RESPONSIBILITY OF FATHERS

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29383, 9 December 1960, Page 19

RESPONSIBILITY OF FATHERS

Moral Training Of

Children

In too many New Zealand homes the father left to the mother the responsibility for the moral training of their children and this was entirely wrong, Monsignor T. Liddy told parents and pupils at the Xavier College prize-giving ceremony last evening.

Parents sent their children to school to receive training from experts in intellectual studies, but although teachers could do much to help a child’s moral training there was no doubt that the parents’ influence, particularly that of the father, was most important. Monsignor Liddy said education was not merely learning the academic content, but learning how to live. Shorter working hours and increasing leisure meant people had to be able to make full use of their leisure.

“Look at the young people you see roaming around the Square. They look bored. They do not know what to do with themselves. Because they are bored they began .to look for things to do, and often it is in the wrong direction. Thus leisure begins to breed licence,” he said.

“Essentially those youths and girls are fundamentally, ignorant. They are not able to think for themselves. They have not been able to assimilate an education which is a training for life. “Remember that in education the moral formation comes first, With intellectual and physical formation second and third.”