Education, to be real, must be denominational. An essay suggested by the present educational crisis

Abstract

By Denominational Education I understand an education in which religion is taught upon a definite doctrinal basis, and into which it enters, not as an adjunct or accident, but as a pervading principle of direction and control. By a mixed or undenominational education, on the other hand, I understand an education from which all distinctive religious instruction is excluded during school hours, with a view to the comprehension of those who do or may differ in their several religious beliefs. I am not going to waste time in arguing that a mixed, as contradistinguished from a denominational education, is perilous to faith ; for this is a position of which its opponents do not need to be convinced, and ·which its advocates do not care to deny. ' See ye to that,' is their reply to such as urge the objection; 'that is your business, not ours. What we want is, not to train up the children of the nation in any particular form of belief, but to educate them ; to bridge over sectarian differences ; to make them good citizens and loyal subjects; moral without dogma, and charitable in spite of it.' If therefore I am to have any chance of convincing our opponents, I must meet them on their own ground, and not on ours, by endeavouring to show that mixed education is not true education ; that it neither realises the idea nor secures the practical purposes of true education; and that the one element which it wants, in order to fill out that idea and secure those results, is precisely that element of denominational, or, as I prefer to call it, dogmatic teaching, the elimination of which is regarded by its advocates as its characteristic excellence... [Excerpt]