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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 77

Hopelessly Impossible

Hopelessly Impossible.

Whence comes it that while narrowing their formal demands, disavowing the desire for specific religious teaching, and professing an anxiety to avoid controversy, the clerical party has nevertheless put forward a manual to which this spirit is a stranger? The explanation must be that the broad minds, the tolerant and scholarly spirits, and the worldly good sense of the men who have shaped the party's recent declarations of policy have had very little to do with the shaping of this book. In the ten years for which the agitation has lasted, the party has never yet found time to devote any independent thought to the compilation of the text-book which is at once to revolutionise our educational system and to give the mind of childhood its first introduction to the highest of all knowledge. They have made two attempts to fill the gap, and in each case it is a ready-made and an imported article that has been relied upon for the purpose. In 1896 they borrowed from New South Wales the barbarous and antiquated Irish Scripture Text-book, which after a brief struggle the indignant public opinion of this colony consigned to the dust-heap: and the book which they have now accepted almost as blindly from Victoria must go the same way. Each is a hopelessly impracticable attempt to solve an absolutely insoluble problem.

J. R. Blair

, President Wellington State Schools' Defence League.