PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION A PERIL TO_ CIVILIZATION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 13, 18 July 1884, Page 29

PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION A PERIL TO_ CIVILIZATION.

(Sam, Francisco Monitor') The Boston, Herald recently contained a communication entitled " A Word to Women," in which the writer — herself the mother of several children who were attending public schools in that city — sent forth a warning voice to every mother in the land concerning the dangers which beset their daughters, especially, in consequence~of the vicious habits that prevail in these mixed schools. Here is the heartfelt cry of a faithful mother who mourns over the fate of her own and her neighbour's children : — " I want to appeal to the women who care for the children, not only for our own, whom the most watchful motherly care cannot always save from the perils of the world, but especially for the thousands who have little help to make them good and strong, except the teachings and influences of the public schools. Oh, sisters, the purity •ad power for good of this institution .is weakening rapidly. The community,' full of necessary and unnecessary cares, seems blind to it, or hopeless about it, and moves not. Whereas once every teacher took almost a parental oversight and thought for every moral and and physical interest of their charge, from the hour in which the children came out from their homes until they re-entered them, and felt, as the noble head of one of our normal schools expressed at a late convention, that • responsibility is measured only by possible opportunity,' now, with a few exceptions, enforced obedience to school rules during school hours seems to he the sum of endeavour. " Charming lessons in some favourite science absorb the free hours oE the week, which are the teachers' golden opportunity to impress never-to-be-forgotten principles of morals, manners, and health upon those young hearts and minds. For lack of these, they are being turned out a peril to civilisation. Weakened, body and nerve, by smoking, by beer, and by vile reading, they feel unfit for work, and ready only to imitate the heroes of their literature, in gaining a living without labour. If girls, there are equally imminent 'danger* of similar reading, of late hours, of walking tbe streets in the evening, of accepting the apparently harmless " soda water " from some slight street acquaintance. This is no newspaper bagbear. It is knowledge gained by years of voluntary work and observation among, not only the people of the North End, but the better working classes of the West and South End. The children of these busy men and women have not had the watch, care and exhortation individually from masters and honoured men of the School Board which the parents lad even fifteen or twenty years ago. And all the school conventions of the country are beginning to wonder why those upon whom so much money has been spent are not being turned out more fit for citizenship. What answer ? " Every word written by this mother is true. Public school education is rapidly becoming what she truthfully calls "a peril to civilisation." Such children as are educated in public schools have n? reverence for parental authority ; they treat their parents as if they yere inferior to them ; they seem to enjoy nothing that is pure and innocent, but all their pastime must be flavoured with blasphemy and c irroded by vice. The books they read are rotten with immoral thoughts and unchaste sentiments ; profanity and impurity are known to them before they are out of their pinafores : and we see the result of all such educational training in the hideous, hidden sins of society in every State in the Union. Civilisation, therefore, cannot progress under such a system of education as that carried on ia public schools. Such institutions may turn out " smart " scholars, but their smartness will lead them, eventually, to develop into wicked men and wanton women to whom tbe commands of God and the Christian virtues will become|an abomination. Our asylums, hospitals, insane asylums, and prisons are rapidly filling up with educated men and women whose very intelligence made them all the more dangerous to society. And it is in this light that we recognise the truth of the assertion that for want of- religious and moral teaching the youth educated in public schools w 11 become "a peril to civilisation."