Can Education Stay Secular?

...It is the most ambiguous word in the language...

...There is, indeed, a great discrepancy between the destructive use of atomic energy in war and the creative intelligence which has penetrated the secret of the atom...

...Moreover, one of the two causes to which he attributes the "conspiracy of silence" is the timidity and neutralism of teachers, who all too often do, indeed, make a fetish of "giving both sides" of every controversy and "leaving the students free" to do what the teacher has just showed them that he himself is unable to do, namely, make up their minds...

...And what does he mean by characterizing this secular atmosphere as "a tacit conspiracy of silence about moral, spiritual and religious aspects of modern living...

...There are many indications that he would...

...But here comes that word "spirit" again to confuse us just when we seemed about to get everything straight...

...Tead is following standard usage...

...At this point, it has become fashionable for publicists to express profound regret that the social sciences have not kept pace with physical science...

...Obviously, this conception of the role of cultural tradition in the lives of all peoples represents an immense advance over the naive cultural egotism with which Europeans formerly viewed all other peoples as misguided heathen or beastly savages...

...Men don't make scientific discoveries in order to unsettle the minds of their contemporaries...

...These writers make it clear enough that, in speaking of secularism as the true religion that unifies America, they are making a sharp distinction between religion and supernaturalism...

...More seriously, we can and often do refer to the fine arts as the highest achievements of the human "spirit" without meaning in any literal sense to attribute the genius of the artist to any sort of "divine afflatus...

...Only a few months ago, Dr...

...The conquest of atomic energy is only a continuation of the achievement of agriculture by neolithic man...

...They make them because certain particular investigations in which they happen to have been engaged somehow lead them to certain particular truths...

...Recent centuries have witnessed tremendous advances in secular knowledge and education—tremendous, but nevertheless insufficient, just as Mr...

...With what I take to be the burden of this declaration I am in full and strong agreement...

...he seems also to express the conviction that we can do so without recourse to supernatural sanctions if we have "the courage, the initiative and vision in matters of the mind and spirit that would be ideally desirable...

...More recently, E. B. White has taken substantially the same position...

...It is this dogma which has provided the rationale of the current fad that may have been in Mr...

...Wherever it is permitted to operate, secular education is immensely effective...

...Unless education deepens our understanding of democracy and so strengthens our commitment to it, there is something very wrong either with education or with democracy, or both...

...Horace Kallen contributed an article to the Saturday Review under the title, "Democracy's True Religion," in which he declared that "secularism is religion," and that "religion is not the antithesis to secularism, but the antithesis to clericalism...

...More to the point, perhaps, is Mr...

...Reviewing Elmer Davis's new book But We Were Born Free with all the verve we have come to expect from him, he declared that "Mr...

...I call it a notion because that is all it is...

...More particularly, what does he mean by deploring "the prevalent atmosphere of secularism in which so much of college education proceeds...

...Animals live by eating plants...

...Tead mean that we should abandon secularism—that henceforth the foundation of the educational structure should be religious faith...

...For one thing, he states explicitly that, in calling for more attention to "moral, spiritual and religious aspects of modern living," he does not mean "instruction of an indoctrinating character about any religion or any denomination...

...The strangest feature of the twentieth-century intellectual scene is that so many otherwise sensible people should have credited the divisive forces with being the "basic values" of all those concerned...

...I might also call it a fad...

...This is a very serious matter...

...The very phrase "act of faith"—auto da fe—has come down to us as a synonym of atrocity, whereas secular knowledge is the foundation upon which all civilization rests, even knowledge of atomic energy...

...Davis is a devout man," and that "his religion is the secular religion that unifies America—faith in freedom, in self-government, in democracy...

...This article is another in a continuing New Leader scries which probes the problems of American education...

...Davis's secular religion doesn't by itself unify America...

...Is this what Mr...

...Insofar as it has penetrated our social, political and economic life, it has brought us steadily closer to what Santayana called the life of reason...

...Tead means by suggesting that the teacher give "a frank exposition of his philosophy of life, his own apologia pro vita sua"—a "philosophy" to which perhaps he has been led, as Cardinal Newman was, by other forms of experience quite distinct from systematic inquiry and reflection...

...Plants live by photosynthesis...

...In using "secular" and "religious" as contrasting terms, Mr...

...The colleges are still turning out graduates whose outlooks in certain areas are unchanged...

...All this is true notwithstanding the existence of divisive forces...

...Tead's mind when he spoke of "narrow "scientism.' " If that is what he was deploring, I would like to applaud as vigorously as possible...

...This is nonsense, of course...

...Tead had in mind, it is a highly disturbing notion...

...Tead has said...

...But what does Mr...

...But in doing so he is taking a position contrary to that of other intellectual leaders for whom, also, I have the highest respect...

...Anybody who is willing to stop and reflect for a few minutes about means and ends will see that, in all ordinary activities (as distinguished from supernaturalism), ends and means define each other—that "ends" get their meaning from the causal interconnectedness of all human activities by virtue of which what one does today makes a difference to one's situation tomorrow...

...Whether or not this is what Mr...

...Kallen has no thought of establishing a mystic cult...

...It is precisely our increasingly clear and general recognition of the all-togetherness of human life that signalizes the great intellectual revolution to which (whether they appreciate the fact or not) all our scientists and scholars have contributed...

...Often they are a bit startled by the broader implications of their discoveries and go out of their way to disavow any revolutionary intent...

...Tead mean by such words as "spiritual" and "faith...

...In short, Mr...

...Would Mr...

...White doesn't mean that he spends most of his time in prayer and fasting...

