SIGNS OF RETURNING SANITY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 45, 8 November 1900, Page 16

SIGNS OF RETURNING SANITY.

Some time ago we published a short anthology of those erica of distress that came from earnest Protestants on witnessing the inarch towards indiiferentism or infidelity which begins at the door of the godless school. The cry has gone over the United States ; it has been taken up by the Mitre and other non-Catholic religious papers in the Australian colonies ; it has echoed in the Auckland secular Press ; it has been heard in synods and assemblies ; and the collected utterances of the leaders of Piotestant thought upon the subject would fill a bulky volume. Even the secular — as distinguished from the Secularist — Press has spoken out upon the subject here and there with no uncertain voice, and recognised the obvious truth that religion and the idea of personal responsibility are at least as important factors in the education of the child as the multiplication table or vulgar fractions. Some time ago we quoted in point from the N. Y. World, the Sandushy Reyixter, and other papers. A short time ago Felix Adler, in an article in the Netv York World, wrote in terms of strong condemnation of some of the tendencies in the ' new education.' Among other tendencies which, he said, need to be checked, he noted the two following : —

For instance, we go too far in the line of physical culture. Some of our schools and colleges are apt to appear as only annexes to their gymnasiums. If you listen to the conversation of a group of students you will be led to think that the acquisition of knowledge is an unavoidable evil connected with college life. . , .

The most harmful of all tendencies in modern education is the lack of spiritual training. There is a cynical and pessimistic spirit in our schools. When our young people graduate they ask themselves, What is life worth ? To what end is all thin activity ? Why Hhould I toil for others ? These are the maiu questions of life "and the schools do not answer them. Education has become like a race that has no goal. We teach our children to aim to be succest-ful, but we give them no definition of success. We do not lift their ambitions above bread-winning and the accumulation of property. You can't get the guiding principle of life from science. Neither can the Ptndy of society as it is and has been tell us what society ought to be. No matter how line your science work ana arc may be, if you do not supply students with a worthy life purpose, it is all of no avail. It is like the play of ' Hamlet ' with iidinlet leu out

The Chicago Times- Herald applied the editorial horsewhip to the hard and selfish materialism which is rampant in the American public schools, and which is almost as conspicuous a characteristic of our own. It said :—: —

The drift toward materialism in the schools is one of the pronounced tendencies of modem educational endeavor which may well excite the apprehension of the true friends of education. In the public schools it manifests itself in the disposition to relegate language and classics in favor of commercial studies, to give°the sciences undue prominence, and to abolish commencement day exercises, examinations, and all other features of school life that have furnished the inspiration and incentive of scholastic achievement in the past. The tendency of the educators is to make concessions to the popular demand for the kind of ' education ' that would place the type-writer aud the cash register on top of the educational pinnacle.

The Catholic schools, both in the United States and in these colonies, are the Catholic Church's practical protest against a form of up-bringing of children which teaches the young idea to place the higher interests of the soul and the claims of religion in a second or third or tenth place— or nowhere at all, and teaches them from their infant year to regard education purely or chiefly with a view to its monetary value, and to reduce all things to the standard of the pound sterling.

Professor Chaule.s L. Dana, of Cornell Medical College, as reported by Christian Work, regards Christian education ' from a purely professional and scientific standpoint and as an expert in neurotic disorders.' And he advocates religion in the school • both as a helpful and preventive force.' The Professor say-, : • i cannot/undertake to pi each a gospel, but 1 can urge the scientilic importance of so doing upon the earnest students of morals and pedagogy of to-day.' 'Here,' says the S./f. Jin-iw\ 'science confirms the wisdom of the Church in insisting that even the physical welfare of the child demands the full and harmonious development of the child's powers — his religious, moral and mental faculties.' Another American Protestant publication, the J far/ford Seminary Record in its issue for May. V.) 0(), made the following sound reflections on the enforced ignorance of Christianity which characterises the instruction given in the American public schools and which is equally the scandal of our o»vn boasted system :—: —

The severance of Church and State in America, however, opeus the door to nescience concerning the life and character of Him Whom every Christian calendar year proclaims the principal figure in earth's annals. Rome chronologised her events from the founding of the city ; Greece from her Olympiads ; revolutionary France would have destroyed the Church calendar alone with the State's structure ; but every business action in Christian America, consciously or unconsciously, recognises the Babe of Bethlehem and the Man of Nazareth. How Htran^e it seomn that in h uch a Christian nation the severance of Church and State prohibit instruction in the public schools concerning Him Who it, the rationale of its every historic record, from the dating of a child's letter to the dating of its treaties ! Such, however, is the status of education iii our country. Protestant timidity on the one hand, fearful that Jesuitism may make the nation the endower of a sect, and agnohtic enmity on the other, jealous of giving a binglo school-thought to themes that even front on religion, flank on the ri^ht and the left the reasonable advance that might be made toward the ethical and historical teaching of Christianity in the nation's bchools.

The comments of the SJf. AVr/Vv/' on this pronouncement of the Hartford publication is well worth reproducing here: it sums up a situation that is common to New Zealand as well as to the United ' Yes,' says our esteemed Boston contemporary, "-Jesuitism," whatever tlut is, is searingotherwise sensible Protestants, who believe in Christian teaching, into the ranks of those atheists and agnostics who hate Christianity and who would make, of oar country a nation without a God. Protestantism, because of its unreasoning fear of the Catholic Church, is helping to destroy the faith of the nation in Jesus Christ. It is aiding the State in its tyrannical usurpation of the rights

of parents, and of the Church. When will our separated brethren cast away this unfounded fear of Catholicism, and go to work loyally with the Church to oppose the atheistic drift of the present day which is so strong in the United States ?