Autonomy in Catholic Education

During the latter half of the nineteenth century the Catholics of England entered upon their long struggle to maintain their schools in a condition of material and professional efficiency equal to that of the wholly state-supported schools in the national system. Both in primary and in secondary education the price of monetary aid from the Government has been increased control by the local or central education authority, and in consequence the chief pre-occupation of our struggle has been to safeguard the principle of Catholic teachers in Catholic schools, and to ensure the integrity of the teaching in doctrine and morals given during the hours devoted by law to religious instruction. In the matter of the curriculum of secular teaching we have been content in past years to follow the lead set by the non-Catholic schools, and have adopted their general educational policy and conformed ourselves as best we could to its varying demands. Even those schools which have always been independent of government control have been forced, during the last forty years, by their acceptance of the external examination system to abandon their autonomy and the traditional system of education which they had inherited from the continental schools of pre-penal days, and to conform their syllabuses and teaching system to the dictates of the external examining boards. Thus it has come about gradually that the curriculum of secular teaching, with its attendant syllabus of books to be read and periods or matter to be studied, has ceased to be chosen by the authorities of the school and has been imposed by an impersonal external authority which has little or no understanding of the purpose and needs of Catholic education

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