Fundamentals of Education
Johnson, George
October 7, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 525 FUNDAMENTALS OF EDUCATION By GEORGE JOHNSON HISTORIANS of American education tell us that in the early years of the last century, sectarian jealousies...
...This relation, of its very nature, defines and directs all other relations...
...what sort of literature commuters read...
...it is life itself...
...that in His death we are reconciled with God and find the grace without which it is impossible for us to accomplish the Divine will...
...Godless education is a contradiction in terms...
...A third strives to combine both proceedings...
...Research is all very well, but it needs a light to guide it—a basis upon which to judge its results...
...And by the same token, there is no doubt but that many a graduate of the public schools, brought up rather strictly in some religious faith, finds himself opposed to all religion, because of the influence of some teacher, who in small ways, apart from any deliberation or malice, gave insidious evidence of the atheism in which he was steeped...
...He learns that truth is one, and consequently that there can be no ultimate contradiction between any phase of it...
...and that this soul it is, and not the complexity of his nervous system, that endows him with the intelligence and free will which differentiate him specifically from the animal...
...Naturally, the teacher in the public schools will play fair and avoid all explicit teaching of religion...
...I dare say that there is many a man in the United States today, who never, even as a child, had any church affiliations...
...For this the public schools cannot be blamed...
...Hence, we are beginning to hear an insistent demand from educators for a definite philosophy of education...
...The churches worry about their declining influence in American life...
...They have no desire to force the thinking in the public schools to conform to their tenets, though they are quite convinced that this thinking is not going to do American institutions any ultimate good...
...It is the philosophy that is being taught in our normal schools and teachers' colleges...
...Yet there has always been religious teaching in the public schools...
...This policy, public education in the United States has jealously defended, and all efforts, well-meaning or otherwise, of religious sects to make religion a part of the curriculum of the state schools, have been successfully thwarted...
...In the high school, occasions of this sort are continually arising...
...We cannot love God unless we love our fellow-man, and the ultimate reason for loving our fellow-man is the love of God...
...It stands to reason that if a man is profoundly convinced of a certain truth, this conviction is bound to show itself in his conduct...
...The teacher interprets life to the young mind...
...They represent a stewardship of which we shall have to give an account on the day of final reckoning...
...What is truth...
...Certainly it will rule his intellectual life and afford him the light in which he will see all other light...
...They are illustrative of the kind of thinking to which American authorities on education incline...
...But suppose that a considerable portion of the citizens of the republic do not fancy this sort of religion...
...but it does not end there...
...He needs now to see its application in other disciplines...
...All the rulings of all the boards of education in the United States, cannot alter the fact that many things are learned in school that are not explicitly taught...
...The result is a new religion that gets along without ecclesiasticism—a religion whose god is humanity, whose heaven is earth, 526 THE COMMONWEAL October 7, 1925 whose sacrament is education, whose church is the public school, whose priest is the pedagogue, and whose name is secularism...
...In vain do I search index after index, for the name of God or of Jesus Christ...
...Religious education begins with the instruction in Christian doctrine...
...They take no account whatever of the concept of free will, nor admit any causation beyond the nervous system...
...It becomes a means of correlation...
...It reveals to him the reason for his existence, makes him conscious of the immortal soul within him, affords him guidance in his search for truth...
...but who, nevertheless, has certain definite religious attitudes, which, if the whole story were told, he derived unconsciously from one or several religious-minded teachers, during the years of his schooling...
...These schools were to concern themselves exclusively with the secular phases of the child's preparation for life...
...Now teaching is an interpretive function...
...The very separation of religious from secular learning is a form of indirect religious teaching...
...Anyone who claims that these things do not count, betrays an ignorance of children...
...The recent events in Tennessee offer abundant evidence on this score...
...In his delightful book, The Cruise of the Nona, Hilaire Belloc quotes a statement of Cardinal Manning to the effect that—"All human conflict is ultimately theological...
...Most of them indicate an abhorrence of anything like first principles as a test of truth or morality...
...In other words, one's final judgment as to the relative value of various possible materials of instruction, their gradation, and the manner in which they are to be presented, depends upon the answer one gives to questions like the following—What is man...
...It is a mistake to speak of the public schools of the United States as "Godless schools...
...The school is not merely the preparation for life...
...For one thing, you cannot have schools without teachers...
...They are written by men who are laboring sincerely, according to their lights, to improve the quality of the American school...
...He must come to know what the Church teaches concerning the nature of God, and the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, the Incarnation, sin and the redemption, grace and the Sacraments...
...A number of them are frankly behavioristic...
