STATE AND EDUCATION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26783, 28 May 1948, Page 6

STATE AND EDUCATION

Sir,—May’ I disregard Balzac's advice and lay hands upon an idol in the hope that some of the gilt will thereby be removed. “ Presbyterian Elder’s ” “ fundamental, irrefutable ” Mentor “ seems to me to warrant neither epithet. On the contrary, where his argument is not demonstrably inadequate, he wraps himself in an abominable tangle of words. “A revival of spiritual belief "—good, sound, orthodox stuff, this; comes trippingly from the tongue! Yes, but what on earth does it mean? Belief in the divinity of Christ? Funny reverential feelings when the moon is full and the stars clear? A vague fear of ghosts on 3 windy night? Come, “ Mentor,” have we overshot Plato that you thus scorn definition?

And now to this ” fundamental and irrefutable argument.” Shorn of the rhetoric, it seems to be that once you admit the principle it is hard to limit the application. This is but a cloak for prejudice and an 111-woven one at that. Precisely the same objection can be raised with precisely the same force against any principle from private property to free speech. In point of fact, several ways of limiting the application spring to mind. The most obvious is to give private schools aid roughly equivalent to the amount contributed in taxation for educational purposes by the group concerned. On such a basis neither Moslem nor Rationalist is likely to cause complications. There is not, I think, on any graven tablet given from Sinai or the hills about Dunedin the eternal command “ education shall be the direct monopoly 'of State secularism.” That it hds in large measure become so is in large measure due to a series of historical accidents in which Mr Bowen’s spleen is of less importance than the Reformation, Rouseau or utilitarianism. “Inspired compromise” is hardly the term for a rehash of ideas which had been hawked round Europe for centuries. Scotland, Canada, Holland, Belgium—these countries have departed without disintegration from “ Mentor’s ” “ miraculously achieved balance." Their standards of education are not noticeably lower than our own. I have even met the dastard who maintained that Louvain with all its obscene ritual and sterile syllogisms, 'is as good a university as Otago. * Would “ Mentor ” believe it, but there are arguments in favour of aiding, denominational schools which are more profound than ingenious? It is said, for instance, that since man has a soul to save as well as a civil life to lead, his education cannot be wholly, of even chiefly, the concern of the Stsite. It is also said that in the natural moral order the right of education is vested primarily in the parents, and in the State only by derivation. How far these propositions may be justified I am not sure, but they touch at the roots of human nature and destiny. They call for an answer other than the easy sneers of anonymity. 11 “Mentor" will forget for a moment the problems of application and think on principles he will become at once lesa superficial and more etc..