PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 84, 6 October 1938, Page 11

PUBLIC SCHOOLS

STRESS ON CONDUCT

NOT RELIGION

LATTER ONLY AN "EXTRA"

(By Air Mail, from "The Post's" London Representative.)

LONDON, September 8

Mr. J. T. Christie, headmaster of Westminster School, addressing the Modern Churchmen's Conference at Loughborough, gave a warning about the wrong emphasis which might be imparted to religious teaching, particularly in public schools—the substitution'of conduct for religion. He said: —

"The public schools, like all thoroughly English institutions, give a vast importance to behaviour. All the powers of religion are enlisted on the side of good conduct, sermons are exhortations to play the game. Confirmation is a clearing-house for past failure and future resolves, and private prayers are an expanded version of 'Please make me a good boy.'

"I know that this state of things is passing away. I also^know how unfair it is as a description'of what is going on. But much of it is still left, both in schoolboys and adults, and its effects are obvious. It substitutes conduct for religion; it forgets that no religion has ever begun by proclaiming, You ought to do so and so; it centres the mind on self, its failures and successes, and it supersedes the unattainable ideal of the Christian life by the eminently accessible ideal of the good fellow and the gentleman, which may be low or may be high according to the varying tone of the community. "Meantime religion itself is regarded as an extra, a cult if or those who like that sort of thing. This substitution of ethics for religion is one of the worst and commonest betrayals of the religious ideal of education." Mr. Christie spoke of the need for safeguarding the natural religious instincts of adolescents. There was a religious instinct, he said, in the mind of the very- young child, as any visitor to a nursery could testify. "The two nicest people I know," a child of four once said to her ' mother, "are God and Trotty," Trotty being the nurse.

In many homes thirty years ago and in some today that remark would have been branded as irreverent and met with a sort •of shocked face, thus suppressing the little growth of religion in a wild state, and possibly the chance would have been taken to impress some fragment of dogmatic theological religion for which the tender mind was absurdly unprepared. That was the way in which permanent harm was done to the natural growth of a religious ideal. It had two effects. The religious instinct would not' find a natural outlet in any religious observance and mature Christianity as represented by adults would be associated with what was compulsory and full of prohibitions. There! were many today suffering from repressed religion. -Repression and arrested development of this instinct towards the unseen would result quite as surely in frustration and phobia as the repression* of other social instincts. Strong criticism of dismal church services which failed to attract the youth of the nation was made by the Rev. N. V. Gorton, headmaster ,of Blundell's School. ... He described public school religion as a small-scale -working model of the original Prayer Book reformers'! ideals and technique. "Yet the Church neither feeds the j public schools nor the public schools j the Church," he said. "The modern boy is alert, individual, and intelligent—so per cent, better than his counterpart 20 years ago. The youth of university age are more interested in the religious solution Of their personal and social problems than in any other.

"I know this, at the back of the boys' minds is one fundamental and final dogma of their own, that to be a Christian does not necessarily imply anything to do with the Church.

"Directly you begin to talk to the boy about the Church his moral ears fly back with innate incredulity. (Laughter.) It is "hot' 'funny a bit. It is really a serious ""thing. The idea of the Church as essential to Christian salvation, their own or society's, is a thing they just do not believe. It is treated politely as 'parson's guff.'

"My experience is that they will not criticise Christianity, but they will always criticise the Church."

He believed it was a matter of services. They needed above all a new liturgical movement if the priest were to do anything through the Church and its services for this genftration.

He knew of no service more repugnant to the realism of youth than what was called "Choral Eucharist." With Cathedral Matins it would be a welllost monument of piety. "What we want," Mr. Gorton said, "is the altar back to the people, saved from choirs and the English Cathedral school of organists, from decorous modern churchmen, or public schools chaplains, from archaisms, dim lights, and medieval pageant.

"If we can make a people's service out of the Eucharist we have something to point to and say, 'That is the Church.'"