Using the Past to Rescue the Future

EDITOR’S NOTE: The existential situation and the future course of education at all levels must inevitably conduce concern among both those involved in the learning process and all those variously affected by the consequences of theories and policies as those are formulated and administered. What we too often find, especially in the orphaned humanities, are undulant conditions that disclose unceasing deterioration in American education. It could be asserted, in fact, that we are caught in a meta-crisis of staggering proportions, when the cruel and cumulative process of the devaluation of right reason and humane principles has leapt even beyond the extremities of “intellectual nihilism” and “ideological antagonisms,” which more than thirty years ago Lionel Trilling decried in Mind in the Modern World.

Modern Age has consistently spoken out against the breakdown of traditional educational standards, and continues to do so, as seen in Professor Jude P. Dougherty’s forceful essay on “Using the Past to Rescue the Future” in this issue. Earlier issues have included an editorial commentary on “School and Society: A Conservative Perspective” (Spring 2006) and Professor Hugh Mercer Curtler’s “A Plea for Humanistic Education” (Fall 2006). Forthcoming issues will feature additional essays on the state of American education. [End of Editor’s comments.]

If you are of a certain age, let us say old enough to be a grandparent, you have seen it happen in your life time. You do not need to be told that American public education at all levels has degenerated in the course of the last half century. It is difficult to determine fully the cause or causes. Partly to be blamed is the ascendancy in educational circles of a philosophy of education that in the name of progress emphasized experience at the expense of the inherited. That philosophy is but one aspect of a much larger intellectual movement, one directly traceable to the Enlightenment, Anglo-French and German, of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an intellectual current that gradually made its way across the Atlantic and, in taking hold, became the common intellectual currency of the academic world in the post-World War II period.

John Dewey (1859–1952) may be taken as representative of the progressive movement in educational circles. His educational philosophy with its emphasis on experience denigrates the value of the inherited wisdom of the past and the necessity to master ancient and foreign languages that are needed in order to gain access to the past. For Dewey, the function of education is to challenge the inherited, to question the received, in effect to take the measure of Western civilization in its core beliefs. Implemented to the full, Dewey’s progressive education deprives the student of those time-transcendent truths about human nature and human fulfillment that are to be found in the Greek poets and in the texts of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, let alone their medieval commentators. Under the influence of the progressive educators, the liberal curriculum that once characterized nearly all college education has been gradually eclipsed by an elective system devoid of a core, even at those celebrated institutions that were once its chief advocates.

Dewey’s philosophy of education is, of course, only one aspect of his pragmatic naturalism. Dewey came to that position slowly. If one were to survey only his later atheistic and socialist writings, one would be surprised to find the newly created Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins lecturing to students at the University of Michigan on “Our Obligation to Know God.” That was when Dewey was still a convinced Hegelian. Hegel seemed to provide an antidote to the skepticism that followed Hume and Kant. The conflict was mainly about the nature of science and scientific explanation. As Hegel came under fire by empiricists on both sides of the Atlantic for his failure to account adequately for method as actually practiced in the natural sciences, Dewey abandoned the idealism of his intellectual mentor in favor of an outlook that has become known as British empiricism. In short, he became a disciple of David Hume, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill, later adopting the social determinism of Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim. Dewey was not oblivious of the implications of his newly acquired pragmatic naturalism, and that outlook became the cornerstone of his philosophy of education. Some of its most profound effects are to be found in the moral and cultural order. Although the moral order may be independent of any religious witness, moral principles were from the nation’s founding communicated largely within a religious context. The Ten Commandments were its core. Prayers were commonly offered at the beginning of the school day, and reference to God permeated the curriculum. These practices were to give ground as British empiricism came to replace the classical philosophy that undergirded the texts widely used in the schools. As any student of philosophy is quick to recognize, British empiricism, because of its denial of evidence for the existence of God, deprives religion of its rational foundation, leaving religion on intellectually shaky ground, with consequences for the moral order. David Hume’s challenge remains today.

Absent a divinely ordained moral order, how do we move from a description of what is to what ought to be. Dewey himself held that many of the values taught by the religious are worthy of consideration and should not be abandoned, but a proper rationale ought to be sought for those deemed commendable. Whatever role religion may have played in the past, Dewey believed, it is an unreliable source of knowledge and, in spite of contentions to the contrary, even of motivation. The thrust of Dewey’s critique of religion was not merely to eliminate churches from political life but to reduce their effectiveness in private life. Religion he deemed socially dangerous insofar as it gives practical credence to a divine law and attempts to mold personal and social conduct in conformity with norms that look beyond temporal society. The aim of his educational philosophy may be summed up in the slogan, “The function of education is to challenge, not perpetuate, the inherited.” The implications of Dewey’s naturalism are many, but the governing principle of his educational project is found in his desire to use the schools to solve social and political problems. To pursue change through politics can be frustratingly slow; using education to change the world is far more efficient. Henry T. Edmonson, in his John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, is convinced that Dewey’s primary interest was not the good of the student but the promotion of his socialist agenda.¹ Edmonson believes that thanks in no small part to Dewey, much of what characterizes contemporary education is a revolt against various expressions of authority, a revolt against a canon of learning, a revolt against tradition, a revolt against religious values, a revolt against moral standards, a revolt against logic—even a revolt against grammar and spelling.

