WIDER BASIS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27038, 24 March 1949, Page 6

WIDER BASIS

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION INCLUSION OF HIGHER INSTITUTIONS PA WELLINGTON, Mar. 22. An organisation to provide for religious instruction in all spheres of education in the Dominion was set up in Wellington to-day to be known as the New Zealand Council of Christian Education. This body will incorporate the present Bible-in-Schools League, which was established nearly 30 years ago, and continue the league’s work on a much wider basis. Discussing the, new council to-night, the Rev. D. D. MacLachlan (Christchurch) and Mr H. J. Mackie, president of the Canterbury branch of the league, said its establishment was a culmination of suggestions made to the league in 1943 by the National Council of Churches. These suggestions envisaged carrying the league’s work, which was concerned with primary schools only, into secondary schools, training colleges and universities. Although most secondary schools had their own arrangements for religious instruction, the National Council felt that such instruction would be better implemented if it were part of a coordinated plan. The new body, they continued, would call upon the Dominion’s leading educationists to act as advisers in its work. A committee of five members, two representing primary schools and three the higher institutions of learning, would be set up to assist the president, the Primate of New Zealand, Archbishop West-Watson, and his officers, who in their turn would represent all the churches embodied in the National Council of Churches.