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I was educated under him at some cost to my knuckles. He was a visionary and prophesied that a day will come at which time, the nationalisation of schools and free education will morally and financially bankrupt the country. That day is here, given the signs in the sky.

Fr. Peter Pillai hated pretence and vice of the chattering classes and glorified in unmasking their cant, deceit and pomposity and sympathised with the misfortunes of the underclass.

I recall in this connection, the words of Milton's Arepagitica "He that can appreciate and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasure and yet abstain and yet distinguish and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring hero."

The headmaster had no more reason than did Milton to wish to see cultivated in his wards "a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary."

In some ways he was very young, in other ways very old, part scientist, part pedagogue, part activist, wholly priest, sometimes proud, sometimes humble, in some ways formidable, competent and in practical ways, woefully helpless, unable to drive a straight nail into the timber. A bundle of marvellous contradictions.

Of his greatness there can be no question. His mind was one of exceptional power, subtlety and speed of reaction. He was one of the few people who could combine in one intellectual and aesthetic personality, vast scientific knowledge, impressive erudition and an active sophisticated interest in human affairs.

He was often described as arrogant and criticised for it, even though the evidence of it, seemed often to reflect prejudice. The shattering quickness and critical power of his mind, made him impatient of the ponderous dolt and the vulgar.

But under the edgy impatience, there lay one of the most sentimental of natures, an enormous thirst for friendship and affection and a childlike belief in human nature.

The greatest tragedy of his life, I often suspect, was not the ordeal to which he was subjected over the confiscation of schools, though that was bad enough but the fact that the members of the fraternity of headmasters were unable or unwilling to bring the sort of tenacity that he himself brought to oppose the schools take over. This to him was a source of sadness, bewilderment and disappointment.

All that was lively and effective in the temper of the school system, at that time, was due to Fr. Peter. He was a revered pedagogue, honourable in appearance, sincere in his conviction and admired for his learning. Ph.Ds which he obtained were not from a small college but from the University of London.

Peter Pillai was a Catholic priest and subscribed to Catholic doctrine which the church always taught and will always teach, that the education of the child belongs to the parent, not the State.

The family is prior to the State in rights and is particularly true of rights over children. This is plain elementary Catholic doctrine on which Fr. Peter had no two views, though as it must be with doctrines, there can be any amount of discussion upon their application.

The nationalisation of schools is a monstrous disaster because it allows pompous politicians and stale bureaucrats, who take idleness as a form of therapy, to meddle in education.

Recently a former vice-chancellor, turned politician, admitted that most of the headmasters are unqualified, creatures of the political establishment. The consequences are scandals.

Teachers, even head-masters, eloping with students. Teachers in tutories giving private tuition not teaching in schools. No one dare touch them because they are backed by powerful politicians. Students invading schools for pitched battles.

Truancy a fashion, where school children without congregating in libraries, congregate in taverns, cadging drinks from drunks. Boys wearing uniforms during school hours smoke pot outside my steel gate.

Despite the nauseating fragrance I dare not question them and risk getting doused with billingsgate or worse a stiletto on my back.

These are the snobs who are flooding into the universities and wrecking the university system. A Vice-Chancellor recently described how he had to ward-off the snobbery of club wielding snobs. A macabre performance on prime-time TV.

Those responsible are the high-brows, and the die-hards, who run the nationalised school system. Their plans are grandiose and argue that pedagogy is the greatest of all sciences and only they excel in the art of teaching. In reality these brethren are pretenders.

The pedagogical science that they talk of is imaginary. All of their profound contributions to the teaching art are worth next to nothing. They specialise only in putting gaudy buildings for themselves and pumping up their importance.

The remedy is to clean out the spoilers and liberate the school system by handing them back to the pedagogues from whom they were looted. The theory that the State can do a better job in education than the pedagogues, is a rusted shackle.

Before the collapse of the Roman Empire, education was in the hands of the Empire. Seeing the degradation of education, the Roman poet Catullus cried out, "who is going to remove this yoke from my shoulders."

Without authority and discipline everything is a mass of ruins. That's why State education is a bundle of dead sticks.

The schools were taken over under the slogan "It stands to reason". Before the outbreak of that ghastly malady of the spirit known as reason, no fool would have hit upon the bottomless idea that he could see beyond his nose. Kant is the physician who cured the world of that malady.

I have been trained too thoroughly in Kant to enable me to pull my head out of the swamp called reason. My craving for genuine authority without which beauty, goodness and truth, so vitally necessary to my life, must remain unattainable. I know only the private school system makes possible that certainty.

The State school system does not even dare to propose it. My spirit is so much too proud to support a system which grants that authority and discipline are to be found outside its walls.

If a system demonstrates that I might perhaps be able to get along without it my self-confidence will never permit me to refrain from the attempt to try, because a decadent system which regards itself as one of many threadbare mutants can offer me no certitude.

But if there is a system which warns me extra quam nulla salus (outside me there is no salvation) my craving for authority and discipline prevails.

- Ephrem Fernando.

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