RELIGION IN SCHOOLS

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 36, 13 February 1911, Page 2

RELIGION IN SCHOOLS

PLEA FOR CALM AND REASONA3LE | DISCUSSION. 1 * BISHOP CLEAEY SPEAKS. [Bit TSLEGBAPH — SPECIAL TO THE POST.) AUCKLAND, This Day. Bishop Oleary, in the course of a statement to a Star reporter regarding the education question, said : "It ia well that this vital matter of education should be discussed and discussed frequently by the right persons and in a calm and reasonings way. Unfortunately in many cases the discussion evolves more heat than light, and again unfortunately, it has thus far been practically impossible for the many Catholio and Protestant friends of religious education to induce the champions of th« purely secular system to defend that system by an appeal to the only arguments by which it can b? properly upheld, namely, by an appeal to a philosophy of life and to the principles of pedagogy (that is, of the science of j teaching). We hear a good deal of the argument of political expediency, which, at best, is only of conditional value or relevancy. We hear much of the plea of a public feeling which is not necessarily a well-instructed or enduring one. We hear the doctrine of 'accomplished facts' pushed in this matter further than pressmen or politicians are prepared to push it in other things, and so on, but we have yet to seS- the divorce of religion from education defended on pedagogical grounds by persons believing in God and revealed religion All true education is a vital and continuous process. It involves the training of all the faculties of the child, of the conscience and the will as well as of " the Intelligence-, and those three chi^f agencies of education — the home, tha school, and the church — should display unity and harmony in their pedagogical , or child-forming action. All that is best in the domestic and social and religious life of the child should b© introduced as matter of course into his school life. Religion should thus enter into all the processes of education. If religion is good and necessary in the home, on what' pedagogical principle can, it be useless or mischievous in the school? Why treat the school life of a Christian child as something apart from its life as a Christian? Why take the child at its most impressionable years and keep it during its school hours utterly aparfc from the knowledge of God, from the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom, and from the love of Him which is its end ? On what pedagogical principle do we sweep out of our schools those doctrines and principles of Christianity which are so intimately bound up with our ideas of right and wrong ? The divorce of religion from education has been one of the means adopted ever since the eighteenth century by the various schools of anti-Christian philosophy to draw Christian children into scepticism and unbelief."