RELIGION IN THE BIRMINGHAM BOARD SCHOOLS.
A CURIOUS and instructive debate occurred recently in the Birmingham School Board, on a motion in favour of
adopting, in regard to religious teaching, the plan which had been pursued from the first by the School Board of London.
It is well known that when, some three years ago, the friends of the National Education League found themselves in a majority on the Birmingham Board, they determined to give effect to that part of their programme which requires that public elementary schools shall be unsectarian, by insisting that they shall be wholly secular. Accordingly, it was resolved that no religious teaching whatever should be given
under the sanction of the Board, or by its authorised teachers in the schools. At the same time, many members of the victorious party were ministers of religion, who were unwilling to commit themselves to the doctrine that the education of the young could be complete without any moral or religious teaching ; and hence the device was adopted of encouraging the formation of the Religious Education Society, which should work independently of the Board, but in general harmony and sympathy with it, and should provide ministers of religion to give instruction to the children of the several denominations, but at such times and under such arrangements as should not interfere with the ordinary secular instruction given by the Board.
The project was ingenious, and was calculated for a time to allay the anxiety of those who, while convinced that the public school aided by the State ought not to be turned into a sectarian propaganda, were alarmed at the thought of eliminating all moral and religious influences from such schools. It was, however, foredoomed to failure. Some of those who had most experience in teaching and in school management pointed out that to turn on relays of ministers of all denominations into the schools, to sort out the poor little children into sections, and operate upon each section separately, would prove one of the most grotesque and un- satisfactory of all possible ways of meeting the religious difficulty; that teaching given under such conditions would inevitably be more polemical and less intelligible than any lessons it would supersede ; and that the experiment was essentially unsuited to the character and requirements of the English people. At the end of three years it has become pretty evident that these anticipations were well founded. Out of twenty Board Schools in Birmingham, there are four- teen in which this plan of subsidiary religious instruction is not adopted ; and the instruction itself, of which no very hopeful accounts are given, only extends to 5,600 out of a total of 17,263 scholars in the Board Schools.
That Mr. Dale and his resolute band of followers should be reluctant to admit the failure of their project, and should de- termine by a majority of nine to five to give it a further trial, is sufficiently intelligible. But that the project was wisely devised, or has the smallest chance of permanent acceptance or success, will not be seriously believed by any one who has studied the interior of an elementary school, the nature and wants of childhood, or the peculiar phenomena presented by the religious and social life of England. In a country like Prussia, or even in Ireland, nearly every man is either a Catho- lic or a Protestant, and the line so drawn is sufficiently clear to give some pretext for classifying the children roughly into two divisions, and providing for them two well-defined forms of religious instruction. But in England we are confronted with the fact not only that there are forty or fifty denominations, but that a very large number of the children of the poor cannot be said to belong to any one of them. In Birmingham, for ex- ample, of the Church and Chapel-going part of the population there are Methodists of three classes—the Primitive Methodists, the Wesleyans of the Old Connection, and the Methodist Free Church. Of the genus Baptist there are at least as many distinctly-marked species. Even the Unitarians have had their Protestant seceders, for such a congregation as that which the late Mr. George Dawson gathered in the Church of the Saviour was a distinctive entity, incapable of classifica- tion with any known sect. And as to the Church of England, some well-known varieties of it place the worshippers at least as far apart in sympathy as the average Churchman is from the average Dissenter. Any given Board School in Birmingham probably contains a few representatives of each of these several communions, besides a considerable number who are attached to none of them. When one pictures the medley of pastors engaged in hunting out the members of their respective flocks, and reflects, further, that unless every one of these various sections supplies its own recognised teacher, the entire reason of the arrangement and its fairness to various sects and consciences disappear altogether, the absurdity of the plan and the cer- tainty of its ultimate collapse will be at once evident. Even if, however, the plan succeeded, it would in effect defeat its own purpose. Rival sectarian teachers, each availing himself of his allotted hour, and brought face to face with his own little group of select disciples, would feel constrained as a point of honour to make their teaching as " distinctive " as possible, and to dwell with special emphasis on those diferentice of doctrine and worship which were characteristic of their own sects, and which alone justified their intrusion as ministers of religion into the sphere of the public school at all. And hence we should find ourselves- beguiled by the influence of a great liberal and unsectarian body, ostensibly anxious to allay religious discords, into the adoption of a system which would do more than any other to intensify those discords, and to bring sectarian distinctions prominently under the notice of little children, who would otherwise be wholly ignorant of them. Another