The Greatest Failure of the Century.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 7, 12 February 1903, Page 3

The Greatest Failure of the Century.

Century. We have been quoting lately the testimony of a number of high authorities, both in America and in France, as to the utter failure of secular education to achieve the two most important ends of all true education, viz., the development of character and the production of good and honest citizens. Another important testimony is now available in the shape of a weighty utterance by a leading representative of the Jewish community in America. Rabbi Hirsch, a prominent leader of of the Jewish body, delivered a lecture in Chicago recently, as we learn from the ' Aye Maria,' on the failures and achievements of the last century. He included amongst the failures the growth of divorce which, happily, is as strongly condemned by Jewish teaching as by the Catholic Church herself. * What a contrast,' he said, 'to the wrecked homes shown in the records of the divorce courts is the family life of the Catholics and the Jews ! To Catholic and Jewish women marriage is a sacrament to be lived, to endure, to exist perpetually.' But even more pointed and forcible are the learned Rabbi's statements as to the failure of our much-vaunted education systems. The greatest failure of the nineteenth century has been the failure of education. The eighteenth century closed with a belief in the efficiency of education, and the best minds of the day seem to have had dreams of universal education and called it a panacea for the social ills. We have largely realised those dreams, and have also discovered that an education of the head alone has not kept the promises which the philosophers of the eighteenth century believed it would keep. Education has not decreased the criminal classes, but has made them more dangerous. Our public schools may give an idiot mind, but they do not give him character. They give him the power to do harm without the moral force and will to restrain him from using that power. In educating the head and not the heart and soul the public schools are failing at a crucial point. A remark the application of which, we are sorry to think, extends to schools much nearer home than those of America.