Non-sectarian Schools Impossible

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 36, 3 September 1903, Page 2

Non-sectarian Schools Impossible

Like that blessed word ' Mesopotamia,' the term • non-sectarian ' is honey in the mouths of many clergymen and politicians in New Zealand who talk, from divers standpoints, more or less stormy nonsense in conwith the National Idol, our godless system of State instruction. To the clergymen referred to, what is Catholic is ' sectarian ' ; what is Protestant is ' nonsectarian.' To the politician who grovels before the Idol as the last and highest expression of glorified wisdom, what is Christian is ' sectarian ' , what is Secularist or Agnostic or Atheistic, is ' non-sectarim.' We have many a time and oft pointed out m our editorial columns that there is not, nor can there be, either in or out of New Zealand any such thing as a non-sec-tarian school system. Our contention has found cble expression by an educationist writer in a recent i:/juc of the ' New York Times.'

' Is a non-sectarian school possible ? ' re asLs. ' iet us see Either the school admits in its HiUhn*, ihaT God exists or that He does not exist, or that it does not know whether He exists or not. If it admits that He exists, then it is theistic ;if it supposes that He does not exist, then it is atheistic ; if it professes not to know whether He exists or not, then it is agnostic. We will go a step fuither. The ideas directing the school admit either that God has made a revelation, or deny a revelation, or hold that they do not know or that they do not care whether there is a r&velation, or that they will ha\e nothing to say on the question, and leave the pupils to think as they please of it. In every one of these cases the school is still " sectarian," and the principles advocated determine the school and put it in accord with a particular set or sect which advocates those principles. There may be no name yet invented for the sect of men who advocate the particular principle involved, but since there must be a principle at the root of every school system that system becomes allied to the sect advocating that principle Now, are our public schools influenced by the principles of any sect ? Most certainly they are They are influenced by the principles of the sect which wishes to have schools without any religious instruction You may reonember that our great statesman, Daniel Webster gave his opinion of such schools in his famous speech in the Girard case. He said : "It is a mockery and an insult to common sense to maintain that a school for the instruction of youth from which Chnstian instruction by Christian teachers is sedulously and religiously shut out is not delstic and infidel both in its purpose and in its tendency.' And Mr. J (}. Spencer, superintendent of public instruction in the State of New York about the beginning of the present school system, wnting to Governor Reward in regard to sectarianism in education said : " It is an error to suppose that the ab-

sense of all religious instruction, if it were practicable, is a mode of avoiding sectarianism. On the contrary, it would be in itself sectarian, because it would be consonant to the views of a particular class, and opposed to the opinions of other classes. Those who reject creeds and resist all efforts to infuse them into the minds of the young would be gratified by a sysitem which so fully accomplishes their purpose." Why should any of our citizens who wish to have children educated according to their own particular views not have a right to their own share of the money appropriated for education.'