SCHOOLS FOR LOVERS.

Evening Star, Issue 12881, 2 August 1906, Page 3

SCHOO LS FOR LOVERS.

The Bishop of Ripon made some novel suggestions on May 25 at the annual meeting. the Parents’ National Educational Union, London. The Earl of Lytton. who presided, also said that, while the House of Commons Were disagreeing about the schools, be hoped the Union would find some agreement about the homes, for the influence and place of the home in education was one of their chief concerns. The Bishop of Ripon, in the course of a lengthy and interesting address, said that the most succinct as well as the most suggestive answer to the question “ When should the education of a child begin?” was, with its grandparents. The proper education of children really depended upon the education of the parents, and even grandparents, and the more that statement was studied the more would the apparently comic element in it disappear. The value of such a movement as theirs was primarily the value of it to the parents of this country, rather than the value of it to the children. Whilst young people specialised in all sorts of professions and callings, training for the occupation of parenthood was almost entirely neglected. He should like to see established a nice little educational home for engaged couples.—(Laughter.) It would be a very great mercy to many of them if there could be a little resting home for them on the eve of marriage. The education of children was too important a thing to be left to parental in-

stinct. The aim of every educational institution should be to make every man a gentleman in the nobler sense of the word, so that there would-be some things that he would scoirn to do. ; This country would never have what he called' ideal home life nntu it had become recognised, as a public, convention, so to speak, that the mother was to be free to give all her time and her thought to the home that God jjad given her. Education would be less controversial if they directed their thoughts more to character. In their eagerness for. education they forgot often this indispensable central thing. The Parents’ National Educational Union laid down very clearly its true conception of how character was to be built up—by the discipline of the body, the development of the mind, the strengthening of the powers of will, and the bringing ont into fitting proportions the noble moral instincts and the quickening of the sonl into that central power which he ventured to call the Apprehension of the Divine.