Most disputes in education today are far more than technical quarrels: they are fundamental philosophical disagreements. Dewey’s educational philosophy did not go unchallenged in his lifetime. Some of Dewey’s less-celebrated contemporaries early on saw the danger of Dewey-inspired, progressive education. Mortimer Adler of the University of Chicago countered with, How to Read A Book, a not-too-subtle attack on Dewey’s philosophy of education.² Mark van Doren’s The Liberal Education was essentially a defense of the education that gave us Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton.³

Sadly, the secular outlook embraced by Dewey and his disciples eventually penetrated all levels of education, leading, as many believe, to a deterioration of both moral and intellectual standards. Deprived of its anchorage in classical learning and biblical morality, and without any discernible moral compass, the educational system in the United States over the course of time became vulnerable to every passing fad. The current enthusiasm for multiculturalism and affirmative action has resulted in a dumbing down of the curriculum to accommodate all and offend none. The depreciation of history and classical languages and the neglect of foreign languages have ill prepared students for advanced studies in the humanities. Useful technical education and education in the sciences have fared no better. In the recently administered Third International Math and Science Study, American l2th graders scored near the bottom, placing 19th out of 21 developed nations in math and science. Our advanced students did even worse, scoring last in physics.

The relationship between the moral and the cultural is not often explored; still less is the role of religion in society. Justice William O. Douglas, in an opinion delivered in a famous case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in l952 known as Zorach, wrote, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”⁴ He was before his death to emerge as a spokesman for an entirely different doctrine, namely, that of benevolent neutrality that affirms that the state does not have a stake in the success of religion. Such a turn might have surprised Jefferson who, while he spoke of “a wall of separation,” never wanted to divorce religion from public life. Like Hobbes and Locke he believed in the social utility of religion. Commonly held religious beliefs, Jefferson thought, are necessary to the smooth functioning of the body politic. Religious people make the best citizens, but it is not necessary to have an established church to get the moral benefit of religion in the civic arena. Small churches, as voluntary societies, can accomplish naturally all that is claimed for an established church without the cumbersome operation of state power.

The Enlightenment rationalism of which Jefferson was representative emphasized a belief in the sufficiency of human reason applied to all aspects of life. Belief in God was part of the system, but it was a God who had created the universe and set it to run according to immutable laws, both physical and moral. Man’s task is to discover these laws and to conduct his life accordingly. The essence of religion is morality—that is, living according to the eternal principles of right and wrong, principles that are discernible by the free operation of human reason. Jefferson held that this pure moral code of religion found its perfect expression in the teachings of Jesus, teachings that were, however, unfortunately entangled in a web of irrelevant doctrine. Jefferson’s attempt to free this teaching from its dogmatic shackles is well known. He created his own version of the New Testament in which he selected those sayings of Jesus that he considered indubitably authentic, omitting those texts that referred to the divinity of Christ.

At the same time Jefferson was laying the groundwork for a moral code, Voltaire was taking a somewhat different tack. Voltaire urged the eradication of Christianity from the world of higher culture, but he was willing to have it remain in the stables and in the scullery, lest a servant class in the absence of divine sanction be tempted to steal. John Stuart Mill repudiated Christianity but not the religion of humanity that, from the vantage point of the state, he thought to be a useful thing. Auguste Comte, more benevolent in his attitude toward Christian practice than either Voltaire or Mill, and in spite of his denial of all metaphysical validity to religious belief, was willing to accept as a civic good the moral and ritual traditions of at least Catholic Christianity. Emile Durkheim was not so positive. For him the major task of the state is to free individuals from partial societies such as families, religious collectives, and labor and professional groups. Modern individualism, Durkheim argues, depends on preventing the absorption of individuals into secondary or mediating groups. In antiquity, religious and political institutions were but parts of a whole social fabric, an organized social life to which men could not but conform; it is, says Durkheim, only in modern circumstances, brought about by the centralization of government, that individuals acquire personal freedom.

Durkheim wrote approximately one hundred years ago. Perhaps he would not be so sanguine today. It is doubtful that anyone subject to the dictates of Brussels or Washington is likely to concur. Centralized government may free one from provincial sanctions and even biblical morality, but it has a way of imposing its own canon of behavior, often at variance with local customs and desires. Government wrested from one form of orthodoxy inevitably embraces another. Intellectual elites are all too anxious to seize the levers of power and frequently do so in an autocratic manner. We have witnessed the removal of the Ten Commandments from the classroom at the same time we have seen the dogmas of tolerance and multiculturalism enshrined. Having eradicated the tutorial role of the Mosaic decalogue, we must now tolerate practices that since biblical times have been regarded as deviant. The singing of Christmas carols and other expressions of religious belief are forbidden in the public schools. One is inclined to ask: When did atheism become the official religion of the American republic?

