RELIGION IN SCHOOLS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 296, 23 February 1945, Page 5

RELIGION IN SCHOOLS

|. Sir,-Your correspondent "Argosy" appears to agree with the "general understanding" that the question of religion in schools was "settled" by the majority "long ago," but there are many legal arrangements "settled long ago" which have since had to be modified and this may prove to be one of them. The question at issue is precisely what features of our present Education Act are worth preserving, and what may and should be altered. Without sharing his fancy for proportional representation, I agree with your correspondent that "majority rule" needs checks; and quite often, both rightly and wrongly, it gets them. The hard facts of our productive needs set limits to what majority rule can do with the miners; and the hard facts of our educational needs set limits also to what it can do with the teachers. I agree with him also about the unsatisfactory character of arrangements whereby some pupils attend religious classes and others "find themselves outside in the playground." For this reason I am not quite happy about A.M.R.’s defence of religious observances in State schools. But "Argosy" himself, in his statement that "Bible reading ought to be one solution for all," makes a partial admission that teaching about religion is not open to the same objection as the teaching of religion, and I would simply suggest that he apply this distinction in a more liberal way. The exclusion of all "interpretations" is an impossible demand. Let the pupils instead learn about different possible interpretations, including anti-supernatural ones, and then when they are able they can make up their own minds, with such help as their homes and their churches give them. What is guarded against in our present Education Act, and needs to be guarded against in any modification of it, is the State’s imposition of a particular decision on this point upon either teachers or pupils. : I doubt whether the difficulties of adding the study of religion to our training college curricula are as great as "Argosy" fears. The London University already offers a Certificate of Religious Knowledge for mastery of a course which could quite easily be adapted to our

needs here.-

-ARTHUR

N.

PRIOR

(on active service).