GOD OR NO-GOD IN THE SCHOOLS?*

New Zealand Tablet, 3 August 1911, Page 1449

GOD OR NO-GOD IN THE SCHOOLS?*

THE DISCUSSION : A CRITICAL SUMMARY By The Rt. Rev. Henry W. Cleary, D.D. PART 111. ‘THOSE THAT FLY MAY FIGHT AGAIN.’ lI.—THE EVENING POST’S ‘DEFENCE’ OF THE SECULAR SYSTEM (Continued from last issue.) There are others a-many, besides French unbelievers, who recognise the practical impossibility of school ‘ neutrality ’ in regard to religion. America of April 15, 1911 (p. 22), for instance, publishes such an expression of opinion by M. de Brouckere, ‘ a militant Belgian Socialist.’ He had been invited to deliver an address on ‘ Neutral Schools ’ to ‘ a recently organised society of teachers in Brussels, Belgium, composed exclusively of Socialists, and having as chief purpose the propagation of socialistic doctrines.’ The speaker set forth (says America) to prove ‘ the flat impossibility of neutrality. . . The orator affirmed the impossibility on two heads: to defend such a system is a vain dream, and in the supposition that the vain dream could be made a reality, its exponents would find themselves forced to close their schools. Neutral schools (he explained), so far from helping to spread the light of intelligence, must plunge their followers into abysmal darkness of ignorance. “For,” he continued, “neutrality in the matter of education must have one of two meanings: Either it supposes that its devotees hold no , positive and fixed opinions in all the questions of controversy of the day, or it simply forces them to banish them from their programmes of study, and to ignore such questions and to teach nothing that is in any way subject of discussion.” M. de Brouckere, in a very effective analysis of neutrality, then proceeded to show how school training is radically impossible in either of the two suppositions.’ The same paper America v01.’11., p. 179) publishes the following opinion expressed in the course of an interview by Judge Grosscup, of the United States Circuit Court: ‘ The consequence of the ardent desire for neutrality as between the various denominations, is that the Government is taking a stand against religion, or at least that is how it works out in the end. The result of, the unfortunate situation is that at an age when children are having their character and mentality made up, they are not given any of the benefits of religion. The rising generation is thus losing religious training at the time it is most needed. Some method should be found by which religious instruction will be a part of the school system.’ Many Australian and New Zealand politicians and Journalists have, no doubt, merely assimilated this foolish cry of ‘neutrality,’ partly because it is a good party catchword, partly because (for the unthinking) it is a convenient substitute for argument and proofj partly because they have not seriously adverted to the meaning of the term neutrality,’ and partly because they have never attempted an analysis of the kind of dogmatism that (as already shown) is necessarily implied and involved in any system of public instruction which legislatively excludes religion from the schools. We may say of their unproven protestations of ‘neutrality ’ what Lord Rosebery said of Tory Democracy: that it is ‘an honest and unconscious imposture.’ In Victoria (Australia) and in New Zealand we are passing through the negatively atheistic phase of the secular system, which is based upon the necessarily implied dogmas set forth on page 41, and nowhere set aside. The secular system in France (as a legislative scheme) passed rapidly through this stage in the eighties. Owing to political and social circumstances, it will take Vic-

