1426 



A USTRALASIA ILL USTRA TED. 



Education. Fourteen years later, another Measure was passed in the Parliament of New 

 South Wales, under the operation of which the denominational system- of education was 

 entirely abolished so far as the control or assistance of the Government was concerned, 

 and a system established which made the State education of the youth of the colony 

 entirely secular except so far as the reading of the Scripture extracts in the Irish 

 National School books was concerned and compulsory up to a certain age. The 

 ministers of the different denominations, by the provisions of the Act, are, however, 

 allowed access to the schools during a certain allotted period of each day, for the 



purpose of affording instruction 

 in religion and morality. Under 

 this Act of 1880, the old system 

 of denominational education 

 came to an end. At the same 

 time the care of the adminis- 

 tration of the Act and of the 

 school system of the colony was 



AX AUSTRALIAN STATE SCHOOL IN THE CITY. 



Council of Education and placed 

 in those of a responsible 

 Cabinet Minister, the new port- 

 folio of Public Instruction being 

 created for the purpose. 



The passing of the Public Instruction Act, which came into force in New South 

 Wales in 1882, marked a new era in the State system of education. The Measure was 

 not carried without a strong fight on the part of the advocates of " religious education," 

 the opposition being, however, confined almost exclusively to the Roman Catholic and 

 the Anglican bodies. The Roman Catholic prelates, supported by the clergy and laity, 

 expressed their determination to carry on their own schools, whatever- the cost or 

 sacrifice might be, with the result that the seventy-five Roman Catholic schools 

 which were in existence in the colony under the State aid system in 1882, were, 

 by the beginning of 1891, increased to three hundred and thirty-four, this number 

 including two hundred and thirty primary schools and eight colleges. The total number 

 of children attending these religious schools almost without exception conducted by 

 religious teaching Orders of Nuns and Brothers at the close of 1890 was thirty thou- 

 sand six hundred and ninety-nine. In the neighbouring colony of Victoria, the returns 

 from the Roman Catholic self-supporting schools showed a total of twenty-seven thousand 

 three hundred and sixty-seven pupils, while the estimated total for the whole of 

 Australasia was eighty-six thousand. The denominational schools in New South Wales, 

 other than Roman Catholic, had, in 1891, dwindled down to less than seventy mostly 

 Anglican an evidence that, with one exception, the Churches have given up the light 

 against the popular system. The Roman Catholics upon whom, in all the colonies, falls 

 the heavy cost of carrying on their "religious" schools have, on the plea of relieving 

 the Government of a large annual expenditure, strenuously sought, but unsuccessfully, for 

 State recognition in the form of payment by results. The primary public schools in the 



