MORAL EDUCATION.

Evening Star, Issue 14036, 17 April 1909, Page 12

MORAL EDUCATION.

TO THE EDITOR. . Sir, —An International Moral Education Congress assembled recently in London, and a summary of speeches is very instructive—instructive because the tendency of several speakers favored secular over sectarian teaching. Mr J. Allan son Picton said that from 1839 to 1846 he attended a school in Liverpool which was absolutely “ secular,” but if he learned nothing else in the school he did learn morality; the moral stimulus and strength given was disproportionate to anything else. One reason for the moral influences of the school was that the masters were able to he absolutely sincere: they were not committed to any creed or book. The trouble was that the elementary school curriculum included many parts of the Bible which all the teachers were expected to believe, or, at least, to teach as if they believed them. This state of things poisoned the wells of our national life. “Teachers could only teach what they believed.” When they were expected to teach things they did not believe, there was a root of corruption in the system. Let them not he forced into hypocrisy. Another speaker said: “There was" a danger of producing merely skilled functionaries and business men by modern education, instead of good citizens. This must be avoided _ by giving a moral teaching of a strictly secular order, based on the needs of man as a social being, not on the arhdrary will of a supernatural deity. The best they could give their pupils was a love for order and work and a keen sense of duty and justice,

and this would be the new gospel which would redeem the world.” In Portugal they have a manual of moral instructs? for primary schools distinct from religious instruction, sanctioned by the Cardinal of Lisbon.—l am, etc..