Dictatorial Education
DICTATORIAL EDUCATION FFFORTS to transform the "office of education," which has been an appendage to the work of the Secretary of the Interior since the Civil War, into a full-fledged department...
...We want to foster the children and not some particularly talkative professor...
...But the Catholic mind is certainly not opposed to the betterment of education...
...Accordingly, the thought suggests itself that the federal government should and could come to the aid of backward communities...
...Whether the truth be widely granted or not, it nevertheless is this: the real goal of education in this country is not to establish some one ideology through the medium of a public school conducted according to a single standard of citizenship, but to develop intelligently, with the aid of society, such schools as will serve each group faithfully...
...Education in the United States has not been merely a question of dollars, but also an affair of contrasted ideologies...
...Some districts are so far behind the average stage of progress as to endanger seriously our general literacy and civic standards...
...It would be a great tragedy if all the peas were turned out just alike...
...But upon what terms shall such subsidies be granted ? Here one gets into a realm of entirely different considerations...
...Educational service in the United States is very spotty...
...Much of the trouble can be traced to a lack of adequate funds...
...We hold that the ideal solution has not yet been reached...
...When, for instance, one realizes that the parochial school is the only one that conserves the old American belief that religion is a fundamental part of every sound educational program, one has grasped a historical fact that is not comforting to any virile Protestant group...
...The desire is just one form of class consciousness, and perhaps the most destructive of all...
...Education is at least as important to the country as a whole as good roads are...
...We think this is, in the main, a sound thought...
...More recently the Fellowship Forum, Mr...
...Neither the power to enforce the law nor the ability to teach can be divorced from the pay check...
...Addressing a recent conference of state superintendents and commissioners of education, Secretary of the Interior Wilbur declared: "In education the danger lies in carrying the idea of organization too far...
...and if Congress legislates to assist in building the second, there is no very impressive reason why it ought not to help the first...
...And when, on the other hand, one sees that Catholic schools, privately supported through necessity, are conducted at the cost of an astounding sacrifice of men and women, one has seized upon another fact...
...Time and time again leading advocates of the federalization of scholastic enterprise have preached a doctrine of uniformity which denies the very possibility of parochial or group education...
...It is at least relatively a very dangerous disagreement...
...None of our reasonable philosophers has ever believed you could...
...What the children receive as individuals is the important thing...
...We seek to arrive at something more compatible with the dignity of freemen than a youth bottle-fed by an intellectualism as thin as it is unacceptable...
...It is faithful to a conception of the national ideal which its bishops have advocated from the very beginning and which holds that our government is not the teacher of any given ideology but the guarantor of the rights of all moral creeds and professions of social faith...
...DICTATORIAL EDUCATION FFFORTS to transform the "office of education," which has been an appendage to the work of the Secretary of the Interior since the Civil War, into a full-fledged department are not new, but they remain persistent...
...It is a matter of pride that the peas raised by the farmer can be harvested by machinery and travel all the way to the sealed can without knowing the touch of the human hand...
...We are, however, of the opinion that such organs do not really believe that federalized education would greatly injure the Catholic cause in the United States...
...Even inside the several states there exists a large measure of uneven-ness...
...In education, mechanics should not go too far...
...We need cooperation and not monopoly...
...We are opposed to super-superintendents, just as we are convinced that all forms of Mussolini-ism are contradictions of Americanism...
...As a matter of fact, this theory conforms not at all with the impulses which have fostered the American spirit...
...Indeed, this plea for "democracy in the schools" has often been markedly anti-alien and anti-Catholic...
...It cannot be repeated too often that the development of American education is a process far from completed...
...In its opposition to the educational philosophy we have just outlined, the Catholic mind is not concerned primarily with its own especial losses or gains...
...Since the movement for a federal department of education was first formulated in the Smith-Towner Bill, it has been sponsored by southern Masonic publications in a spirit of frank hostility to the Church...
...Franklin Ford's irenic publication, has editorialized in the same vein with great gusto...
...The reasons which underlie it ought, therefore, to be brought out quite frankly and cogently...
...Thus a kind of half-suppressed conflict has arisen...
...They seek rather to capitalize Catholic opposition to a measure which has a certain popularity and which seems also to imply respect for the national government...
...We believe they may be divided into two distinct groups...
...You cannot galvanize people into one American type...
...And manifestly one basic element in any species of individuality is the impression left by the family, the group and the locale in which one has lived during youth...
...The executive committee of the National Education Association has backed them strongly during a good many years, and so-called "private" educational agencies (including, of course, spokesmen for Catholic parochial schools) have been vigorously committed to opposing them...
...But it must be perfectly clear that the aid is offered to the schoolroom and not to a pedagogical idea...
...If a measure of federal authority or federal money can be expended to advantage upon school systems which are not now functioning properly, that measure should be endorsed...
Vol. 11 • December 1929 • No. 8
