The Secular System on Trial: What American Authorities Say.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 4, 22 January 1903, Page 1

The Secular System on Trial : What American Authorities Say.

In America, as in New Zealand, the secular system has been set up as a fetish in education and its cult has been preached with almost as much fervor as if it were indeed a religion. Everywhere throughout the States the secular principle has been adopted and enforced in the public schools, and if ever the system could be said to have had a free, full, and fair trial it has had it in America during the last fifty >ears. The result has been so very unsatisfactory and disappointing that even absolutely impartial and non-partisan authoiilies are now found strongly condemning the system. We quote a few of the published testimonies to the failure of secularism in America, and they are well worthy of the most careful attention. Let us first see what a representative of the teaching body — the men who actually work the system — has to say. Professor Curran, in inaugurating the meeting of the Ohio State Teachers' Association, declared : ' When we look abroad on the life of our people, we tremble for the safety of republican institutions. Theft, robbery, and murder in the slums and alleys scarce keep pace with defaulting, embezzling, and bribery in the higher walks of life Liberty has degenerated into licence, and society writhes in throes in the endeavor to rid itself of the noxious elements. The daily press teems with the exposure of vice, and the English language is taxed for invectives against crime. The ignorant have suddenly become rich, and think that their children must not submit to restraint. They forget that the foundation of all prosperity, the basis of law and order, the entrance way to happiness, is obedience.' The utterances of the other authorites which we shall quote are taken from an interesting article which appears in a recent number of the Month. The writer of this article quotes the Brooklyn (New York) Eagle, of June I, 1902, as writing thus:— ' Right and wrong in the affairs of conduct are not matters of instinct : they have to be learned, just as really, in fact, as history or handicrafts. . . . The truth is we are taking for granted a moral intelligence which does not exist. We are leaning upon it, depending upon it, trusting to it, and it is not there. Our whole machinery of education from the kindergarten up to the university is perilously weak at this point. We have multitudes of youths and young men and women who have no more intelligent sense of what is right and wrong than had so many Greeks of the time of Alcibiades. The great Roman Catholic Church is unquestionably right in the contention that the whole system as it now exists is morally a negation.' * Even such a strictly sectarian journal as the Methodist makes the same admission :—: — 'In our judgment,' it says, 'the denominational schools of the land, as compared with the purely secular and State schools, are on moral grounds incomparably the safer. Our State institutions, as a general thing, are hotbeds of infidelity

—not less than of vice. That unbelief should be fostered and fomented therein is not unnatural. We thoroughly believe that our Church should invest at least ten million o? dollars, in the next ten years, in denominational schools.' The same general view was expressed even more vigorously by Mr Fred Woodrow in the Age 0/ Steel, October, lßy6: — ' A boy may be kept at school for several years, . . , but if his heart is not educated with his head, his conscience with his memory, a knowledge of arithmetic and skill in penmanship, of the date of the battle of Bunker Hill and the number of gallons of water in Lake Michigan, are no guarantte that he will not use his acquired knowledge in putting the finishing touches to as consummate a scoundrel as ever entered a prison cell. So far as education goes, there are rascals who understand geometry, and can give you the distance of the sun, moon, and stars as easily as a railway conductor can punch a mileage book.' Finally, the North American Review, a magazine of world-wide reputation and standing, in the January number fo« 1898, had the following weighty utterance :—: — 1 The Catholic Church has insisted that it is its duty to educate its children in such a way as to fix religious truths in the youthful mind. For this it has been assailed by the nonCatholic population ; and Catholics have even been charged with being enemies of the people and of the flag. Any careful observer in the city of New York can see that the only people, as a clergy, who are teaching the children in the way that will secure the future of the best civilisation are the Catholics ; and although a Protestant of the firmest kind, I believe the time has come to recognise this fact, and for us to lay aside prejudices and patriotically meet this question. . . Such instruction [as is required] can only be given successfully by an almost entire change of policy and practice on the question of religious teaching in the public schools, and the encouragement of private schools in which sound religious teaching is given.' The quotations we have given are from authorities whose disinterestedness and competency as witnesses cannot possibly be impeached, and the moral they point is obvious. We only wish that New Zealand parents, politicians, and leaders of public opinion would take the lesson to heart.