Page:Jesuit Education.djvu/566

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546
JESUIT EDUCATION

from the false philosophical notions of such critics; particularly from their wrong conception and very low valuation of the human soul.

Many, especially such as have never stepped inside the doors of a Jesuit college, are rilled with an absurd dread of the supervision exercised, as they fancy, by the Jesuits. From time to time, however, when some appalling scandals are discovered within the walls of a college where the students enjoy pretty nearly full liberty, or when scores, if not hundreds of students, exhibit most disgraceful scenes of disorder on the public streets, then the eyes of many are opened and they see that, after all, some supervision, and a pretty strict one, is necessary in a place where hundreds of hot-blooded youths live together. In 1891, an English non-Catholic paper, speaking about scandalous disclosures on board the school-ship Britannia, said there were two kinds of public schools, Jesuit and Gaol-bird school. "The Jesuit idea of school life is that a boy at school should, as far as possible, be in the same position as he will afterwards be in as a man in the world, that is to say, the position not of a wild beast in an African jungle, free to do what he pleases, but of a human being in a civilized country, living under the eye of the law. The Jesuits in fact police their schools, that is, what it comes to. This policing is called by people who don't like it (i. e. don't like the trouble of enforcing it) espionage and other ugly names. As a matter of fact, it amounts to no more than that ordinary care which a commonly decent and commonly sensible father exercises in his own house: It means simply reasonable supervision, aided of course by rationally constructed school buildings –