In colonial times the staunch Puritans of New England and the other Calvinists of the Middle Atlantic states early turned their attention to higher education. They believed that the faithful presentation of the gospel, as well as its adequate defense, required an educated ministry. And in the examinations of candidates for the ministry by the presbyteries and by the synod, academic attainments, were insisted upon as 'strictly as theological soundness. Nearly all the colleges founded before 1776 and many of those founded afterward, while they were not theological institutions, were established by Christian people for the advancement of Christianity.
Neither the American Calvinists nor the great reformers of Europe ever believed that ministers alone should be well educated. Wherever the Reformation went, schools flourished. But of course the aim was to provide a Christian education; it was not for the purpose of producing behaviorists, communists, and atheists. Today, also, Christian people ought to be equally interested in understanding the universe in the light of God's revealed Word; they ought to be equally zealous in maintaining an educational system based on Christian principles; but the disquieting thought intrudes that perhaps the force of the Reformation is spent.
The past may teach us a lesson. For long periods of time, human history moves placidly along troubled only by minor disturbances. Then in a short span of years, everything seems to happen at once. A storm overtakes the race, breaking up all the fountains of the great deep; and when the waters subside, the course of history has been set for the next epoch. The sixteenth century was such an age of storm. By the preaching of Luther, Calvin, and Knox, by the Romish Inquisition and massacres, the prevailing religion of nations was fixed for three hundred years. Not only did the sixteenth century witness the Reformation; it also saw in the Renaissance the birth of the modem scientific mind. While inventions and detailed scientific applications have been multiplied more recently, the general scientific world-view, based on the application of mathematics to the problems of physics, was defined for the coming centuries even before Descartes was born.
The twentieth century bids fair to rival the sixteenth. Two world wars have already occurred, and, even without the third scheduled for 1975, this will be a century of upheaval. Hitler wished to set the direction of history for the next thousand years. He may well succeed - generously aided of course by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Now, while the political situation that makes newspaper headlines occupies the popular attention, the use which dictators have made of the means of education shows clearly that the role of schools and universities is of more profound significance. Educational policy in the new society, whether for good or evil, will be a basic factor. And if Christian people wish to discharge their obligation to God in this crucial century, one thing they must do is seriously to consider the problems of education. If orthodox Protestantism has no voice in educational circles, or if it has so feeble a voice as to be technically incompetent in comparison with the secular universities, the growing forces of humanism will easily establish a godless society. In addition to reexamining our personal adherence to Biblical Christianity, it is important also to know what are the recent trends in American universities and to anticipate, so far as is possible, at least the immediate future.
First, let us examine the educational interests of American colleges before December 7, 1941. If a generalization be permitted - a generalization, however, with happy though infrequent exceptions - educational discussion was bogged down in a morass of triviality. Primary educators discussed whether grammar schools should end at the sixth grade instead of the eighth and whether a junior high school should be inserted before the senior high school. College educators repeated the same theme with respect to junior colleges. Faculties spent hours discussing comprehensive examinations, junior-senior hours, and one-half grade point for some extracurricular activity. They gave earnest attention to how they were doing things, but little reflection was given to the things they were doing. Perhaps the faculties thought they knew what an education was, but, pressed by commercialized administrators, their lowering of graduation requirements, gave little evidence of it.
The liberal arts requirements were altered to cater to a group of students who, having found German and mathematics too difficult for them, thought they were competent to reform economics and sociology. On the other hand, the requirements for students intending to enter professional schools were raised so far as their technical subjects were concerned. There were pre-law, pre-medical, pre-engineering, pre-dental courses. These courses on the whole provided excellent technical training, and with the crowding out of the liberal arts they produced expert ignoramuses, efficient cogs. in some body's machine. William Clyde Devane in the Autumn, 1943, issue of The Yale Review repeats once again what a few clear-sighted people have been saying recently. Students, he says, now graduate from high school - he might have said college - unable to write, read, or speak English, unable to cope with mathematical problems which require algebra and trigonometry, unable to use any foreign language, and at a time when all these things are very much needed.
