Warren, speaking at a service in the Christchurch Cathedral to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Cathedral Grammar School. ‘‘The Cathedral Chapter are not siving the board considerable support in maintaining the school for nothing.” he said. ‘‘We are not in the educational arena for the sake of providing just anv kind of education.

“Archbishop Temple, not only one of the greatest thinkers England has produced of late generations, but himself an experienced headmaster, said: ‘An education which is not religious is atheistic; there is no middle wav. If you give children an account of the world from which God is left out, you are teaching them to understand the world without reference to God. If He is then introduced He becomes an apnendix to His own creation.’ “If we treat religion as of such little importance that it can afford to be ignored, we are not being neutral: we have made a positive decision against religion. If we merely include Bible teaching in the school curriculum it is no complete solution. While it is better than nothing, it is not enough because it is not only Divinity, as a subject, which is related to God. who made the universe, but all learning. “As my old tutor. Professor Hodgson, has put it—religious education does not mean education in a particular subject, buV a peculiar kind of education in all subjects. That is teaching all subjects from a Christian point of view.

“There is no advance in knowledge or science which, if it is true, that religion need be afraid of. for all truth is a revelation of God,’’ said Bishop Warren.