I.945/4C
".11PWIFOr:irownworp.. -
.
jree fedlo---e-4C et
ELLIOTT ELLIOTT
ELLIOTT ELLIOTT OPTICIANS
oily k4, PERTHAr
OPTICIANS
U
John fllioFF mar. Ex-MarisF Bros:
Piccadilly Arcade
Tel. B 7988
Tel. B7988
Perth
Siudeni
Has the Neutral
School Given
Be Christian Citizens?
SEVENTY-FIRST YEAR.
PRICE THREEPENCE.
PERTH, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1944.
NO. 9,149.
the Children of Australia the Chance to
At the Best Secularism Gives an Incomplete Picture of Life
.
Materialism Treats Religion features Johnny ballet the human interpretation but may continue great machine The probably rightly quite as Unworthy of Consideration the something that there
Absurdity of Letting Children Decide From Themselves Lecture to Teachers' Guild by Hugh Goerke (Concluded. Bearing in mind, then, the two purand poses of education-character knowledge-what has been the result the neutral of State intervention Has the neutral school met school? the. wishes of the parents in regard to I character building and training? am inclined to say that it has not. The parents of the first children to attend the neutral school represented on the whole a Christian community. As per cent. of Australians late as 1911, who furnished census returns stated that they belonged to some Christian denomination. Even by 1933 the percentage was still upwards of 90 per cent., while in a Gallup poll conducted some months ago nearly 80 per cent. of all parents thought that religious instruction should be given in schools. I think, then, that it is safe to say
that the great majority of the parents
towards the end of the last century, when the neutral school was introduc-
ed, would have wished their children instructed in Christian principles and brought up on Christian lines. Has the neutral school, then, given every opportunity to the children of Australia to grow up as Christian citizens? The answer can only be no. By way of an analogy, let us consider a community of people who are passionately fond of music and who wish
their children to have every opportunity of acquiring musical knowledge and proficiency. They differ Sharply, however, as to the type of music they prefer; some are high-brow and some are low-brow in the same sense as some are High Church and some are Low Church. To settle the difficulty of ar-
bitrating these differences, the State decides that it will teach no music whatever in its schools, and that it will not subsidise any schools in which music is taught. It will let music look after itself, and indeed by its very attitude will teach the child to discount
Now such the importance of music. a school may turn out some very creditable scientists, but no blame could be laid at its door if the awful discovery was made that somehow or other
it had produced a child who could play the scale of C major. The State's attitude would be if the parents want their children taught music, let them teach it themselves, and then the,' proceed to give the child homework to It also enocupy its time at home. tirely begs the question that many of the parents have neither the time nor the requisite ability to give such in-
struction. Similarly, the neutral school is a distinct impediment to the parent who wishes his child to be brought up a Christian. It thus fails in the first But, necessity of character building. moreover, secular education is a very incomplete form of education. It cannot provide the answer to a lot of interesting questions. To carry on the musical analogy-if you are going to omit music altogether from the schools, you will either have to ignore or to provide alternative explanations for a multitude of other things. You will probably end up by describing dancing as an interesting habit some people have patterns of describing mathematical with their feet on the floor. You may may add further that for some odd reason many people also like to have this exercise accompanied by musical noises-for which consideration they generally have to pay the piper in the same sense as the Catholic has to pay the priest. I have already referred to the existence of certain social codes limiting the use's any person may make of his knowledge. The teacher in the neutral schools may be successful in preventing the child from breaking some of these codes, but, if he is to be strictly neutral. he will give him no idea, or at least a very incomplete idea, of
why such codes exist at all. That is why people talk nowadays of the need for teaching the principles of social behaviour in schools, because indirectly they realise the weakness that comes from not teaching Christianity. Johnny, for example, may inquire by what strange perversity people want It is scarcely a comto wear clothes. plete answer to tell him that it is some peculiar family custom understood to have been originated by Adam and ob-
If you can't procure in town what you require, TRY US.
