The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1908. MORAL INSTRUCTION AND TRAINING IN SCHOOLS

New Zealand Tablet, 26 November 1908, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1908. MORAL INSTRUCTION AND TRAINING IN SCHOOLS

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N our last issue we gave a broad outline of some of the findings of the recent international commission of inquiry into moral instruction and training in schools. The two bulky octavo volumes containing the reports and papers of the commission present strata of vastly different values — from streaks and veins of virgin gold to the rubbish of the tip-tilt. The persons associated with the inquiry disclosed every degree of fitness and of unfitness to deal with the theme of moral instruction and training — from the cultured Christian gentleman and scholar down to the professing atheist groping blindly after vague and sanctionless ' civil ' formulas to mitigate the rising crime of juvenile France, and to stand as some sort of a substitute for the Faith that conquered and civilised the world. The covers of the two volumes enclose a vast deal of idle rainbow-chases after circular triangles and round squares — in other words, after schemes of morality not resting upon dogmatic truth and divine sanction. In part the report is a hurly-burly of clashing theories and conflicting schemes, Christian, neo-pagan, and atheistic — a din of voices proclaiming their various codes, from the true Christian one that makes the fear of God the beginning of wisdom and the love of Him the end, to the ' civil morality ' of French atheism that has no higher ultimate sanction than fear of the policeman. But out from it all there come the chords of a great harmony proclaiming the need of systematic moral instruction and moraf"~ training in the school. A great body of expert knowledge proclaims, in addition, that this moral training is ' inseparably connected with . the sphere of religion. ' The whole tenor of the report emphasises the service which efficient schools and moral training may render to the community ; it also inculcates a clearer apprehension of the part that other factors of schoollife (teachers, companions, etc.) play in the development of the child along right lines ; it throws into especially strong relief the truth that good homes and wise parental care are necessary elements in any true system of national education ; and it points out the oft-forgotten lesson that ' the process of education, so far from being concluded with the school course, is, for good or evil, carried on by the conditions and influence of the occupations in which the pupils subsequently earn their livelihood.' * The really ideal course of moral instruction and training 19 partly described in a paper by a Protestant clergyman, the Rev. Edward Myers, M.A. ' The French Catholics,' says he (vol. 11., P- 53)» ' in. their primary, schools do give a very t definite and systematic course of religious and moral instruction and training. They know exactly what they want to produce — true men and

women with a full sense of their duty to God, to their fellowmen, and to themselves. They realise that this sense of duty is not to be learnt like a lesson in school ; that occasional— nay, frequent— references to it will not suffice ; that it must be taught by word and by deed.^and that the very surroundings have their bearings upon it; that life must be lived with this sense of duty ever to the fore ; hence the insistence, in the face of opposition and competition which would have crushed any less in earnest, made at the cost of great personal sacrifice on the part of Catholic teachers in Catholic schools, upon the cultivation of the Catholic atmosphere. This, in the concrete, is their way of expressing the truth that education is not synonymous with instruction ; that moral education and training must go hand in hand with the child's mental development.' 'The aim of the French Catholic schools,' adds this Protestant clergyman, ' is to inculcate Catholicism as a life to be lived, not merely as a doctrine to be taught and learned, or as a collection of information to be acquired whether in or out of school.' What has followed from the State war upon religion, both in and out of the school, will best be told in another issue.