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The Crisis of Western Education, March 9, 2009
This review is from: Crisis of Western Education (Hardcover)
Decades ago ago an English historian/sociologist, Christopher Dawson, published The Crisis of Western Education (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1965). It deserves recurrent consideration, in part because of its clearly Christian convictions. Half of the book, Part One, details "the history of liberal education in the West" and provides a highly instructive delineation of develop¬ments basic to higher education in Western Culture. Initially, the "liberal education" which took root in Hellenism largely focused on "the art of speech and persuasion, an exact knowledge of the value of words and an understanding of the laws of thought and the rules of logic" (p. 10). It was a great achievement, lacking only "its final spiritual goal," which Christianity supplied. Both Eastern (e.g. the Cappadocians) and West¬ern Church Fathers blended Hellenism's "liberal arts" with Christian theology, creating distinctive edu¬cational programs. In the Latin-speaking West, following the conversion of the many Germanic "barbarians" who populated the area, universities as well as Gothic cathedrals accompanied the "rise of vernacular culture" in the High Middle Ages. It was a vigorous intellectual epoch. providing first rate educational programs saturated with Christian principles and objectives. Though medieval "scholasticism" is often disparaged by modern critics, in its own era it was fresh and innovative, capable of challenging and captivating some of the best minds the world has known.
Subsequent developments in the Renaissance and Reformation significantly altered the Medieval synthesis, but it took the eighteenth century Enlightenment to shatter it. "Thus the combination of Cartesian rationalism, Newtonian physics and Lockian empiricism produced a highly explosive compound which detonated in the second half of the eighteenth century and almost destroyed the traditional threefold order of Christendom--Church and State and Study" (p. 47). This revolution of the mind antedated and then sustained the political and industrial revolutions which have shaped the modern world, a world lacking many Christian components.
During the past two centuries educational programs have increasingly served national, industrial, secular interests. In the United States, despite early efforts to synthesize education and religion in the old English tradition, schools influenced by men such as Horace Mann, who disliked religious education and championed "state control and public support," remodeled themselves according to the German pattern, and stressed "democratic moral values and the ideals of national patriotism rather than any religious doctrine or ethos" (p. 67). Such tendencies clearly distinguished the thought of Lester Frank Ward and John Dewey, who so influenced American education in this century.
Consequently, whether studying Europe or America, "the crisis of Western education" looms large. So in Part Two of the book Dawson addresses "the situation of Christian education in the modern world." Insofar as the West developed under the inspiration of Christian teaching, he argues its future depends upon a recovery of the educational philosophy which shaped Western Christian Culture. Only by understanding the spiritual principles which birthed our civilization, only by resurrect¬ing those truths which have undergirded great cultural achievements, can we preserve "civilization."
There's an open door of opportunity, Dawson thinks, for "the old domination of classical humanism has passed away, and nothing has taken its place except the scientific specialisms which do not provide complete intellectual education, and rather tend to disintegrate into technologies" (p. 107).
Rather than floating with the disintegrating flood of secular education, Dawson calls Chris¬tian colleges to reinstate a real liberal arts curriculum, rejecting the temptation to tolerate a "growing number of subjects until it becomes an amorphous collection of alternative courses" (p. 109). Christians should study Christian Culture. "I believe," he says, "that the study of Christian culture is the missing link which it is essential to supply if the tradition of Western education and Western culture is to survive, for it is only through this study that we can understand how Western culture came to exist and what are the essential values for which it stands" (p. 110). An "integrative principle" which blends his¬tory, theology, and culture lies latent within the Chris¬tian tradition. For "Christian culture is the periphery of the circle which has its center in the incarnation and the faith of the Church and the lives of the saints" (p. 113).
In Part Three, "western man and the technological order," Dawson focuses on a two-flanged modern "predicament": first, the secularization in the West, whereby modernity "has become a closed world and has lost all contact with the higher world of spiritual reality" (p. 142), and second, the anti-Western revolt of much of the world.
To rightly respond to this challenge, "there is an apostolate of study as well as an apostolate of action and of prayer" (p. 142). Amidst a secularized society whose educational programs deliberately ignore spirituality, Dawson insists that "above all, it is necessary for Western man to recover the use of his higher spiritual faculties--his powers of contemplation--which have be¬come atrophied by centuries of neglect during which the mind and will of Western man has concentrated on the conquest of power--political, economic and technological" (p. 162).
In response, Christian scholars need to tap into and open up "the divine process of spiritual rest¬oration and reintegration which finds its center in the Incarnation and its orbit in the Christian faith" (p. 143). The antidote to an anthropocentric secularity is a theocentric Chris¬tianity. "We may not be able to build cathedrals like the Catholics of the thirteenth century, or write epics like Dante," he admits, "but we can all do something to make man conscious of the existence of religious truth and the relevance of Catholic thought, and to let the light into the dark world of a closed secularist culture" (p. 144).
Despite a title which might make it purely topical, since "crises" come and go, The Crisis of Western Education has enduring relevance, for the "crisis" endures. Dawson's treatise is wise as well as learned, practical as well as academic. It is one of the finest avowedly Christian educational treatises written in this century.
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