The London Welshman

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THE BISHOP OF ST. DAVID'S ON THE EDUCATION BILL. Bishop Owen of St. David's, who never allows his weapons to rust, has addressed a long letter to his clergy severely criticising the Education Bill. In the course of it he says The provisions of this Bill are injurious to the nation as well as unjust to the Church. As the Church is not a sect, it is bound always to have primary regard for the welfare of the nation as a whole. To all who believe that religious education is a vital condition of national welfare a Bill which seriously weakens national security for efficient religious education cannot but inflict upon the nation an injury of a grave and far-reaching character. The risk involved in this weakening of national security is far graver now than in 1870, on account of the growth of national indifference, illustrated in the decay of Sunday observance and of family religion, in the rush for pleasure, and the re- laxation of moral fibre, which all thoughtful Christians have to deplore. The existing 11,817 Church schools of the country, in which 2>35°5i76 children are educated, form the most solid part of our present national guarantee for religious education. The trust deeds of Church schools not only statutably secure for religion its right place as the basis of education, but also define its char- acter and provide that it shall be taught by teachers known to believe in what they teach. In Council schools, on the other hand, there has been hitherto no statutable security for religious education at all. The only thing secured by statute is the rigid exclusion of any religious catechism or religious formulary which is distinctive of any particular denomina- tion." The main object of this Bill is to con- vert all Church schools at one stroke on January 1, 1908, into Council schools. It sum- marily sweeps away all the statutable security for religious education contained in the trust deeds of Church schools, with the mere excep- tion of the conditional possibility of certain facilities of slight practical value at the pleasure of local education authorities, while at the same time, be it carefully observed, it materially weakens, instead of strengthening, the already precarious position of religious education in Council schools. Religious Education. There is no national problem more vital in the long run, as well as more difficult, than the problem of religious education. To stake deliberately for the first time, as this Bill does, the whole security for a matter so vital to the national welfare upon the uncertain outcome of years of acrimonious strife in local elections throughout the country, is indeed a light-hearted sample of legislative inefficiency, unworthy of patriotic statesmanship. In this attempt at a compromise between undenominationalism and secularism, the secularists have decided the best of the bargain. The majority of Christian op- ponents of Church schools are sincerely con- vinced that the right solution of this religious difficulty lies in an Act of undenominational uniformity, taking the normal religious education of elementary schools altogether out of the hands of religious bodies, and entrusting it to the State as represented by local education authorities. The great majority of Churchmen, on the other hand, not only strongly object, on conscientious grounds, to the State monopoly of undenominationalism, but also hold, as citizens, that it would defeat its own object by spoiling the efficiency of religious education. The chief object of all education is to train children to be in right touch with the actual facts of life. It is, therefore, educationally unsound, because it is unreal, to ignore in the education of children the religious bodies to which their parents belong. The example of Germany, where the whole of the problem of national education has been thought out on scientific lines, with a thoroughness worthy of its importance, shows that it is quite practicable for the State, with great advantage to itself, to deal justly in this matter with all parties, by the adoption of the reasonable principle of making parents respon- sible for the choice of the form of religion in which their children are to be educated. The Parental Right. It is unfortunate that it was not found pos- sible, for reasons upon which I need not now enter, to embody in the Education Act of 1902 the recognition of the natural right of parents which had been urged upon the Government of the day, in July, 1901, by the two Convocations of the Church. Churchmen would have wel- comed from the present Government a Bill securing for all parents the rights of choice, in all schools, between undenominational and de- nominational instruction for their children. The Bill, however, instead of some such reason- able amendment of the Act of 1902, violates both justice and liberty, by peremptorily pro- hibiting teachers from giving denominational instruction to any child, except in urban areas under grotesque conditions, which reduce reli- gious liberty into vulgar fractions. This pro- hibition would have inflicted palpable injustice upon Church parents had no single Church school ever been built; but in Church schools, upon which, for the sake of Church teaching, Churchmen have spent many millions of pounds, to prohibit by statute, as this Bill does, Church teachers from giving voluntarily Church teach- ing to Church children, even outside school hours, without any public expense, is outrageous injustice. It is no wonder that a Bill, which perpetrates such an outrage as this, should also tear up trust deeds, and establish an autocratic Com- mission of Three, independent of all courts of law, with power to seize, at their discretion, Church school buildings, "subject to such con- ditions (if any) as to payment or other matters as may be agreed to by the Local Education Authority and as the Commission thinks just." The Council of Wales. It is obviously unreasonable to ask Welsh Churchmen to accept the provisions of the Bill which transfer to the Council of Wales "the powers and duties of the Board of Education," with sundry exceptions which may or may not be, temporarily, made hereafter by scheme. The provision places, in Wales, Church teach- ing in schools and Church educational endow- ments, practically at the discretion of a local body, in the impartiality of which, in matters of controversy, recent experience has made con- fidence impossible. Apart, however, from this insuperable objection, it would be better for Welsh education, for reasons which I gave at the Conference held at Cardiff last month, to confine the powers of the proposed Council of Wales to the powers of the existing Central Welsh Board for Intermediate Education, to- gether with such powers for elementary educa- tion as Welsh Local Education Authorities may think fit to delegate to it, without transferring to it any powers now vested in the Board of Education.

Mr. Birrell's very reasonable Bill. For instance, at the recent Dowlais Church Vestry, a resolution was moved by the rector and carried, in which the Bill is referred to as a tyrannical violation of the sacred rights of parents in the matter of the religious education of their children and its manifest object was the trampling under foot with Cromwellian ruthlessness, the liberty of Church people." Such ridiculous ecclesiastical stage thunder is positively nauseating. The rector also made a speech in which he said that there was in every line of the Bill a clear desire to inflict a deadly wound on the Church -teachers were dragooned, trusts were violated, parents spurned, and a machinery for petty sectarian tyranny was called into existence which would ruin the cause of education." Was ever such arrant nonsense ever spoken ? And could misrepresentation of an honest attempt to settle the educational question be more pronounced ? Deadly wounds, forsooth Dragooning," indeed! Ruining the cause of education." A glywsoch chwi y fath sothach ?