EDUCATION POLICY.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 190, 13 July 1936, Page 9

EDUCATION POLICY.

SECULAR SYSTEM CRITICISED. Condemning it as a root-cause of present-day social evils, Rev. Father Her!iliy criticised the secular system of education when speaking in St. Patrick’s Church, last evening. Our civilisation still called itself Christian, he said, after scrapping most of wluit once made it Christian. The cause of the widespread return to paganism in recent years was to lie found in the system of secular education which had divorced religion from education and banished God from the schools. Such a system of education where children heard nothing about God, or His claims on man, or man’s obligations to Him, could only, result in false standards of morality and a pagan outlook on life. Hence a plentiful crop of ev'ls in which social injustice and class-war was only one item. In Soviet Russia, where the Government had deliberately adopted a system of Godless education in its worst form —atheistic, anti-God education—the result had been a prolific harvest of juvenile crime. In other countries where Godless education prevailed, juvenile crime was greatly on the increase. Even here in little Now Zealand the statements of magistrates and others who had to deal with youthful delinquents were not reassuring. The Catholic Church in New Zealand had for years been seeking from the Government justice for its schools—not charity nor kindly_ benevolence, but plain, simple justice—because it was educating Now Zealand children on Christian lines to be good New Zealand citizens. So far, that claim for justice had been persistently and consistently disregarded. Would it be too much to hope that a Government which had set out as its programme to do justice to ■ its citizens might give this just and honourable claim its proper consideration, and at the same time help to stem the advancing tide of paagnism that is threatening Christian civilisation P