toria and New Zealand a longer time, to pass" this given point and move '(after prance) into the second and third and fourth stages of the sure and logical progression from ignoring God in the school, on a dogmatic basis, to - denying Him on a foundation of dogma. Professor Mackenzie’s pamphlet is sufficient evidence, that some, at least, of our New Zealand fellow-citizens deem that the time is opportune to place the defence of the secular system upon another foundation—a rationalistic, question-begging attack upon accepted and fundamental tenets of Christian faith. The professor calls this ‘ strict neutrality ’ (p. 11). He has learned his Gallic lesson well. And, no doubt, he goes on his ‘ strictly neutral’ way rejoicing in the blessing of the Evening Post upon his ‘valuable pamphlet.’ • 3. ‘Undogmatic.’ 3. The Evening Post asserts that the rigid exclusion of religion from the schools, by Act of Parliament, renders such schools ‘ undogmatic ’ in regard to religion. ■: ' , Reply i (a) This assertion (letter No. 2) is not a statement of a Christian view of life, of its duties and its destiny. Much less is it a justification, on . a Christian view of life, of that secular system which atheists and other unbelievers defend on an anti-Chris-tian view of life. It is, therefore, irrelevant to this discussion. (b) The Post’s assertion, furthermore, assumes what it is its duty to provenamely, that the State has a moral right to eject religion from the place which it holds by immemorial prescriptive right, in education, (c) As a matter of hard fact, the secular system is as dogmatic as Mohammedanism. Here is one of the present writer’s oft-repeated challenges to the Evening Post : ‘ Can you show how a body of legislators can kick religion out of the place it occupied in the schools, without at least implicitly asserting the following (among other) sectarian religious dogmas; (a) that religion has no necessary or rightful place in school training; (b) that all Christian history’ teaching, and tradition, demanding, the essential union of religion and education, are a vast blunder, a scholastic heresy; (c) that a majority of law-makers has a moral right to banish religion from the schools by Act of Parliament. Or can you -show by what particular moral right, acknowledged by believing Christians, a professedly “neutral” State can impose the abovementioned implied sectarian dogmas, with enforced taxation of dissidents, on the public schools?’ To these challenges the Post has made no reply. In a very real sense, we have here the very condition which the Post (March 9) so strongly deprecates-namely, 1 the State adopting a religion of 'its own.’ -As"suggested above, this fallacy of the Evening Post is based on the unproven suppositions that a system of public instruction can be ‘ undogmatic,’ and that this ‘undogmatism’ is, somehow, an advantage in the matter of. teaching. Both suppositions are absurdities, and imply a strange misconception of the meaning of the terms ‘ dogma ’ and ‘ dogmatic,’ and of what is fundamentally involved in the function of teaching. The very assertion that our secular system is ‘undogmatic’ is itself, in a very real and .accepted sense, a dogma. For ‘dogma,’ in English, means * any settled opinion, conviction,’ and not merely ‘ an authoritative religious doctrine ’ ; and ‘ dogmatic ’ means: ‘Employing, or characterised by, positive assertion ; making ■ statements without argument or evidence ’; ‘ having the form of a simple and unqualified statement’; and ‘pertaining to, or of the nature of, a dogma, or an authoritatively settled doctrine.’ The very idea of teaching and education involves dogma. The function of teaching is to lead the pupil onward and upward to the recognition of more and more truths. The process is constructive and affirmative. And in imparting any truth —whether arithmetical, geopraphical, historical, or religiousthe teacher is. bound at every moment to recognise and obey, in his words, a rigid external authority-namely, the facts of the matter which he is communicating to his pupil. In other words, he has to express his truths' as definite propositions, as ‘ settled opinions, or convictions ’—that

is, as dogmas; he has to proceed; by way of ‘ positive 5 assertion ’ and ‘ unqualified statement ’—which means that he must be .‘ dogmatic.’ -; The multiplication table is a litany of sharply outlined, definite dogmas. Only by somebody’s ‘ positive assertion ’ and ‘ unqualified statement that is,' by dogma—does the schoolboy, for instance, learn that five times nine are forty-five.? Every such acquirement of knowledge is progress," in its kind; and so is every surrender, on the child’s part]; of erroneous private opinion to the new truths which] dawn upon him in his toilsome way through arithmetic. And what is true of arithmetic is likewise true of geo-;i graphy and history and botany—and of those definite ; religious and moral truths which have created the; Christian home and all that is best in our Christian? civilisation. There is no mental or moral progress,’ no way to instruction or to education, but .through dogma. At the-first meeting of the Centenary of the National Society in London (March 23, 1911), : Mr. Balfour said, in this connection: 'I do not care what it is about, all teaching that is worth anything is dog-: matic teaching. If you are dealing with children very often when you are dealing with people not children—you must teach them definite things. If I am* rightly informed, the school of modern mathematicians have shown that the very foundations of mathematics are full of difficulties, full of great logical and mieculative difficulties; but when you are teaching clmdren the first four rules of arithmetic, you do not trouble them with the foundations of pure mathematics. You teach them arithmetic, and you teach them dogmatism ally. If you do not teach . them dogmatically;? you cannot teach them at all. If you are dealing only with the so-called “ Cowper-Temple ” religion, that must be taught dogmatically, or it will not be taught at all. If your teaching is to be teaching, it is teaching a definite proposition of things, and stating! it dogmatically—for that is what dogma means—and: there is, : :really no e escape from it.’ Chesterton wrsetjr says ( Heretics , pp. 285-286) that ‘the vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always; something concerned with the" breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more-and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. . . Man can bo defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which. the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. _ When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system,.when he says that lie has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God] holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded;’ In a more recent work (What’s Wrong with the World) the same gifted author says (6th ed., p. 197): ‘ It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma- from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.’ Elsewhere in the same work (p. 208) he declares that ‘ all educationists are utterly dogmatic and authoritarian.’ And again (pp. 220-221): ‘The true task of culture to-day is not a task of expansion, but very decidedly of selection—and rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it. Even if it be not a theological creed, it must still be as fastidious and as firm as theology. In short, it must be orthodox. . . They say that nowadays the creeds? are crumbling; I doubt it, but at least the sects are’ increasing; and education must now be sectarian education, merely for practical purposes. Out of all this throng of theories it must somehow select a theory out of ail these- thundering voices it must manage to

hear a voice; out of all this awful and aching battle of blinding lights, without one shadow to give shape to them, it must manage somehow to trace and to track a star.’ ' (To be continued.) ''