I.—THE CASE STATED.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 4, 28 January 1909, Page 130

I.— THE CASE STATED.

The following two articles are the first and second of :a short scries on the subject stated above; They appeared in the Otago Daily Times of January 21 and 23. The circumstances out of which these articles arose" "have been set forth in the course of an editorial paragraph, on the last page : — The Otago Daily Times is an able and consistent supporter of our system of public instruction. The outstanding features of the system are summed up in the familiar phrase: 'Free, secular, and compulsory.' With the free and compulsory phases of the system Catholics have- no quarrel. The head and front of their objection to it lies in its seaularity. As will be shown more fully in another article, it excludes religion; and, in the plain and customary meaning of the term ' secular, 1 it is a system which trains children only in things ' pertaining to the present world or to things not spiritual,' and in things ' disassociated from religion or religious teaching ' (Encyclopaedic Dictionary, Vol. \I, Part 1., p. 316). In their respective attitudes towards religious training, there can be no reconciliation, no compromise, between our secular system and the Catholic or any other Christian method of education. True Catholics accept the system, where they must, as the alternative to what Carlyle terms the tragedy of ignorance. And the strength of their convictions is amply evidenced by the extent and the duration of "the sacrifices made by them to keep religion in ibs prescriptive and (to them) proper place in education. The school system built up and maintained by New Zealand Catholics is perhaps the most impressive external fact in the sjiiritual lifo of this Dominion. ' Ideas of religion are ideas of life,' says Spalding. They ' spring from a Avorld-vicw, and are involved in philosophic systems which are spiritual or material, theistic or pantheistic, Christian or pagan, secular or religious. Since education is for life, notions of life determine its processes and methods.' The quarrel between the two education systems thus resolves itself, in its last resort, into a quarrel between the philosophies of life upon which, respectively, they are ultimately based. Between philosophy and pedagogy (the science of teaching) there is an intimate connection. Derived from the Greek, the term ' pedagogy * means, literally, the ' guiding of children.' Now, the first essential in a guide is to know the goal or terminus of the journey to which he is to lead the wayfarer. And the end or goal of man's life can be known only through a knowledge of his true nature. This, in turn, requires true answers to the momentous questions : Whence is he ? What is his most pressing business here? Is he for this world only? Or is it his duty to fit himself for a higher existence in a world to come? A true philosophy gives true answers to these questions, and indicates the true aims and processes of education. A false philosophy (if we may dignify it with the name philosophy) supplies false answers, and gives a false direction to life. In regard to secular, as opx>osed to religions, education, two chief antagonistic schools of philosophy contend for our choice. On the one side we have Christian philosophy, of which more anon. On the other side we have the many ' systems ' that are based on the somewhat vague and shifting thing known as ' modern ' philosophy. Among these are positivism, pantheism, agnosticism, and the hard materialism which looks upon man. as merely a highly developed and soulless chimpanzee or Barbary ape. This system can hardly find a higher aim in human life than some form or other of utilitarianism, ' or mere enjoyment (hedonism) — and then the blackness of extinction. These various schools of ' modern ' philosophy stand for a more or less complete divorce between education and religion. Their position is clear. So is the Catholic position and the Christian position generally. But it is difficult to fathom the pedagogical principle (if any) on which the exclusion of religion from education is based by those who hold at least the groundwork truths and principles of Christian faith and practice — as the bulk of the journalistic supporters cf secular public instruction apparently do in New Zealand. The present writer has often seen the separation of religion from public instruction defended by our newspapers as a political or social expedient; he can recall no instance in which it has been sustained as a pedagogical principle. Yet it is on this plea that it must be effectively defended, if at all; for a grave principle is here manifestly involved — a principle which gets us back to the deepest questions

