BOHEMIA.

Waikato Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 2388, 29 October 1887, Page 2 (Supplement)

BOHEMIA.

Duke : I tore the people, Rut iht not like to stupe me to their e>fes; Though it (to well, I do not relish well Their loud applause and aves vehement; Xnr do 1 th ink the. man of safe discretion, That does affect it. Measure for Measure. Tub education question is one of the most dilliuult of the many serious subjects bequeathed to the now Parliament. It is a legacy of the unwise and profligate legislation of the past decade or more that has encompassed the colony with many dangers, and driven it into a corner from which it will bo no easy task to extricate it. The cost of the national •system of education in all its branches is little short of £({00,000, and the burden of it has pressed so hardly on the people that Government will find it imperative to ask Parliament to make a considerable reduction in this enormous expenditure. To do this there must necessarily be a modification in the system itself. What appears to me a very culpable feature in connection with the state administration of educational affairs is that a large proportion of the public money spent on school buildings has come out of loans and not out of ordinary revenue. This has been pointed out on several occasions by writers in the press, and its want of business principle strongly condemned. The colony was committed to the existing system by a pliable Parliament, too much steeped in the prevailing corruptions, in order to gratify the demands of the dogmatic Stout, then rising into prominence and whose brain, at the time, was filled with now fangled notions. His volatile mind seized on wild theoretical ideas preached by fantastical doctrinaires, and easily led away by the unsound literature of that class of philosophers who rank far below the great thinkers of the day, he plunged into excesses with a reckless want of forethought and sagacity in order to inflict them upon the people regardless of the cost to the country. Thus it has been with the Education Act. He kicked away the Bible of his forefathers to assume the mantle of the Apostle of Infidelity, with Ingersoll as his ideal, and determined to crush Christianity out of existence and abolish its sacred Scriptures. And the taxpayer was to pay the piper for his darling whim of the hour !

We are now reckoning up thooost of it. Wo have not only to consider the actual money value of the system, which is painfully conspicuous enough. It is not alone the more arithmetical calculation of the heavy burden oast upon half a million of people, the most heavily taxed in the Empire, to uphold a scheme so costly and extravagant. But, it is also the enduring injury inflicted on the nation through the absence of any recognition of the value of moral training in the youth of the colony. Tho abolition from the syllabus of the schools of the culture of the sacred history and writings of the people which have been preserved from the remotest ages has exercised a baneful influence on the tone of the community which is makingitaelf felt more and more every day. My own personal investigations and the testimony I have obtained from others who have given time and thought to the subject and are recognised authorities thereon, have fully convinced me that to this dark blot in our educational system, and to very little else, is due tho disregard of parental control and home ties so apparent in the young generation of the present day, accompanied in them by an irreverence for sacred things and followed by the correllative evils, as night succeeds day, of a spirit of lawlessness that chafes at discipline in any shape, immorality filling ;the streets with vice, and increased juvimie depravity. The polish of polite society and the general moral tone of the community, commercially and otherwise, has suffered accordingly, * * * * #

The condition in which the Act has thrown the colony is deplorable in other ways, and demonstrates how necessary i t is to select cautious men with the genius for statesmanship in them, to be our legislators. It shows how dangerous a thing it is to entrust power to men who have no knowledge of the great world beyond them, and whose sole aim is to foist crude fantasies upon this country in direct Tiolation of accepted laws, human and divine. The consequence of the system is this: A young nation growing up without a creed, for it lias cast off the great corner stone, upon which the might, the wealth and the strength of u magnificent Empire has been built as upon an unassailable rock, and upon which the great people of that Empire have fixed their faith, and by which they have won their blessings. The difficulty before us is how to recede from so great an error. It is easy to slip over the bank into the river, but it is another matter to regain the high ground of safety. The discord created amongst the religious bodies gives the question a phase of great delicacy. The advocates of the system in its integrity denounce any meddling with the Act: but they form a minority of the population. The Church of England people are opposed to it on the grounds of the absence of religious teaching; the Roman Catholics also refuse to accept it for conscientious reasons ; and a large proportion of the inhabitants of the colony of all shades of religious belief desire its amendment by the introduction of Bible reading. The Church of England comprise over 250,000 of the population, and the Roman Catholics about 80,000; therefore numerically the people adverse to the present state method exceed by more than half the whole population of the colony. Their protests against the system and the mischief it will inflict on the moral conditions of the people have been loud, and has never ceased.

Both those bodies have established schools of their own throughout the colony. The Roman Catholics, who, as a class, are not by any means wealthy, have made many sacrifices and borne heavy expenses, in order to provide schools for their children in all the principal districts of New Zealand. I hive given this subject my attention for some years ; I have personally visited their principal schools and observed their system, and with the data before me, casting aside all differences of belief, I can only come to the conclusion, as a lover of justice, that they are entitled to the claims they make for aid.' In the diocese of Auckland alone they are educating about 2000 children. Were it not for the relief they thus afford, together with the Anglican schools, the State would have to provide additional accomodation and increased teaching staff to meet those heavy responsibilities, and our already over-charged system would be saddled with a much greater burden of cost. It is commonly thought that their method is anti-national, which, more than anything else offends Englishmen ; and Archbishop Trench, referring to this point says, if that prejudice should ever grow weak, all protests against their system would soon loose its energy and strength, With a list of the class books they use before me, many of them being familiar to my own schooldays, and with a copy of the standards of examination and time table at my hand, I can sec no exception to either, and indeed I perceive that there are points of excellence over the national system. I have met with not a few of our own flovernment schoolmasters who are opposed to the state system, not on!}' from a scholastic point of view, but on administrative grounds also. There is but one .conelpsjpn forced on my mind, and that is there should he frep (trade' in tlj.o prp : fessiou pf teaching.' The §t'ate should j pot annihilate private establishments so completely by its competition. In England grants in aid are givec to dcjjomtpational schools, and there no friction exists

between the religious bodies and the national system, whilst religious and moral training is carefully preserved to the British Youth. The Anglicans in this colony ask for the same just measures here, and that is all that the Roman Catholics desire, the Government having the usual right of inspection, Neither do the latter expect aid for any other of their schools except those in large centres of population, for they admit that in small districts where their co-religionists are small in number, their schools could not come up to the requirements that would be imposed by the Government. The important principle for the state to carry out either directly by its own means or by the means of others under its control is to rear the young of its people to be intelligent, law-abiding citizens ami become fit to add to the wealth and progress of the nation by being capable of entering into suitable and honourable spheres of labour. Whoever complies with the great and noble duty of so training up the young of both sexes, fulfils the whole law. Fra no Tiredr.