...I confess that I'm not sure, and the chief cause of my uncertainty is the other cause to which he attributes the conspiracy of silence: namely, "scientism...

...Davis is a man of transparent sincerity, a man of principle who would risk his job and, if circumstances dictated, his life rather than falsify any important truth or betray any good and significant cause...

...We all use it, quite often in contexts utterly devoid of super-naturalism...

...Tead not only recognizes that we live in a changing world and that our minds must be nimbler if we are to keep up with changing circumstances...

...Because we have been passing through a great intellectual revolution in recent centuries, we are likely to think that the men who, as we now see, have made significant contributions to that revolution of ideas all knew what they were doing and did it on purpose...

...that science (and, by implication, rational thinking generally) serves only to discover the "means" by which we may pursue "ends" in which we "believe" for wholly non-scientific reasons...

...Tead go along with such a "religion...

...Tead gives his highest mark to the colleges for "an improving sense of social accountability...

...Our educational system has been predominantly secular from the outset, and is so still...

...Thus, the anthropologists, in their eagerness to view every people's culture from the inside, have taken each people's entire social system at that people's own valuation and so have laid it down as a universal law that all decisions, all choices —in short, all "values"—derive from the "basic values" of tribal tradition...

...Tead means...

...but, at the same time, he insists that this is precisely where the need for improvement is greatest...

...on the other, the ideals and aspirations by which to so remarkable a degree all good people are united...

...Although he lakes specific exception here to some of the views expressed in a previous article by Ordway Tead, his basic argument is self-contained...

...But that dictum is an outrageous fallacy of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi...

...Does Mr...

...C. E. Ayres is Professor of Economies at the University of Texas...

...But the maneuver that is most appropriate to the twentieth century is the dissociation of "means" and "ends" and the identification of science (and intellectual inquiry generally) with "means" and concomitant disavowal of all responsibility for "ends...

...By C. E. Ayres Last October 5, in these pages, Ordway Tead raised a question to which he failed to supply a clear and unequivocal answer...

...For, as the official announcement of the bombing of Hiroshima pointed out in August 1945, atomic energy is the original source of all life on earth...

...There is a reason for this, of course...

...It is the benightedness of nations that wars express, and the benightedness of nations is the consequence not of any intellectual lag but of the persistence even into the twentieth century of the divisive forces which have been man's curse throughout the ages, just as secular knowledge-and-skill has been his blessing...

...The anthropological doctrine of cultural relativism began with recognition of the fact that every people cherishes beliefs and performs rites which in turn define what that people regard as mortal sin and saving grace, and the fact that all such practices, essentially supernatural in character, have no other basis than the traditions of that people...

...But wars do not occur in consequence of the benightedness of social scientists...

...Those areas are the ones in which sacred traditions persist...

...In calling for "a less narrow "sci-entism,' " he may be referring to the notion which has gained wide currency in recent years among scientists?and especially among social scientists—to the effect that science is always "descriptive," never "normative...

...Unfortunately, however, what began as a significant truth has solidified into a pestilential dogma...

...Thus, we speak of "high spirits" without any suggestion of the sacred, and even of the "spirits" that sometimes induce high spirits...

...It is just at this point that "mindfulness for the most cherished spiritual values of our society—including our convictions about the democratic faith needs fuller articulation, reinforcement and rational and spiritual clarification...

...but nothing could be farther from the truth...

...College education (and for that matter, I would say, education generally) is better today than it has ever been, but it is far from being good enough...

...It is rather the recognition and acceptance of the fact that America—and, for that matter, all mankind—is united, willy-nilly, in a social structure by virtue of which what anybody does more or less affects everybody else...

...Similarly, I feel quite sure that, in characterizing secularism as true religion, Dr...

...What is at issue here is more than a simple matter of semantics...

...In earlier generations, the easiest and most convincing way to do this was by insisting that their discoveries only filled in the details of the Divine Plan...

...The answer to that question was clear enough and is one with which I am in hearty agreement...

...The world is full of infidels, heathen, skulking Communists and bloated capitalists...

...On the contrary, he means to drive a wedge between, on the one hand, the supernatural beliefs and sacred rites which vary so widely from sect to sect, and...

...For if systematic, organized inquiry teaches us anything, it teaches us that the secular activities of mankind—tool-using and crop-raising, efficient division of labor, organized cooperation, the pursuit of knowledge and the transmission of that knowledge to each other and especially to the young—are the activities that unify mankind, whereas the sacred is always divisive, always culture-limited, always narrow...

...This question was implied in the closing paragraphs of a very fine article entitled, "How Good Are Our Colleges...

...Does Mr...

...He means that Mr...

...Tead's complaint that many "old grads" have seemingly preserved without question "the same outlooks on politics, business, religion and so on as they held when they left college"?worse still, the same as they held before they came to college...

...Is this what Mr...

...Observation shows that all peoples have a disposition to attribute their entire culture to the supernatural Authors of their tribal legends—to suppose, so to speak, that their irrigation ditches were created by the gods who still give celestial signals for their proper use, or that traffic regulations are an emanation of Christian courtesy...

...Thus, I take it that, in describing Elmer Davis as a devout man, Mr...

...So far as the words go, I would be willing to go along with Humpty Dumpty and let any writer use words exactly as he pleases...

...Tead propose to reverse this trend...

...But, in that case, I am more puzzled than ever by his aversion to secularism and his apparent affinity for the sacred...

...It is true that many of our oldest colleges and universities were founded by church groups, but their development has been in the direction of steadily increasing secularism (Roman Catholic schools excepted, of course...