The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1917. TRUE AIMS OF EDUCATION

New Zealand Tablet, 8 February 1917, Page 33

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1917. TRUE AIMS OF EDUCATION

t T has become a commonplace with Catholics that given any fair opportunity their schools in New Zealand are more than able to hold their own with the ' . pampered favorites of the State. . Year in and year out, since our primary schools first received the benefit of inspection by the Education ~ Board’s inspectors, they have been almost invariably singled out for the highest praise by these impartial judges. One instance in point may be quoted. Last year the Christian Brothers’ School, Dunedin, which has some 300 boys on its roll, succeeded in winning two Junior National Scholarships, three Free Places, twenty-five Sixth Standard Proficiency Passes, whilst eight boys passed Junior Civil Service and two Matriculation. And this fine success is but a type of that yearly won by many other Catholic schools throughout the land. - = * ■' Fortunately this proud record of outward success is in the eyes of teachers and parents alike the smaller part of the work of education going on in our Catholic schools. The real vocation and work of our religious Brothers and Sisters is to awaken, purify, and enrich the spiritual endowments of the young, to make them understand and feel that duty is happiness, that virtue is its own reward, that the supreme law and good of men is God’s will. And they succeed in their noble work because they have great aims and make large sacrifices, because they do what they say. If Catholic children at school learn reverence, obedience, gentleness, and purity, it is because these virtues inspire the words and deeds of their guides in learning. Herein is the honor, worth, and blessedness of the Catholic teacher, who, having himself learnt the lesson of life set by the Eternal Schoolmaster, tries to help others to learn it too. * No nation, indeed, that wishes to be worthy of the name can be content with a purely utilitarian education. A nation, like a man, has a soul and must cultivate. the higher things of the spirit. ‘We should, as far as it is possible,’ wrote Aristotle centuries ago, ‘ make ourselves immortal, and strive to live by that part of ourselves which is most excellent.’ For everything that touches the soul leaves its impress, and we are, consciously and unconsciously, fashioned little by little into the > image of all we have seen and heard, known, and meditated and if from childhood we learn to live ■ with * what is good and fair and pure, it shall . become stuff - of the

very stuff of life. Instruction alone will make clever, but not good men, and what any country wants is the good citizen more than the clever one. ‘The old [secular] education, writesthe Anglican Bishop of Carlisle in a'recent number of the Nineteenth Century, ‘ had its ideas. Whether, these ideas were ideal is, at least/ questionable; for its ideas . were chiefly limited to “the gospel of getting on,’’ and by getting on was generally meant getting on materially— money; achieving industrial success ; controlling the markets of the world ; winning the race in competitions in which truthfulness, sympathy, and generous feeling were almost hindrances competitions not for excellence in work or the noble uses of wealth, but for higher wages and higher dividends, for comfortable sloth and luxurious indulgence. I do not mean—far from it that these - were the intentional ideas of the creators and promoters of the old education ; but that these have been its effects, pr, at any rate, that the old system has not arrested, the flow of these effects, any observer of the world around him can plainly see. And to those who have any yearning, whatever for the enlightenment and elevation of their fellow-men, these effects must surely seem deplorable. And they all spring, at least so it seems to me, from the radical vice which deems education to be merely a thing of the head, instead of including, as it ought, the heart and the whole nature of the child. - Heart and head must be educated together, else the result will be either frothy sentimentalism or clever callousness.’ Catholic schools, and Catholic schools; alone in this country, are providing this complete education for the head and the heart. * , * Who, then, it will be asked, is to provide this allround education which, a nation needs? We do not ■claim that the Church alone can do it, for the Church in these days lacks two essential conditions of success money and. the power of coercion. Still less can we admit anything in the shape of a State monopoly of education, for that would be an unjust invasion of the inalienable rights of parents and the death-knell of liberty, the soul’s noblest birthright. Even so ardent a secularist as John Stuart Mill saw the grave danger of State monopoly ; ‘ One thing must be strenuously insisted on—that the government must claim no monopoly for its education ' either in its higher or lower branches, must exert neither authority nor influence to induce the people to resort to its teachers in preference to others, and must confer no peculiar advantages on those who have been instructed by them. ... It is not endurable that a government should either in law or in fact have a complete control over the education of the people. To possess such a control and actually exert it, is to be despotic.’ In these days when we hear so much of the rights of small nations, let us Catholics not forget these wise words of a clear thinker. We would welcome State co-operationand a wise and just government would hasten to supplement our valuable work, —but it will never be at the sacrifice of our conscience. * When we probe to the heart of the question of the State’s attitude towards education and religion, we find it to be the menace of secularism, for this persistent ignoring of God and religion, however cleverly masked under the guise of neutrality, is nothing less than hostility to man’s noblest possession. And such a course of action spells ruin in the end, national and individual. ‘ Let us,’ Washington gravely warned his fellowcountrymep in . his ‘Farewell Address,’ with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.’ Dr. Fenlon,- of the Catholic University of America, writes in the same strain, and his words, though applying directly to his own country, hold good of guy other land which tries to educate its children without religion. * It is indeed strange that a

practical and’ level-headed people like the Americans can fail to see that religion and. morality are the foundation of abiding national security and prosperity, or, seeing this, can believe that religion and morality can be vital elements of our national life if they are excluded from our schools. . Especially is it remarkable that religious people can fail to see the importance of reliorious education. . . . . We■ desire to see a more enlightened public opinion which will recognise that you cannot gather the harvest unless you first sow the seed ; nor reap wheat unless you sow wheat; that you' cannot have a strong morality in public, and private life unless you.train the, children in morality; and that you cannot train them in morality unless you implant in their hearts the love and fear of the Eternal Lawgiver and Judge. We desire, also, to have an historical truth recognised— that we Catholics have preserved the true original American principle of education, professed by Puritan, Cavalier, and Catholic, and by. the fathers of our country, which maintained that the chief and most important element in education is the training of the young in religious and moral principles. It is not we who have left the channel of true Americanism and are willing to drift recklessly on an unchartered sea ; it is those men who do not fear the experiment of training a whole ‘ nation without the knowledge and fear of God.’