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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 74

The Duty of the State

The Duty of the State.

"Free, compulsory, and secular"—these are the three characteristics of our public school system to which its friends are wont to point with pride. I must confess that in the last of the three epithets I see no occasion for boasting. Secularity is a negative quality; it means the negation of religion; and so far as religion is a necessary element in a good life, or even a powerful aid to a good life, to the same extent an education which excludes it is incomplete. I notice that an able advocate of the present system, Mr Theo. Cooper, in a paper read before the Church Congress at Auckland on the 6th inst., maintains that "the State has no such duty to perform" as the teaching of religion. In this absolute form the proposition is more than I can accept, for I do not see how a Christian State can properly lower its ideal below that of the wisest of the heathens. "The State," says Aristotle, "in its origin has life as its aim, but afterwards a good life." Everything, therefore, that conduces to a good life, ultimately and for all, falls ideally within the functions of the State; but there are two practical considerations to limit any proposed extension of the State's activity :—
1.Is the State better fitted than other agencies to do the work suggested ?
2.Will the assumption by the State of this particular work jeopardise the success of its work in fields of equal or greater importance ?

In either of these cases State interference is inadvisable, simply because it will not ultimately tend towards that good life which is the State's ultimate aim. Applying these two tests to the proposed undertaking of