It is not only in the elementary schools that such types of formidable
selfishness are produced. In any class of life, in school or home,
wherever a child is growing up without control and "handling," without
the discipline of religion and manners, without the yoke of obligations
enforcing respect and consideration for others, there a rough is being
brought up, not so loud-voiced or so uncouth as the street-rough, but as
much out of tune with goodness and honour, with as little to hold by and
appeal to, as troublesome and dangerous either at home or in society, as
uncertain and unreliable in a party or a ministry, and in any
association that makes demand upon self-control in the name of duty.
This is very generally recognized and deplored, but except within the
Church, which has kept the key to these questions, the remedy is hard to
find. Inspectors of elementary schools have been heard to say that, even
in districts where the Catholic school was composed of the poorest and
roughest elements, the manners were better than those of the well-to-do
children in the neighbouring Council schools. They could not account for
it, but we can; the precious hour of religious teaching for which we
have had to fight so hard, influences the whole day and helps to create
the "Catholic atmosphere" which in its own way tells perhaps more widely
than the teaching.
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