A DISCUSSION

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 5, 4 February 1909, Page 170

A DISCUSSION

(By the Editor of the New Zealand Tablet.) The following, articles on the above subject — the third and fourth of the series — appeared in tho Otago Daily Times of January 28 and 30 : — III.— SOME RIDDLES TO READ. The secular and the religious systems in education !£rc (as already explained) mutually irreconcilable. The battle between them is not of merely local or academic interest. For it is a question of practical principles of philosophy and of pedagogy (the science of teaching), which are of universal application. The human race has everywhere the same native faculties, from New Zealand to Nova Zembla, from China to Peru; and these faculties follow the same laws of development under the moulding and formative processes which are collectively termed ' education.' Even on this outer rim of the world ' the battle of the schools ' is in a real sense a world battle, inasmuch as it involves issues of world-wide importance and principles of world-wide The conflict upon which our secular system has entered is not a more local strife with Catholic ideals of education ; it is merely the local phase of a wider struggle against tho whole principle of the union of religion and education which has been the common posession of Christendom — and of more than Christendom — from time immemorial. Being thus in possession, this must be deemed to be rightly in possesison until adequate evidence to the contrary is forthcoming. Tho secular system appears in the role of a recent and rival claimant for the possession of the world's schools ; it has, therefore, to establish its claims, and to establish them all along the line. Education, like all training, is dominated by the purposo that is in view. The end or purpose is (for Christians) determined by Christian philosophy and revealed religion; its processes by the principles of pedagogy or the science of teaching. The secular system must thus establish itself, if at all, by an appeal to these principles, and to tho true teaching as to the origin and destiny of man. Its line of demonstration involves proof of one or other of the two following propositions : — (1) Proof that the association of religion with education is contrary to, or inconsistent with, the true end or purpose of human existence, and the true principles of pedagogy (child-training); or (2) that the exclusion of religion from the working hours of the school is calculated to promote the true end or purpose of human life, and is, moreover, in accord with the true principles of pedagogy. Proof of one or other of these two ugly-looking propositions is involved in the only scientific and effective defence which our secular system can set up. These propositions aro in substantial harmony with the views of philosophies which do not accept' a Personal God, and to which the post-mortom destiny of the human child is no nobler than that of hog or dog or codlin moth. If the exclusion of religion from our schools is defended on the linos of these or of any such philosophies, we shall know where we stand and how to meet them: But throughout these articles 1 assume that lam dealing with Christian men. Ido not profess to know on what recondite^ principle of Christian philosophy or revealed truth or pedagogical science they uphold the divorce of religion from the school, and the curious situation (stated above) that it logically iiivolyes. To me, and to many besides, their attitude on this question is As full of kinks And curious riddles as any sphinx. Here is a small selection of the first of these ' curious riddles ' that occur to my mind : —

1. Our Government found God in the schools. It banished Him therefrom. On what principle of philosophy and of pedagogy did it do so? By what right, and on what principle, does it seize upon the best and most impressionable part of the child's life and keep it utterly apart from the knowledge of God, the fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom, and the love of Him which is its end ? .In what precise way does all this promote the true end and purpose of the life of the child? Renan was no believer, but he realised the great moralising power of faith in God and love of the great Exemplar, the Saviour of the world. ' The peasant without religion,' said he, 'is the ugliest of brutes, , devoid of the distinctive sign of humanity ' (L'Avenir de la Religion, p. 487). I could fill whole issues of the Otago Daily Times with testimonies as to the need )f religion in the school — testimonies written in half a dozen languages by the foremost authors, educationists, and leaders of men of the past 50 years and more. I limit myself, however, to the following striking pronouncement of so keen a judge of human nature as the first Napoleon. ' I want pupils,' said he, ' who know how to be men. Without God one is not a man. I saw the godless man in 1793. You don't govern that sort of man ; you give him grape-shot ' (translated from W. S. Lilly, 'On Shibboleths/ p. 143).

2. Our ideas of right and wrong are intimately bound up with the doctrines and principles of Christianity. Even agnostics and materialists acknowledge the powerful and sustaining moral influence that these principles have exercised uppn mankind. Our Government found these doctrines and principles in the schools — and swept them out with the legislative besom. By what right, by what principle of philosophy and of pedagogy, did it do so? On what principle does it seize the best period of tlie child's life and arbitrarily cut it off from these ennobling moral influences, at the very time when the formative processes of education are being carried on? And how, precisely, does all this aid the child to attain the true end of its existence ?

