Politics & Power Quote by Edmund Barton

Memory is doing a lot of political work here. Barton’s line looks like a mild personal reminiscence, but it’s really a carefully engineered argument: if religious instruction existed, it left so little impression on a future prime minister that it might as well not have been there. The key phrase is “if any” paired with “I do not recollect it” - a neat rhetorical escape hatch that dodges direct accusation while still undermining the premise that sectarian teaching was central to schooling under the “Irish national system.”

The intent is defensive and strategic. Barton is staking out a position in a recurrent Australian fight over state schooling: whether public education can be “moral” without being confessional. By invoking the Model School on Fort Street - a prestige institution in colonial Sydney - he offers an elite testimonial for a system associated with mixed-denomination instruction and standardized curricula. He’s not praising secularism as an ideology; he’s normalizing it as lived experience.

The subtext lands in the politics of federation-era governance, when new national institutions had to navigate denominational rivalry without igniting it. Barton’s phrasing suggests that social cohesion depends on keeping explicit religious formation at arm’s length in public spaces, while still allowing citizens to imagine their values are intact. “Conducted upon the Irish national system” signals policy literacy; “I do not recollect it” signals moderation. Together they cast religious controversy as overblown, and public schooling as a quiet technology of nation-building: teach the basics, avoid the altar calls, keep the peace.