EDUCATION SYSTEM

New Zealand Tablet, 20 April 1911, Page 723

EDUCATION SYSTEM

CATHOLICS' POSITION. The following letter from the Right Rev. Dr. Cleary, Bishop of Auckland, appeared in the Wellington Evening Post of April 17: Sir, — (I) In your issue of April 5 you assert (1) that , ' religion has not been banished by the State from the school-training of children ' in New Zealand. To have even a conditional argumentative value, your assertion must suppose that the ruling majorities found religion quite outside the school system, and simply refrained from inviting it to 'come in.' But you well know that they found religion in possession, as an intimate part of the school system, by legal right and old and accepted prescription. The ruling majority dispossessed religion, drove it out of the schools. They ejected it by public act— and this is the meaning of the term 'banish,' both in it* personal and i literal sense and in the figurative sense in which it is here correctly employed. They left the school system 'absolutely secular ' (Bowen), ' entirely secular ' (Act of 1877) — in dictionary phrase, 'they entirely 'stripped' or 'threw off' from it 'religion and religious teaching and influences/ (2) The State (according to you) merely declines either to teach religion itself or to subsidise the teaching of religion.' As a matter of notorious fact, it goes vastly farther than this. It makes it an offence against the law for any person whomsoever to ' teach religion ' to Christ's ' little ones' during school hourseven to tell them that there is a Personal God Who sees and loves and rewards and punishes. The Act of 1877 is, in a very real way, an ' edict against religion ' — in the school. It is for you, as the Christian champion of our secular system, to justify these things, if you can, on moral and educational principles which believing Christians can accept. The burden of proof is upon you. And unsupported assertion and denial are not proof. 11. At last you have something to say in defence of the secular system, from the view-point of a ' philosophy of life.' ( This ' philosophy ' is a repeated quotation which (again without any reference) you attribute to Dr. Parker. But (1) the extract is not at all a statement of a philosophy of lifethat is, of a view of the. origin, duties and destiny of life. (2) I find the Parker extract in a much more extended form, in a misleading and bitter attempted ' defence ' of our secular system, by a Wellington professor. Leaving aside, for the present, the question of the textual and contextual correctness of the extract, I may summarise its contents as follows: (a) Dr. Parker (as quoted) declares that ' no education can be complete ' without a ' thorough religious training.' This is good Catholic doctrine. (b) Dr. Parker declares that it is not the business of the State' to furnish that religious training. This is likewise sound Catholic doctrine, (c) ' The State.' adds Dr. Parker, j might very well stop when it has paid for a thorough knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Thus I would not exclude religion: I simply would not include it:' And his ' reason for not including religion in rate-supported schools' is 'simply' his objection, on Noncol'ormist principles, 'to support it (religion) by rates and taxes, and thus by possible penalties.' (I may state that ' rate-sup-ported schools'_ were built by religious and other bodies or private individuals, and received grants from public funds). Nonconformist principles apart, we have Dr. Parker hero advocating what Catholics have been so long demanding in Australia, and New Zealand— : grants-in-aid to denominational schools, but for secular "knowledge only; non-interference by the State in religious instruction; non-inclusion of religious teaching among the subjects to be 'supported' by 'rates and taxes'; and absolute refusal to countenance the positive 'exclusion' of religion from education. Heaven bless your ' philosophy of life.' (3) I have before me the words of such great leaders of British Nonconformity as Matthew Henry, John Foster. Robert Hall, and Hugh Owen—all of whom stand stoutly for the essential union of religion with education. But (4) oven if you had a harmful of divines huzzaing for the exclusion of religion from the schools, this would in no wav ' refute ' or mitigate the ' un-Christian implications ' of the secular system, or relieve you of the duty of justifying it, on Christian and educational principles—if von ran ~ (III.) The first Godless schools were those founded in the French Revolution, on the principles laid clown by antiChristian philosophers, such as Diderot, Voltaire/ Rousseau etc. (1) Now it is for you to show, if vou can, in what substantial way (if at all) the professedlv 'neutral' New Zealand secular system differs legallv from the still professedly 'neutral' secular system of France. (2) To be neutral in regard to religion is to refrain from taking sides thereon. -Now for Christians, religion is (a.) a bodv of truths regarding God and our relations to Him; (b) flowing from these a collection of duties, which have God P J hei \?rn ° bl T t; a nd (V ) a virtue of i us tice towards God. Will you explain just how any sane adult, or anv educational system, can possibly be 'neutral' in regard to religion ; or how, .m this connection, there can be anv possible alternative between religion . and irreligion ? (i) I am all along dealing with what is involved in the endless svstem-and not yet fully realised by its well-mea nChristian supporters. It is no justification or 'refutation to assert that the ruling majority in New Zealand exclude religion from the schools, merely. because some

people 'upon British soil ' or elsewhere differed as to the kind and amount of religion to be imparted in the schools, (a) You again assume, without proof, that this is the only 'solution' of the difficulty. Why cannot New Zealand as well as Germany and so many other countries unite religion and education, without Slate-teaching of religion? And do you propose to suppress all land tenure because the bitter war of opinions as between the leasehold tenure and the freehold tenure (b) And why do you assume, again without an atom of proof, that any political majority has, on Christian principles, a moral right to legislate religion out of its prescriptive and immemorial place in education. You always get back to this: The burden of proof -'s upon you. But the outstanding feature of this discussion, from the very first, has been your complete inability even to attempt, on Christian and educational lines, a justification of the exclusion of religion from the schools. My object in entering upon this discussion has thus been amply achieved. 1 thank you greatly for your space. — Yours, etc., * HENRY W. CLEARY, D.D., Bishop of Auckland. April 8. P.S. —Your procession of unsupported assertions of April 7, just to hand, concerns two personal side-issues, and contains at least nine errors in matters of fact-one of them the amazing statement that I term our secular system ' godless ' BECAUSE it does not endow private religious schools! I have reached, if not passed, the limit allowed by you, but some of these matters will be included in a public pronouncement which 1 propose to make at an opportune time. * H.W.C. April 10, 1911.