Some educators glorified this condition. One of the crassest statements, too crass to require comment, is that of Edward Lee Thorndike in an address, "Human Resources", published in The University and the Future of America, by the Stanford University Press in 1941. "The welfare of a community, that is, the goodness of life for good people in that community, can be measured by a composite index made up of thirty-seven items of fact, such as the infrequency of death in infancy, the infrequency of death from typhoid, ... the frequency of ownership of homes, of automobiles, and of radios, the frequency of domestic installations of telephones, electricity, and gas, ..."
It is true that our best trained men can invent radios and radar; it is true that they can reduce typhoid and infant mortality - more power to them; it is true that they can produce bigger submarines and better bombs; but it ought to be as clear as a flare and as emphatic as a block-buster that who uses these for what is a tremendously more important matter than their invention. In fact, the impact of Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, and the Solomons has focused educational attention on this basic question. Thorndike's telephones will multiply, but their wires may carry commands to massacre the Jews; radio will be greatly developed, but it may be used for totalitarian propaganda; and young men who have not died of typhoid may make excellent Gestapo agents. Every mechanical aid, by which Thorndike judges that a society is good, can be used by bureaucrat or dictator to make his society bad. How can the people of the United States become competent to judge and therefore withstand the coming barrage of propaganda? Is the expert ignoramus a competent judge? Is a pre-engineering course the best defense against totalitarian ideas?
These questions are far more basic than those of extra-curricular grade points and the length in hours of a comprehensive examination. Though unanimity is not achieved among the educators, it is fortunate that their attention is somewhat withdrawn from trivialities to really important problems. Unanimity is too much to expect - far too much when the questions are so essential. Instead of reaching unanimity, educational discussion seems to be developing two radically antagonistic positions.
On the one side, there are possibly only a few university men. Perhaps the president of Antioch College, Algo D. Henderson, is not altogether in this camp, but his article in The American Scholar of Autumn, 1943, calls for more rather than less vocational instruction and practice for the regular college student; he looks for the extinction of the American middle class and foresees a nation of workers and of government clerks. In such a society a rigid or common curriculum must be abolished, and education must be geared into the work of the world by a system of apprenticeships at jobs.
This does not seem to be the view of most university men; it accentuates the defects of the previous educational set-up; but it has the backing of communistic bureaucrats and is aided, perhaps unintentionally, by the Army and Navy programs. The Army and Navy are buying education on contract. Industry in peace time could conceivably do the same thing. But in both cases they pay for what they want and they want nothing else. While industry has ordinarily assigned specific problems to its research men and has been interested only in applied science, it is just possible that a very large corporation might support a little pure science; but it is less conceivable that it would support an archaeological expedition; and only if it could be turned into patronage, could one think of the Tammany delegation in Congress voting for research in Hellenistic philosophy. The question should be put pointedly and insistently, Who can best judge the content of an education -a bureaucrat, a labor racketeer, or (with all their failings) a college faculty?
The second group of educators, apparently including the majority of university people, rejects the vocational view. President Hutchins of Chicago University spoke earlier, but the war has brought others to his general position as they have seen the result of Germany's repudiation of the liberal arts in favor of government-propagandized technical education.
No one denies that applied science can be worthwhile; no one denies that great inventions have been made; but western civilization, as it became mechanically unified by telegraph, telephone, and radio, has disintegrated socially, morally, and religiously. Physical means of living have been multiplied, but the purpose and end of life, which alone makes the means worthwhile, has faded from view.
It is not only the factories that have inaugurated the piece-work system; the universities have done the same thing, and people in general have adopted the piece-work method of living. A chemical formula is valuable because it makes varnish; an animated cartoon is valuable because during the show one can forget something else; a job is a good thing because we like to eat. And these fragments of civilization are accepted as valuable in themselves alone, without a suspicion that a life of detached fragments has no value at all. Why not commit suicide and save so much bother? Seriously, why not?