'Phone: B5393
of a of in action. dancers in a very real sense became cogs in the machine. Now, -whatever we may think of such a performance
served by most men since. to wear clothes,
in Moscow one of the
will
a
he feel in a
indim way is tellectually unsatisfactory , about the grow not whole situation. He may up to practice nudism, but he may come to see nothing wrong in near nudism. He may find it quite incredible to know that he cannot torture the teacher if he feels the mood of a Borneo head-hunter coming upon him, but when he comes to consider the question that Europe was split on the question of indulgences, or, worst still, that ' the Reformation happened because of the indissolubility of the Sacrament of Matrimony. which he does not understand, he may well give up in dismay. I have been trying to point out that insofar as the secular school ignores spiritual values it tends to materialism, and insofar as it ignores Christianity it it gives a very incomplete picture of the world about us, which is still supposedly a Christian civilisation.
But actually the neutral school presents a much greater danger to Christianity insofar as it subjects the unformed mind of the child to all sorts of materialistic theories. Though Christianity has an answer to most of the phenomenon around us, the child is encouraged to seek alternative explanations. He looks to the teacher for guidance, and may find out that the teacher is drawing his own opinions from some fashionable materialistic thinker of the last century. He may learn in his researches into geology that because the world is so old, God is too young to have created it. If you adopt an attitude of neutrality to music, you can't blame the child if he comes to like jazz. If you ignore music and teach .the child the physical theory nf sound, you cannot complain if he comes to look on the physics teacher as the brightest of all musicians. Furthermore, the neutral school produces a majority of persons who leave school at fourteen ,and then imagine that they are sufficiently educated. Shaking off the shackles of the schoolroom, they feel perfectly free to devote themselves to material pursuits. They feel that religion is a subject scarcely worthy of an intelletual interest. Now, I am not saying that this is to be deplored; I am not even saying that such a community could not be a happy community; but it could scarcely be called a Christian community. Indeed, it will probably evolve some new religion altogether, whether it be the worship of man or the worship of the machine. A few years ago
,
E. LUISINI
Registered at the G.P.O., Perth, for transmission by post
u a newspaper.
was
and the aesthetic pleasure it might give, it is certainly typical of a new culture which has broken with the traditions of the ancient culture, We might hear, for example, of a fishing community in Brittany giving a fish supper, but we scarcely expect them to be so servile, so materialistic, as to turn on a fish ballet. We do not expect them to set up the Sign of the Fish by which they get their daily bread in opposition to the ring on the hand of the Fisherman in Rome, in the same way as Moscow has set up the sign of the hammer and sickle. We do not expect the president of one of those well -organised French fishing cooperatives to open the meeting of the guild with the prayer which has come to us from Mexico, "Our Socialism, which art on earth, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come to the country as well as to the town," To maintain our Christian civilisation, then, religion must be restored to the schools. This means either the reconstruction of the denominational school or the giving of some Christian instruction in the State schools. I am aware that some people say it is not fair to impart religious dogma to the child. They say that it ought to be allowed to make up its own mind when it grows up. I think it is just as sensible to say to a nation of 'asparagus eaters that you should not teach a child to eat asparagus when it is young, because it may find that it will give it indigestion when it grows up. The most obvious way of preventing a child from making up its mind about religious truth is to prevent it from finding out anything about religious dogma when it is young, especially in its impressionable adolescent years. If your dislike of the Christian doctrine of modesty impels you to prevent Johnny from wearing any clothes at all, you not only make him a rather singular creature, but you also effectively deny him the pleasure of dressing up as a Red Indian, because you think that at some future date he may be unable to prevent himself from being trussed up like a mummy or like a Christian. I do not think that you are going to restore a Christian civilisation by restoring the Cress to the schools. The problem of modern irreligion goes very much deeper than that, The masses of the paients of yesterday did not (Continued on Page 4.)
MERCERS AND iDRAPERS
215-219 William Street,
Perth