A Treatise on Parents and Children

Now children must be taught some sort of religion. Secular education is / an impossibility. Secular education comes to this: that the only reason / for ceasing to do evil and learning to do well is that if you do not you / will be caned. This is worse than being taught in a church school that / if you become a dissenter you will go to hell; for hell is presented as / the instrument of something eternal, divine, and inevitable: you cannot / evade it the moment the schoolmaster's back is turned. What confuses / this issue and leads even highly intelligent religious persons to / advocate secular education as a means of rescuing children from the / strife of rival proselytizers is the failure to distinguish between / the child's personal subjective need for a religion and its right to / an impartially communicated historical objective knowledge of all the / creeds and Churches. Just as a child, no matter what its race and color / may be, should know that there are black men and brown men and yellow / men, and, no matter what its political convictions may be, that / there are Monarchists and Republicans and Positivists, Socialists and / Unsocialists, so it should know that there are Christians and Mahometans / and Buddhists and Shintoists and so forth, and that they are on the / average just as honest and well-behaved as its own father.

For example, it should not be told that Allah is a false god set up by the Turks and Arabs, who will all be damned for taking that liberty; but it should be told that many English people think so, and that many Turks and Arabs / think the converse about English people. It should be taught that Allah / is simply the name by which God is known to Turks and Arabs, who are / just as eligible for salvation as any Christian. Further, that the / practical reason why a Turkish child should pray in a mosque and an / English child in a church is that as worship is organized in Turkey in / mosques in the name of Mahomet and in England in churches in the name / of Christ, a Turkish child joining the Church of England or an English / child following Mahomet will find that it has no place for its worship / and no organization of its religion within its reach. Any other teaching / of the history and present facts of religion is false teaching, and is / politically extremely dangerous in an empire in which a huge majority of / the fellow subjects of the governing island do not profess the religion / of that island.