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Page 1
Longmans, Green and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London
Fourth Avenue & 30th Street, New York
Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras
Fourth Impression
1914
Nihil Obstat:
F. THOS. BERGH, O.S.B.
Imprimatur:
FRANOISOUS CARD. BOURNE
ABCHIEPOS WESIMONAST,
die 1 Januarii, 1912.
PREFACE
We have had many treatises on education in recent years; many
regulations have been issued by Government Departments; enormous sums
of money are contributed annually from private and public sources for
the improvement and development of education. Are the results in any
degree proportioned to all these repeated and accumulated efforts? It
would not be easy to find one, with practical experience of education,
ready to give an unhesitatingly affirmative answer. And the
explanation of the disappointing result obtained is very largely to be
found in the neglect of the training of the will and character, which
is the foundation of all true education. The programmes of Government,
the grants made if certain conditions are fulfilled, the recognition
accorded to a school if it conforms to a certain type, these things
may have raised the standard of teaching, and forced attention to
subjects of learning which were neglected; they have done little to
promote education in the real sense of the term. Nay, more than this,
the insistence on certain types of instruction which they have
compelled has in too many cases paralysed the efforts of teachers who
in their hearts were striving after a better way.
The effect on some of our Catholic schools of the newer methods has
not been free from harm. Compelled by force of circumstances, parental
or financial, to throw themselves into the current of modern
educational effort, they have at the same time been obliged to abandon
the quieter traditional ways which, while making less display, left a
deeper impress on the character of their pupils. Others have had the
courage to cling closely to hallowed methods built up on the wisdom
and experience of the past, and have united with them all that was not
contradictory in recent educational requirements. They may, thereby,
have seemed to some waiting in sympathy with the present, and
attaching too great value to the past. The test of time will probably
show that they have given to both past and present an equal share in
their consideration.
It will certainly be of singular advantage to those who are engaged in
the education of Catholic girls to have before them a treatise written
by one who has had a long and intimate experience of the work of which
she writes. Loyal in every word to the soundest traditions of Catholic
education, the writer recognizes to the full that the world into which
Catholic girls pass nowadays on leaving school is not the world of a
hundred, or of fifty, or of even thirty years ago. But this
recognition brings out, more clearly than anything else could do, the
great and unchanging fact that the formation of heart and will and
character is, and must be always, the very root of the education of a
child; and it also shows forth the new fact that at no time has that
formation been more needed than at the present day.
The pages of this book are well worthy of careful pondering and
consideration, and they will be of special value both to parents and
to teachers, for it is in their hands and in their united, and not
opposing action, that the educational fate of the children lies.
But I trust that the thoughts set forth upon these pages will not
escape either the eyes or the thoughts of those who are the public
custodians and arbiters of education in this country. The State is
daily becoming more jealous in its control of educational effort in
England. Would that its wisdom were equal to its jealousy. We might
then be delivered from the repeated attempts to hamper definite
religious teaching in secondary schools, by the refusal of public aid
where the intention to impart it is publicly announced; and from the
discouragement continually arising from regulations evidently inspired
by those who have no personal experience of the work to be
accomplished, and who decline to seek information from those to whom
such work is their very life. It cannot, surely, be for the good of
our country that the stored-up experience of educational effort of
every type should be disregarded in favour of rigid rules and
programmes; or that zeal and devotion in the work of education are to
be regarded as valueless unless they be associated with so-called
undenominational religion. The Catholic Church in this and in every
country has centuries of educational tradition in her keeping. She has
no more ardent wish than to place it all most generously at the
service of the commonwealth, and to take her place in every movement
that will be to the real advantage of the children upon whom the
future of the world depends. And we have just ground for complaint
when the conditions on which alone our co-operation will be allowed
are of such a character as to make it evident that we are not intended
to have any real place in the education of our country.
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