THE EDUCATION QUESTION.

Southland Times, Issue 1601, 5 July 1872, Page 3

THE EDUCATION QUESTION.

(communicated). i The following extract from an article in Blackwood's Magazine entitled " The Manchester Nonconformists and Political Philosophy" is suggested as suitable for the times : — Another set of persons who form a very numerous and troublesome body are exercising great political pressure to transfer legislation from the common parliament of the nation to local groups of ratepayers, and seek to place the details of private life, the liberty to guide our conduct and to supply our wants, at the mercy of multitudes of small ignorant and uneducated local assemblies. And they do this upon theory in the name of moral philosophy, under a conception of scientific politics, and of its right and duty to prescribe the details of morality to every citizen. The modern doctrine of religious equality as conceived at the present day by the nonconformists, contains a whole system of political philosophy, they seem to be profoundly unconscious of the revolution in political theory which their demand implies. They are jealous of the Church of England, they resent the hold which it has upon the nation, not because it teaches error, but because it is an institution to which they do not choose to belong. They thought that they had inflicted a mortal Btab on it two years ago, and they are astounded and dismayed to see that, boomerang-like, the weapon they hurled at another has returned back upon themselves ! . . . And then under the agony of these irritated feelings, they lift up their voices with the fierce utterance of a political theory, which, if logically carried out, would reduce the nation to anarchy. Their doctrine of religious equality not only assails the desire which a people may have to accomplish public ends by the establishing of a national church ; it does more ; it tyrannises very unmistakably over the liberty of their fellow citizens, even though these may constitute the great bulk of the nation. By far the largest number of Englishmen desire that the education of their children shall include religion — for they regard as Christians that morality cannot be adequately impressed on the conscience without religion. Most of them are also profoundly aware that religion is not a separate affair like arithmetic or drawing, embodied in some catechism, and to be got up as any other branch of knowledge, but that it pervades the whole of man's being, and guides his moral judgment over every part of his conduct, as well as the recorded actions of other men. The Manchester congregationaliats know perfectly well that religion consigned to a special department of the mind is not true religion : and none more than they would vehemently recoil from an edHcation of their own children which relegated religious teaching to a limited portion of the day, and never referred to its lessons, the feelings it inculcates, the tone of mind it inculcates, at any portion of the school time. Tet these very men demand, in the name of respect for their own feelings, that the children of the poor shall have a form of education which they would carefully repudiate for their own. Their negative claim thus becomes an instrument of very positive tyranny. Let them devote some Berious thought to the examination of the essential elements of that social organisation called a nation. _^___________ - _