of the origin and destiny of the little men and maids whose minds are being moulded in our public schools. ' Philosophy,' says Balfour, ' has never yet touched the mass of men except through religion.' Christian philosophy is in_ full harmony and intimate association v with revealed religion. The union of religion and education flows naturally therefrom. That union has been in possession from time immemorial. • In greater or less degrees of application it is still in possession over the vastly greater part of Christendom — almost the only exceptions being New Zealand, part of Australia, a number of States of the American Union, and Prance, which has been for many years past under what the Saturday Review correctly terms a regime of ' aggressive atheism.' 1. Broadly speaking, the Catholic position as to the place of religion in education is based upon the teaching of Christian philosophy and revealed religion in regard i-o the origin and destiny of man. It teaches that the human soul is a spirit created by a Personal God to His own image and likeness ; that 'we have not here a lasting city, but seek one that is to come ' ; that man lives truly and completely only so far as he lives in God; and that he is destined for the perfection of his being and eternal happiness in heaven. 2. This teaching broadly indicates what should be the chief aim of any system of training the child. Rich or poor, beggar or king, bond or free, the child is heir to heaven. All his faculties — physical, intellectual, moral, religious — were given to him as means to that end. These faculties are to be developed harmoniously — not with the lop-sided development of the Spartan or the Athenian, but unto the full perfection of Christian manhood and womanhood. Physical and intellectual training have their proper place and purpose. Far more essential is the formation of character through the training of the will and the moral sense. Physical debility and ignorance are evils; vice is a far greater one. Formal intellectual culture is highly desirable, but all are not called to it; to right conduct ail are called. And right conduct springs from the right things which we believe and feel and love. 3. Right conduct implies ' instruction of the intellect in the knowledge of our duty and its grounds, the cultivation of moral conscience and moral responsibility in the easy discernment of duty, and the building up of habits of virtue, or permanent dispositions of the will to act according to the dictates of the moral reason.' To Christians the knowledge of duty and of its grounds comes through religion. In the connection used here religion may be described as ' a body of truths or beliefs respecting God and our relations to Him ; and, flowing from these, a collection of duties, which have God for their primary object.' These duties towards God color, and give a text for, all other human duties. The doctrines define and provide an intelligent basis for duty. They are the only solid basis of morality; they also supply a powerful motive and a strong inducement for the due performance of duty. The training of the intellect," the will, the emotional nature, is bounded by the Christian Revelation. The Christian idea of child-progress is to ' seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,' to ' advance in wisdom and grace before God and men ' ; and the highest wisdom is 'to know Christ and Him crucified.' The training of the Christian child centres around the personality of Christ. He is the incomparably perfect ideal to place before children, the highest inspiration to noble thought and endeavor ; and the best things of our civilisation are the fruit of the Gospel that He came to teach. \ 4. What" motives of right conduct does a secular system of public instruction offer as a substitute for all this? Certainly not the will of a Personal God to Whom all may freely and trustfully go. At best it can consistently offer secular motives only — a thin morality based upon a secular foundation, such as utility, wordly wisdom or appetite, or other such motives, without, perhaps, any clear knowledge as to how teacher or child came by them. Such abstract, impersonal, or otherwise inferior motives are feeble and imperfect, and have little power of appeal to hearts and consciences and infirm wills — especially- among peoples whose ideas o.f right and wrong are so intimately bound up with the principles of Christianity. ' Faith in a Personal God,' as someone has remarked, 'may be hard to acquire; faith in an abstraction is vastly harder to brace the human will.' 5. Professor Schiller rightly contends for concentration and unity in education. All true education in virtue and character is a vital and continuous process, working on uniform principles. The chief agencies in education are the home, the school, the church. There should be unity and harmony in their pedagogical action. All that is best in the domestic and social and religious life of the child should be introduced as a matter of course into his school life. Religion should, in other words, enter into all the processes of education. This is, substantially, what Catholics mean by the ' religious atmosphere ' to which

they attach so much importance. This does not, of course imply the continuous direct teaching and practice of religion; it means (in the words of Pope Leo XIII.) that children s ' training must he permeated hy religious principles. Experience sufficiently testifies "to the woful neglect of religion in thousands of homes, and to the insufficiency of the utmost educative work that can he done in the brief hours spent in church and Sunday school. All this increases the responsibilities that devolve upon the school Now, more perhaps than ever, are Humboldt's words trueWhatever we wish to see introduced into the life of a nation must first be introduced into its schools ' The secular system is comparatively new, localised, experimental. It appears as a rival to one that is, historically and geographically, m possession. It has to prove and justify itself. And it must do so not alone against the Catholic system, but against every system, Christian or non-" Christian, which stands for religion, in however meagre a degree, in the school life of the child. 6. The materialist, agnostic, and other such ideals of education we know. But on what principle of pedagogy (that is, of child-training)— for a question of pedagogy is here directly involved— do professing Christians discard m the education of Christian children, so powerful a moral agency as religion, while retaining it in their own domestic circle? Why subject the Christian child to opposite influence in the school and in the home? Why pack his brain with snippets of a dozen 'ologies and neglect what is (for the Christian child) the most important knowledge of all— that of the Christian faith ana Christian principles which Ibave transformed the world? Why in a Christian land separate the school from the"-* influences which created the Christian home? On whatprinciples of pedagogy do we (in Sir Joshua Fitch's words) ! view the life of a school child as something apart from '^ the life of a Christian ? Why retain religion in any rela- * tion of life if we exclude it from the directly formative process of education, at the most impressionable period of - life? ' " The answers to these (and sundry coming) questions should show lioav much (if anything) our public school system owes its inspiration to Christ, and how much to, say, Herbert Spencer. If its inspiration is avowedly due to the latter, or to any non-Christian philosophy, we shallhave a sufficient answer; if to the former, we shall no doubt also learn by what recondite principle of pedagogy the exclusion of religion from the school life of Christian children has been evolved out of belief in the truths and principles of the Gospel of Christ.