To remedy the defect of modern civilization, the defect of having no chief purpose and accomplishing it efficiently, this second group of educators points to the broader basis of judgment provided by a liberal arts education. An able exponent of this demand for a unifying life-purpose is Lewis Mumford in his The Unified Approach to Knowledge and Life, happily included with the resulting contrast in the same volume that contains Thorndike's vacuum-cleaner philosophy. The article is to be highly recommended. Mumford stresses the need of orientation, of seeing the relationships between chemistry and aesthetics, economics and Greek grammar, literature and mathematics. That is, he wants us to see life as one whole. He has a keen sense of the need of a criterion by which to judge the conflicting voices of radio, press, and movies. And if these voices, instead of conflicting, all speak a centrally controlled ideology, there is a still more urgent need of calm criteria. A narrow technical training provides no safeguard against being deceived. Only a liberal arts education that uncovers three thousand years of human motives, foibles, reflections, and devices offers hope. Only a knowledge of how one science or one part of a science is related to all other knowledge can give one the needed perspective on life Chemistry is undoubtedly important and worthwhile, but only if it is integrated with morality. Greek grammar has value, but only if it contributes to the chief end' of man. Now the study of the relationships among chemistry, Greek, and anthropology is not just another subject among many. While it is so listed for convenience' sake in college catalogs, philosophy is rather the subject that underlies our approach to and use of all other subject matter. Philosophy is the study not of a part but of the whole. And for the lack of serious study of the whole, American education has lowered its standards, compromised with commercialism, and distinguished itself by mediocrity.
There are then two discernible trends in American education today: first, some want government-propagandized vocational training and aim to crush private institutions by high taxes and salary limitation; second, the large majority of university men desire free schools committed to the wisdom of the liberal arts. If the future were to be a matter of free choice and not political compulsion, education could look forward with optimism.
President Hutchins before the war was the first to gain public attention to the need of a basic metaphysics to unify education. Against the prevailing tide, he struggled to convict education of a fragmentary, disjointed approach and to urge a unified approach governed by basic principles. Now he has many educators to echo his demands. They have sounded a needed note and deserve our gratitude. But they seem to have failed in one very important point. And it will, I trust, not be construed as a lack of appreciation if a single criticism is offered in conclusion.
The one great flaw in the work of President Hutchins is that, while he emphasizes the need of a basic metaphysics to unify education, he fails to supply the metaphysics. For the contents of his ideal curriculum he proposes a series of great books. This program is one of considerable excellence, and some of his opponents would no doubt concede that these books have been too widely neglected in the past. But, note well, the books proposed do not present a single, unified metaphysic. cat system, nor have I been able to discover that President Hutchins provides for their explication on the basis of a definite metaphysics. In other words, Hutchins has analyzed modern education, has diagnosed its disease, has said that a remedy is needed, but he has failed to write the prescription, Now, if someone wishes to unify education, it is not enough to say that a metaphysical basis is necessary. To accomplish such a result, it is essential to provide the metaphysics.
Mumford, too, it seems, has also failed at this crucial point. In fact, to speak my mind, his conclusion makes success impossible. There is only one metaphysics, one philosophy, that can really unify education and life. That philosophy is the philosophy-of Christian theism: that metaphysics is the metaphysics of the Being of the Triune God. What is needed is an educational system based on· the sovereignty of God, for in such a system man as well as chemistry will be given his proper place, neither too high nor too low. In such a system there will be a chief end of man to unify, and to serve as a criterion for all his activities. What is needed therefore is a philosophy consonant with those greatest creeds of Christendom, the Westminster Confession, the Canons of the Synod of Dort, and the like. And in such a system, God, as well as man, will have His proper place. This alone will make education successful, for the social and moral disintegration of civilization is nothing other than the symptoms and results of a religious breakdown, and the abominations of war are the punishment of the crime, better the sin, of forgetting God.
But Mumford, excellent as his article is, aims to found the new City of Man. In opposition to his aim, let us long for the splendor of the City of God.
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