School days, school days
Dear old Golden Rule days
‘Reading and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic
Taught to the tune of the hick’ry stick
You were my queen in calico
I was your bashful, barefoot beau
And you wrote on my slate, “I Love You, Joe”
When we were a couple o’ kids
—Will D. Cobb and Gus Edwards
Perhaps nothing is more indicative of the decline of American culture than the development — if it can be called that — of the American public school system in the past five decades. In every possible respect — academic, cultural, moral, and yes, religious, it has been in a flight from excellence for decades. But For those who believe this to be a process beginning in the 1960s — or even the 50s, when such provocative reports as Why Johnny Can’t Read were published — this writer must submit that, ultimately, it began with independence. Of course, given the strength of the Western Academic Tradition, from whence our system derives, it took a long time; but it seems well-nigh accomplished in our day.
In Christendom, education was intended to open the student’s mind to God and assist his salvation; to teach him to use his intellect for that end and for the lesser ones encompassed in employing a free and formed intellect for understanding the world around him and taking his place at his own level in both Church and State. Naturally, this implies a society ordered to Man’s true last end.
But the newly independent United States would require a new model; this was to make good Americans of the disparate peoples of the colonies, and to assimilate the immigrants as they arrived. Over time, three men would arise who would transform the face of American public education into what we have now.
The first was Noah Webster (1748-1853), a New England Yankee, best known for the fact that in his famous dictionary, he created our idiosyncratic English spelling — a move resisted by Washington Irving, no less. Extremely influential in education as well, he sought to tear American students’ attention away from the Old World whence their fathers had come. Moreover, education for Webster must do more than educate; it must indoctrinate: “It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.” While this last may sound laudable to us to-day, it was revolutionary then. Moreover, as we see now, a lot depends upon whose definition of “just and liberal ideas of government” is used.
His near contemporary, fellow New Englander Horace Mann (1796-1859), is called the “Father of Public Education.” He took things further, and made of public education itself a sort of secular religion: “What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the public good.” For him, reduction of all religions and ethnicities to a single “American,” who would think in a manner Mann considered rational, was the whole point of education. But coupled with this in Mann was a rigid moralism — a sort of secularised Puritanism.
The third member of our triumvirate, John Dewey (1859-1952), was a also a Yankee, albeit from Vermont. To the dry patriotism and moralism of Webster and Mann, Dewey added the aridity of modern psychology. Also a socialist, he believed that education was primarily a matter of “socializing” children: “Personality must be educated, and personality cannot be educated by confining its operations to technical and specialized things, or to the less important relationships of life. Full education comes only when there is a responsible share on the part of each person, in proportion to capacity, in shaping the aims and policies of the social groups to which he belongs.”
By this time, of course, we are a long way from the idea of education as a search for truth. But a detailed study of these three shows an organic development. “Education” based upon these principles no longer has as its goal anything transcendent, but simply the creation of well-oiled cogs for the machinery of commerce and industry. The 19th century “Land Grant” colleges for the most part avoided teaching the classics — Latin and Greek. It can hardly surprise any that the youth of the 1960s began to rebel against what they saw as the grim conformity it imposed. As JRR Tolkien observed in the 1960s, “There are, of course, various elements in the present situation, which are confused, though in fact distinct (as indeed in the behaviour of modern youth, part of which is inspired by admirable motives such as anti-regimentation, and anti-drabness, a sort of lurking romantic longing for ‘cavaliers’, and is not necessarily allied to the drugs or the cults of fainéance and filth).”
Would that the young people of that day could have seen that the Catholic Faith was the fulfilment of their dreams. What the Faith had to offer these products of the dry education we have been discussing was real truth — the end of real education. Not the idolatry of the nation proposed by Noah Webster, but real patriotism — a Catholic virtue. Nor still the secular moralism espoused by Horace Man but a true, royal, and living code of Christ. As opposed to John Dewey’s maunderings, this education features incorporation in the Communion of Saints.
Unfortunately, at that point Catholic university educators capitulated to the shades of Webster, Mann, and Dewey. In 1967, leaders of the major American Catholic universities issued the “Land O’ Lakes Statement,” which among other things declared: “With regard to the undergraduate — the university should endeavor to present a collegiate education that is truly geared to modern society. The student must come to a basic understanding of the actual world in which he lives today. This means that the intellectual campus of a Catholic university has no boundaries and no barriers. It draws knowledge and understanding from all the traditions of mankind; it explores the insights and achievements of the great men of every age; it looks to the current frontiers of advancing knowledge and brings all the results to bear relevantly on man’s life today. The whole world of knowledge and ideas must be open to the student; there must be no outlawed books or subjects. Thus the student will be able to develop his own capabilities and to fulfill himself by using the intellectual resources presented to him.” There is no thought here of the Salvation of the student, of his last end.
In time, as academic standards fell at every level of education, leftist ideology came to replace even the most basic of skills to be acquired. Eventually children were taught that white males were inherently evil, even if they were not taught what year that quintessential white discoverer, Christopher Columbus, came to America.
In response to all of these developments, a primarily lay-led movement has created new Catholic colleges and a network of Catholic and/or Classical Academies across the United States. Rarely supported by their local dioceses, these small-scall institutions demonstrate both the Catholicity of the Church and her inherent guaranteeing to parents the role of senior educators of their children — the very opposite view to those such as Webster, Mann, and Dewey. It is important that this movement be continued for the sake of the Church, the Nation, and the World.
Not for decades but for centuries, the bad legacy of the Unholy Trinity of Webster, Mann, and Dewey has stunted American education. It is absolutely essential that it be abolished — for the Country’s sake, as well as the Church’s. As voters, we should demand our rights in regard to supervising education, and do our best to reduce our State’s spending bad educational institutions. We should also support good ones financially to the best of our ability.
This tainted educational tradition is one reason why it has been so hard to convert these United States. As with every other element of national life, this should give us a renewed sense of urgency in attempting to convert our nation. May the work of such as St. Elizabeth Ann Seton replace her secularist rivals in the national mentality.