...All facts, volumes of them, ferreted out with surprising skill and noteworthy industry—but still only facts, quite useless for practical purposes until they have been weighed and evaluated and fitted into their proper place as materials for instructions...
...If this conviction concerns anything as fundamental as religion, it will affect every phase of his life...
...that human destiny is not to be found in earthly content but in union with God for all eternity...
...At least, it is his life...
...Efforts towards reorganization and reform have been under way for the past twenty-five years...
...that in the fall of man is an historical fact, and that because of it every human being born into this world is tainted with original sin...
...It exhibits itself in the textbooks that are put into the children's hands...
...The difference between man and the brute, as they see it, lies in a greater complexity in the neurones of the brain...
...Even a lesson in beginning reading may suggest a problem to a first grader, an honest answer to which must reveal the teacher's religious convictions...
...Another investigates the interests and tendencies of the children themselves, on the assumption that what the child is, that he should become...
...By acquiescing to a system that separates the school from the church, they have allowed the impression to grow that you can separate life from the church...
...None of them make any reference to the supernatural...
...what forms of arithmetic are used by business men...
...but so is the neglect of some civic obligation...
...I have at hand, some five hundred books on modern pedagogy...
...The whole atmosphere of the school, the personality of the teacher, the discipline, the spirit, the experience provided, should reflect the truths that are taught—so that the while the pupil acquires the necessary ideas, he may develop the attitudes and the habits that are of the essence of Christian character...
...The Catholic believes that religion is not something apart from life, something belonging to a particular order of thinking or confined to the realm of emotion...
...It is the coming religion of the American public school...
...Both are offenses against God, though one is direct and the other indirect...
...Nothing do I find of faith, nothing of divine grace, nothing of prayer, nothing of definite relations between man and God...
...The arrangement suggests, if it does not imply, that religion is not an integral part of life, that religious truth and scientific truth have nothing to do with one another, that religion is not a vital consideration outside of mere church-going, that it is not as serious a matter as, for instance, long division or the exports of New Guinea...
...In all of this, there has been no motive of discrediting religion, or minimizing its importance in national life...
...A technique for determining what should be taught in the American schools, and under what arrangement, is being perfected...
...Hence it was that in 1829, the Third Provincial Council of Baltimore decreed that—"It is absolutely necessary to establish schools in which the young may be taught the principles of faith and morality, the while they are being instructed in letters...
...October 7, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 525 FUNDAMENTALS OF EDUCATION By GEORGE JOHNSON HISTORIANS of American education tell us that in the early years of the last century, sectarian jealousies forced the public authorities to discontinue the policy of granting funds to religious bodies for educational purposes and to set up free schools, supported by public taxation, in which religion would have no explicit place...
...They are adepts at mind reading, when the subject is their teacher...
...all of them assume that material evolution is an established fact...
...But they cannot be weighed and evaluated until there is some agreement as to what constitutes educational values...
...For the most part, they subscribe to the social philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and the pragmatism of James and Dewey...
...It dictates the philosophy of all other branches...
...The more one ponders over that sentence, the deeper its significance appears...
...But what of the "obiter dicta...
...Blasphemy is a sin...
...You cannot entirely separate religion from education, for the simple reason that all education is ultimately religious...
...What are the ideals that should govern human activity...
...One attempts to analyze the activities of the adult population, hoping thereby to discover what children must be taught to do...
...What else can they expect, when American children are educated in schools that must of necessity treat religion as a more or less superfluous appendage to modern civilization...
...Moreover, children have a way of asking questions and they usually demand some sort of an answer...
...In the public schools there was to be no direct teaching of religion...
...He that is not with Me, is against Me...
...Secularism is less and less a by-product, and more and more a conscious aim in American education...
...It serves to unify the pupil's knowledge and to insure him against unfortunate dualisms—such, for instance, as that between religion and science...
...The result, to date, has been the accumulation of a vast number of isolated facts...
...They mention the soul only when referring to discarded psychological theories...
...Were I to ask these 500 authors for an explanation of the phenomena of mental life, they would give it to me in terms of Thorndyke's situation-response bonds...
...But a philosophy of education is a philosophy of life, and a philosophy of life is a religion...
...as far as the child is concerned, it is life itself...
...What are the ultimate norms of human conduct...
...He can no more keep his religion out of this process than he can separate the sound of his voice from the words that he speaks...
...High idealism is characteristic of all of them...
...Suppose they note that it is built upon premises to which they cannot subscribe, and which contradict truths of which they are firmly convinced and which October 7, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 527 constitute by far the most sacred and satisfying element to be found in their lives...
