Hr Matthew Arnold on Education.

Waipawa Mail, Volume X, Issue 1022, 14 December 1886, Page 2

Hr Matthew Arnold on Education.

Mr Matthew Arnold addressed tho following words to an American audience on his experience with common schools abroad : I think I have inentionod somewhere or other liow much I was struck with a remark made to me more than twenty years ago by Cardinal Antonelli, at Rome. I was visiting popular schools on tho continent, when he said : “So you have come to see our schools ? and many people would tell you that our popular education is nothing, nothing at all, or next to nothing, and that you will not bo ablo to find anything to report about to your government. But tell them this ; that illiterate as tho Italian population is said to bo and I suppose is, yet, if you mix with the people at any festival and listen to their criticisms of what they see, you will find it to be utmost invariably right. And a people, “ he continued,” of whom that can be said, must surely be allowed to have a certain sort of education.” . .

1 thought of the stolid insensibility to ugliness, the inability to discern between good aud evil, where the beautiful is concerned, which besots our Anglo-Saxon race, and I acquiesced in what tho Cardinal said. And at the same moment there arose in my mind the adinirul sentence of a Moravian school-master iu tho l?ih century, John Comeuius, fixing the universal scope aud aim of oducution. The aim,” says Comeuius is the train generally all who are born men, to all that is human.' 1 Surely, to be offended by ugliness, to be delighted and refreshed by beauty, is eminently human. In England, religion is excluded from the official programme of the popular schools. If it is taught, it is taught outside of the official school-hours, .and subject to private and local . regulation. Religious liberty, it is said, requires this. If religion is taught at the public expeuse, what religion is it to be ? If it is tho religion of the majority, tho minority aro aggrieved. Religion, therefore, must not be prescribed in school-hours at all. Well, in Germany they no more hesitate to make the religion approved by the majority a school matter for fear a minority should object, iu tho name of religious liberty, to its being taught, than they hesitate to make tho literature approved by the majority a school matter for fear the minority should object, in the name of intellectual liberty, to its being taught. In German countries, German Switzerland for instance, religion stands as one of the foremost subjects of instruction in tho popular school, instead of being, ns in England, a subject not laid out or noticed in official programmes, a subject which inspectors and official people are told to avoid, it is a subject laid out with tho greatest care, and in which inspectors examine with special diligouco and interest.

Iu general, one may say that three religious denominations, and uo more, aro recognised in German schools, the Evangelical or Protestant, tho Catholic, aud the Jewish. Between Catholics and Protestants, tho public authority deals, both in theory and in practice, with absolute fairness. There is no persecution and no proselytism. So fair is tho action of the administration, and so complete is tho confidence of the people in its fairness, that in the lower classes of the Evangelical or Catholic schools you not unfrcquenttly find that the Evangelical or Catholic minority take the religious instruction, with the consent of parents, along with the majority. In the upper classes, the law requires the minority in these mixed schools to be sepurajed aud to receive religious instruction fiom teachers of their own commuuion.

With us,|(in England), the difficulty of including religion in the school programme is caused by the sects of Protestantism. Everybody knows how our Protestantism breaks into sects. There is an instructive list of them in Whittaker’s Almanack. One might say that amongst our Anglo-Saxon raoe a new seot often arose front the mere pleasure of making one. And these sects in England would cry out against a religious instruction based on the formularies of the established church, of any one great body of the Protestants ; but throughout Protestant Germany the religious instruction in Protestant schools is based on the Lutheran catechism, the Evangelic hymn book, aud Bible, and all denominations are expected to follow it. With ns, the individual judges what degree of diversity among religionists renders separate religious instruction necessary; in Germany, tho law.

I do not tldnk that in Germany, where the spirit of sect has been less carefully cultivated, than amongst ourselves, Protestants in general feel tho obligatory religious inst ruction of the public school to be any hardship. I could not hoar of any complaints on tiro subject. But I was very curious to learn how the woiking classes in the German cities who are said to bo greatly estranged from tho Christian religion, took tbe obligatory religious instruction of their ohildren. I asked an inspector what ho thought, and ho said, “They do not like it, but they have to submit to it.” lie added that the religious instruction did the children good ; that the mothers in general could percieve this, and some even of the secularist fathers.

I spoke on the same subject when I was at Berlin, with a man whoso name will be 'received with respect in any university, Professor Mommsen, the celebrated historian. I told him I was surprised to find after all I had heard of tho decay of Protestaut religion in Germany, how important a place it still held in the programme of the public schools. He agreed that it did so, and lie too thought it was a good thing. He quoted to mo the words of Goethe, “ Ho who has art and science, has religion. He who lias not art and science, let him have religion.” The popular school, lie said, is for those who have no art or science. To leave religion out of its programme, therefore, woqld be a great mistake, . . , , t As to the French schools. The moral and civic instruction in them seemed to bo poor stuff, and I saw no signs of its touching the soul or mind of anybody receiving it. Moral teaching for the yonng people is generally dull; aud when it is conveyed into stories, the story may interest, but the moral is apt to be lost sight of. As to civic teaching, the most remarkable specimen of it which I have met with I will mention, for it is worth mentioning. “ Who gives you” stpd flip “ questioner to the children J’ ajl the liencfitij you are enjoying ? These fine school buildings with all their appliances, jour instructors, this beautiful city where you live, everything iu which the comfort and security of your life exists?” I wt. 3 attentive, for I said to myself: Surely the child must be goiug to answer ‘-‘God gives me all this.” And yet the name of God must not bo used iu u school of the Municipality of Paris. But the civic instruction proved equal to the occasion, and a legitimate answer caino from the child. ‘ it is our country gives us all this." The force of civic instruction could hardly co further.