Teachers and Religious Education

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 9, 4 March 1909, Page 329

Teachers and Religious Education

- It is commonly asserted, or assumed, that the teachers employed in State schools are almost unanimously opposed to the whole principle of religion in education. And this argument is commonly advanced as one reason why the Catholic claim — the counterpart of which is some measure of non-Catholic religious instruction in the" public schools — cannot be entertained. Public school teachers might not unnaturally be expected to look askance^ at any fresh burden thrown upon the already hopelessly over-loaded, syllabus of the public schools. But the Catholic schools follow the same syllabus, and give, in addition, the moral and religious training which " go to constitute true education. And on the broad principle that the religious, side of the child ought not to he neglected and that attention to the moral faculty is an essential element in true education the best members of the teaching profession are heartily agreed. Mr. Ossran Lang, editor of the School Journal, a monthly journal of education published in New York, says in his December issue: 'About the need of religious education there is no division of opinion whatever among thoughtful people. 'How much? and 'How?' form the only lines of division.' The New Zealand journal of Education (the organ of the N.Z. Educational Institute) in its issue of October 15, 1908, quotes the following among a list of 'TVEoral Don'ts ' selected from an exchange : ' Don't train the head and forget the heart. Don't neglect the teaching of morality and relicion (in the widest and best sense of the word).' And in the recently published report of the International Inquiry on Moral Instruction and Training, organised in London by Prof. Sadler and carried out by a particularly

able and representative committee the following passage occurs : ' Therfe is general agreement among experienced teachers that direct moral instruction, when given at the right time and in the right way, is a valuable element in moral education.' These utterances, as might be expected, do not go so far as Catholic principles and the Catholic position necessarily carry us, but they . are all in the right direction, and they go to show that, at bottom, teachers have little love for the hard secularism which is made such a fetish of in our New Zealand system.