...All of which summed up, yields a point of view on religion, which is in reality a form of religion...
...The end of human living is social efficiency—the progressive evolution of the natural man...
...For the sake of their children's salvation, for the perpetuation of the religion of Jesus Christ, and for the welfare of their nation, they gladly build and maintain their own schools, trusting that in spite of bigotry and ignorant misunderstanding, their efforts will finally be regarded by their fellow-citizens with the respect and gratitude they deserve...
...what games children play, and what instincts they exhibit...
...For example, the curriculum of the American schools, as everyone knows, developed in a rather haphazard fashion...
...It embraces not only those activities whose direct object is the worship of God...
...Questions come up in history, in science, and in literature, to which an answer devoid of religious implication cannot be given...
...The conduct of schools demands a working philosophy of some kind...
...Now such books as these contain the beginnings of the formulation of an educational philosophy that seems destined to direct future educational research in this country, and make its influence felt in every phase of school work...
...It is simply a matter of what has come to be considered necessary policy, both for the purposes of avoiding religious bitterness and for preserving the principle of the separation of church and state, which from the beginning has been regarded as essential to the welfare of American institutions...
...A synthesis results that affords a basis for sane judgment and sound thinking...
...They are dowry that the Lord has put into our trust, for His own glory and for our sustenance...
...The traditions of the past, the educational practice of European countries, the theories of pedagogues, and the needs of the times, have all contributed to its development, with the result that there is confusion, over-crowding, lack of coordination, and waste of time...
...that Jesus Christ is not just a religious leader to be classified with Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, and Mohammed—but very God from very God—that in His teachings are involved the fundamental truths to which we must subscribe in thought and action...
...This knowledge gives him the light in which he comes to see all other light...
...It is very interesting to know definitely what people do...
...but the question is, what ought they to do ? It is very illuminating to discover what children like...
...It is because the notion of God and our relation to Him, implied in the prevalent educational philosophy of the secular schools, does not square with the truths of Catholic philosophy, that Catholics find the public school inadequate...
...that there is, as a matter of fact, a personal God, and that in this God there are Three Divine Persons...
...They are accustomed to use the word "dogma" as a term of contempt...
...that to redeem man from sin and its effects, the Second Person of the Trinity became man...
...There has never been anything anti-religious about the public schools of the country...
...He strives to inculcate the point of view and develop the attitudes that he regards necessary for successful adult living...
...that unaided reason cannot attain to the fulness of truth, and needs the light of faith—suppose, I say, that a considerable number of people believe truths of this kind, does it not stand to reason that they will desire schools for their children in which these truths are taught...
...The word "religion" strikes my eye, and I turn to the page indicated, to find some vague sentences on human fellowship or indefinite emotional yearning...
...The child must be taught the fundamental truths of his religion as they are expressed in the Cathechism...
...Opportunities must be afforded him for putting his ideas to work...
...What of the unconscious emphasis, the flashing of the eye, the compression of the lips...
...But what of their underlying philosophy...
...It colors his point of view and manifests itself in his actions...
...and teachers are human beings...
...Different investigators are following different lines of enquiry...
...But it is not enough for the child to learn the truth...
...By the same token, we offend God by any abuse of the things of lower nature...
...It concerns that which is the most fundamental of our relations—our relation with our Creator...
...Educators are beginning to realize these positive implications of the separation of church and school...
...but ought they to like it...
...he must likewise be schooled in living according to it...
...If the churches deemed religious training necessary, they were free to supply it outside of the regular school hours...
...What is his destiny...
...Particularly in their tenderest years, their babes cannot be entrusted to the care of an educational system, which, to say the least, is neutral concerning Christ—for they know as a matter of fact, that such neutrality is impossible...
...Every subject in the curriculum runs into theology somewhere, and in expounding it, the teacher is almost bound to express his own theological convictions...
...it includes all of our activities because all of them, at least indirectly, refer back to God...
...that Christ founded the Church to be the authoritative interpreter of His teachings and the channel of His graces...
...No school exists in which pupils do not acquire some notion of God...
...We have come to know what words the average adult American citizen employs in his correspondence...
...What I do find may be summed up in the words of Joseph Kinmont Hart in his Democracy and Education—"It is determined that all men shall know the truth—not the mediaeval truth that the afflictions of this world shall be recompensed in heaven, but the scientific truth that there is no reason save our own carelessness and unintelligence, why anyone should be deprived of the goods of this life...
...Suppose, for instance, that they believe that man has an immortal soul, not derived from matter but the object of a special creative act of God...
...How shall that destiny be accomplished...
Vol. 2 • October 1925 • No. 22