3. The divorce of religion from education is one of tho means adopted ever since the eighteenth century by the various schools of anti-Christian philosophy to draw Christian children into scepticism or unbelief. A similar purpose (as stated in a previous article) was avoired by the father of the secular system in Victoria, of which ours is practically a copy. And in France to-day (as I can amply demonstrate) a secular and professedly ' neutral ' system of public instruction is being utilised, of set and deliberate purpose, to cast discredit upon Christianity, to uproot religion from the hearts of the rising generation, and to replace it with scepticism or unbelief. (The general reader will find useful summaries of the evidence in point in The Month for December, 1908, and in Moral Instrvction and Training in Schools, Report of an International Inquiry, London, 1908, Vol. 11., pp. 51-69.) Will the supporters of our secular system explain in what particular way a method devised by philosophers to choke-damp Christianity in Europe, may be used to promote it in New Zealand by aiding Christian children in our schools to attain the glorious destiny known to them by faith ?

4. According to the lessons of experience and the constant teaching of Christendom religion is needed as an active power in the child's early temptations, and 'it should, as far as possible, be handed over to him as a finished weapon.' Now, if the true purposes of life arc; furthered by the exclusion of religion from the school, how are they likewise furthered by including it in the home? If religion is good for the child at his mother's knee at 9 o'clock this morning, by what black magic of pedagogy does it become so poisonous to the same child in the school at 9.30, that the law must ' protect ' him from it as it does from contact with a declared leper or a bubonic rat? And if 0 on pedagogical grounds, God and religion are to be barred out of the school part of our citizens' training, why retain them in any period or phase thereof? For we must not fall into the too common error of supposing that training is only for the young. The process lasts as long as man's probation lasts — in other words, it lasts till we pass out by one or other of the thousand doors of death. ' 5. The material on which both the religious and the secular systems of education must produce the results they aim at is of a very varied nature. In this Dominion an appreciable percentage of it is furnished by parents who keep more or less, severely apart from Church life^ and neglect in various degrees the religious' and moral upbringing of their children. The Anglican Bishop of Auckland (Dr. Neligan) estimates at, I think, 50,000 the neglected white children in this Dominion who know not God-or His Christ. Synods and assemblies have published disconcerting figures in point, and the experience of most clergymen probably goes to show that the number of children of neglected religious and moral training is considerable. The accuracy or inaccuracy of their estimates, however, in no way affects the radical evil of the .system.- Under the

' system of religious education that long prevailed in this' Dominion these evils of domestic neglect were to a greater or lesser extent remedied in the school. But in 1876 our legislators stopped the further operation of this great boon. They seize the best and most plastic part of these neglected children's lives and expose it to the influences of a system of instruction from which they have barred out God and a ' moral law whose sanction is of— God.' What can this counterfeit ' education ' do for these hapless children but sharpen their wits, confirm them in their disregard of religion, and send them in tujm to found homes which, in this respect, shall be the counterpart of the schools in which they received their one-sided and inharmonious training? How, on Christian principles, does all this accord with the tenets of true pedagogy (child-training) or promote the great end of the children's existence ? 6. But that is not all. The incorrigible, grown-up slum-girl in the story, No. 5, John Street, makes this heart-riving appeal: 'It's too late for me; but give the kids a chance 1 ' What chance does our secular system give ' the kids ' ? Let us see. (a) It dethrones God from His olden and prescriptive place in the school; it seizes and monopolises to itself the best and most impressionable part of the child's life and shuts out therefrom the highest, tenderest, most inspiring, and most exalting moral influences, (b) It treats the child as an intelligent, but not as a moral, being. Yet, in Tennyson's phrase, a youth or man may be ' gorged with knowledge ' and yet ■ really uneducated. For mere instruction is- not ethical; it is not enough to form even the intellect, much less to mould the heart and will and form the- character, which is the real end of education. (c) During the precious period of the child's life which the secular system monopolises, it concentrates the intellectual faculties exclusively on material interests and pursuits. It, in effect, makes the school a market and knowledge* a machine for money-getting. Truo educational development of the faculties is simultaneous and harmonious; but the outstanding features of the training imparted by our secular system are these: Thrusting material interests into the forefront and supreme place .in life, and throwing religion, and the things of the Spirit, and the ordered development of the moral and religious faculties, into the background or over the wall. It :s the natural tendency of unused powers and faculties to become feeble or degenerate. What is to prevent this ill-balanced development, this neglect of the spiritual side of the child, from following the path of its normal tendency to moral and religious atrophy — to indifferentism, scepticism, or unbelief? A good home life, and other factors to be mentioned in another article, may check to some extent the normal operation of such tendencies, and hold tho youth to the faith in God that has transformed the world. But by what jugglery of causation can a secular system of public instruction, of itself, tend towards making him much more than a materialist? And how does all thismaterial absorption, all this exclusion of the highest moralising influences, all this lop-sided development of faculties, promote the true purpose of the child's being, and accord ■with the true principles of pedagogy? These are mere samples of the riddles that have to bo read by Christian apologists who advocate the exclusion of God and His law from the school life of children, on philosophical and pedagogical grounds-^-the only grounds upon which a valid defence of our secular system of public instruction can be raised.