Some thoughts on national education for the United Kingdom : June, 1875

Abstract

I had submitted humbly to the Queen my opinion that in any plan adopted for a national education, it should be provided that the youth of the kingdom should be religiously brought up, and that the rights of conscience should be respected. These two foundations of national education seem to have excited the anger of the authors of the Revised Code. They adopted the opinion that a labouring man, hardly vvorked till the evening, would have ainple time to teach his children the principles of the Christian religion.

With respect to the rights of conscience, the authors of the Revised Code seem to have thought it sufficient to provide that the children who did not adopt the doctrines which might be taught in the schools to which boys and girls were admitted, might abstain altogether from religious lessons, and pass in secular work or play, the hours which they did not spend in receiving lessons from the Bible or the Catechism of the Church.

In making this provision, the authors of the Revised Code seem to have overlooked the fact that the dissenting parents who object to the worship and Catechism of the Church of England, or who ask as Independents for a separate congregation, are by no means satisfied with a permission to dispense with all religious teaching. A boy who has been taught by his parents not to acknowledge that a name has been given to him by his godfathers and godmothers, may yet have been taught to look to God as his Maker ; to comprehend that his soul has been bestowed upon him by an Almighty Being, and that the commandment to do no murder is a lesson which he is bound to obey... [Excerpt]