SCHOOL EXAMINATIONS.

Evening Star, Volume IX, Issue 2764, 27 December 1871, Page 2

SCHOOL EXAMINATIONS.

To the Editor. Sin, —Having been out of town, I have been prevented from drawing attention to a practice apparently rife at all our public school examinations, but fraught, I believe, with injurious consequences to the schools. At the Girls’ High School exhibition, a Presbyterian clergyman -the Rev Mr Will, commenced the proceedings with a Protestant prayer. At best, the exhibition was a quasiconcert, and I was not aware until then that it was a Presbyterian procedure to pray at the commencement of a concert. But there were Catholics, Jews, Infidels, and all the various kinds of Protestants at the e.xhibibition, and yet Mr Will prayed as if he had been in his Taicri pulpit—unconscious that he was insulting the Catholics, the Jews, and the Infidels with his Protestant prayer. 1 went also to the High .School for boys to see the distribution of the prizes, and here also there was a reading, this time by one of the boys, of a passage from the New Testament. This, also, I considered out of place and uncalled for, but especially as all the boys at the school are not Protestmts. One of the duces of the school was a Jew. Why should he or his friends be thus insulted ? At two of the District schools I beheld the same thing, and I am informed that at the third the same was witnessed. If our schools are to be unsectarian, sucli practices must; be given up If these by not discontinued, then I cannot see why, in all fairness, there should not be Btate ’rheological schools, and a State kirk. —I am, &c. A Skoi:t,.uu»t. Dunedin, 20th Dec.