difficulty of scarcely less practical weight also suggests itself. The art of communicating knowledge to child- ren is a special art, one very difficult of acquirement, and one which, even with the special training and experience to which the primary teachers are subjected, is often only half acquired, after all. It is an art which, as a rule, is not possessed by the ministers of religion. Their whole training and habits of thought tend to disqualify them for the task of teaching the young in a graphic, interesting, and effective manner. They are accustomed to impart truth by means of preaching, and preaching is the very last method by which truth of any kind is to be brought home to the understanding and the con- science of a child of tender years. It is no reproach to the ministers of religion to say this ; but it is surely a grave foot that in regard to the simple elementary truths of morality and religion, the system now adopted by the Birmingham Board deliberately sets aside the trained teacher--the one person whose experience best enables him to know what sort of knowledge is appropriate and intelligible to children, and how it can best be imparted—and substitutes for him another functionary who is not only not an expert in the art of teaching, but who is, from the habits of his mind and the pursuits of his life, curiously unfit for the work. We forbear to dwell on the minor dif- ficulties inherent in the plan under consideration. What, for example, is to happen to the little Christadelphian or Strict Baptist, if the preacher in the chapel which his father attends declines to come and give him lessons, on the invitation of the Religious Education Society ? How is the preacher who does accept this invitation to be paid for the lessons he gives? And if he is not paid, why should he continue long to give up his time and effort to a thankless and uncongenial task ?
All these difficulties have been practically avoided by the London School Board, and by a considerable majority of School Boards in the country. With them the day begins, as a rule, with the singing of a morning hymn, and with a simple prayer that God would bless the day's work, and help the teachers to be diligent and the children to be obedient. Selec- tions from the Bible are read in class, the children are made acquainted with so much of its history, its poetry, and its language, and of the life and teaching of our Lord, as is suited to their age and comprehension; but creeds, and all instruction on those points of faith and practice which divide the various Christian Churches, are avoided. Teaching of this kind is found to be acceptable to the parents of 99 per cent, of the scholars, the remaining 1 per cent. being made up of Jews, Catholics, and those who object to religious teaching in schools altogether. For them the law has provided the protection of a Con- science Clause, and it is the duty of the Boards to see that this pro- tection is real and effective. But the unity of the school is virtually unbroken, theological differences are unknown, and yet the whole of the work is pervaded with a serious and religious spirit, which distinguishes it in an unmistakable way from a purely secular school.
From the point of view of a pulpit, or of the platform of a public meeting, this mode of escape from the religious difficulty is apt to seem impracticable. Indeed, nothing is easier than to start logical and casuistical problems which could not be solved by this method, and to demonstrate the untenable character in theory of any religious teaching not founded on a definite theological creed. But no one who is familiar with school life, or with the material on which an elementary teacher has to work—certainly no one who has ever sought to inculcate on his own children at the age of ten or twelve the fear of God and a sense of moral responsibility—will be dis- posed to doubt the practicability of the expedient. We should like to learn how many of the religious parents who are mem- bers of the Birmingham League are in the habit of giving to their own boys and girls at that age formal catechisms, or what is called, for purposes of public controversy, distinctive denomi- national teaching. It is precisely this distinctive part of religious teaching which, though it looms so large in the imagination of the controversialist, is rejected instinc- tively by the little child, and is never presented to him by a wise parent or teacher. There is a solid substratum of fact, of story, of poetry, and of elementary ethics, about the value of which, as a part of a child's nurture and discipline, most parents are agreed ; and whatever specu- lative difficulties may occur in defining this, experience shows that there is no practical difficulty in -discovering and using it, and that schoolmasters and mistresses who know their business impart it with success. In a large proportion of the Board Schools throughout the country, in all the *ell-known schools of the British and Foreign School Society, and in a far larger number of the National or Church schools than is generally believed, this is the method adnpted. For the most part, these schools are officered by grave and religious men and women, who, though they feel it to be no part of their business to attract their scholars to any particular church or chapel, nevertheless have learned to give simple in- struction in the history and teachings of the Bible, and whose whole school-work is in many ways suffused and ennobled by such teaching. Yet from all these gracious and humanising influences the little children in the Board Schools of Birming- ham must remain excluded a short time longer, until Mr. Dale and his Mends have learned, what has become very evident elsewhere, that the true solution of the problem does not lie in the direction of teaching controversial theology to children by the clergy, nor in that of absolute secularism, but in a third course, wiser and safer than either.
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