There is no doubt that the Constitution of the United States embodies a moral outlook, i.e., a respect for truth, a willingness to tolerate religious pluralism (or should one say “dissent” since a kind of orthodoxy was assumed), and a willingness to arbitrate differences and abide by majority decision when differences are beyond resolution. Concepts regarding human dignity and natural rights are likewise presupposed, although one may ask how deeply certain principles were held in colonies where slavery was to flourish almost from the start. The questions for our time are: Can the principles upon which the Constitution was founded and the nation’s laws created be unified by a secular philosophy in the absence of the religious outlook on which they were actually based? Does the state, short of imposing an ideology of its own, not depend on religion to bring some things about? Can a state remain indifferent to religion? These questions, important as they are, are not often asked in a public forum.

When asked, an overwhelming majority of American people (perhaps, 85 percent) declare themselves to be religious, yet religion has ceased to be an intellectual or cultural force. If a culture is composed of a moral outlook with implications for personal behavior and for the creation of civil law, if a culture is judged by its painting, architecture, music, and literature, if it consists of attitudes toward one’s own country and toward the family, then judging from prevailing standards, one would have to say that the developing culture, as opposed to the received, is untouched by religion. But could it be otherwise? Can religion speak with a divided voice and still be authoritative? If the religious mind is unsure of itself or is overwhelmed by the secular, what moral or cultural tutelage can it provide? Is the problem of social disintegration the problem of the disintegration of religion itself? Absent a common religious bond, will a faith in the democratic charter produce a reverence for human life, freedom, and justice? Such was the Enlightenment project: the common faith, it was thought, need not be religious. Most social theorists are likely to acknowledge that a civic outlook requires in the people, in addition to a sense of justice and respect for the law, a sense of devotion and mutual respect, if not love. Most, too, are likely to hold that these are attitudes of mind that are learned primarily in the family and secondarily in the schools. Thomas Hobbes regarded education, particularly at the university level, as the key to the establishment of a proper political order. John Locke, although convinced that government has nothing to do with making men good, nevertheless, held that government presupposes virtue in the citizenry, for without it, lives, liberty, and property are rendered insecure. This is not to say that Locke had no interest in education; he simply depended on the family and the school, not the state, to prepare men to exercise the civic franchise.

For many Jewish and Christian thinkers who came after Kant, the only genuine base for morality is religion. This is true of theologians such as Emil Brunner, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Rudolf Bultmann, who hold that, without belief in God, there is no ground or reason for being moral. One may be surprised to find some prominent Catholic thinkers asserting something like, “Only if we believe in God as a lawgiver can we come to believe that there is anything a man is categorically bound to do on pain of being a bad man.” Such thinkers maintain that the moral use of obligation statements makes no sense apart from a divine law conception of ethics. In the absence of divinely sanctioned obligation, contract theory was introduced to impose obligation and to legitimize coercion by means of a fictional consent given in some hypothetical primitive state. Since the eighteenth century, the “societal contract theory” has been a staple of political discourse, yet it is Kant who wields the greatest influence apart from the natural moral law theorists in the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas. Josiah Royce wrote in 1881, “We all live, philosophically speaking, in a Kantian universe.”

The landscape need not be so circumscribed. Before Kant, before “contract theory,” the natural moral law outlook of Aristotle and the Stoics was common academic fare. This teaching formed the basis of moral teaching in the early days of the American republic, when education was the province of the New England divines, those same ministers who laid the foundations of what were to become some of America’s most prestigious universities. The classical curriculum of the early American college, following the lead of the English model, exposed students to texts that included Livy, Virgil, Horace, Homer, and Cicero’s orations.

The curriculum during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries concentrated on training students in the Seven Liberal Arts, a curriculum that can be traced through the Middle Ages to antiquity. Aristotle is prominently represented in the curriculum along with Plato and the more philosophical works of Cicero, such as de Officis de Senectate and de Amicita. The most classical curriculum of American colleges was that of King’s (Columbia) College, where the 1763 curriculum mentions Aristotle, among others, as an author to be studied in the third year. Yale mentions Aristotle in its announcements of 1824. The classical curriculum remained in place throughout the eighteenth century. It was the curriculum that shaped the thought of the founders of the American republic. John Adams, in his defense of the proposed U.S. Constitution, quotes Aristotle in support of a “mixed constitution,” one that he, Adams, recommended for its checks and balances.

Extraordinary advances in the natural sciences introduced a wealth of technical and specialized disciplines that tended to usurp the time given to classical studies. In the twentieth century there have been numerous efforts to revitalize the liberal education of an earlier period. The University of Chicago, under the tenure of its president Robert M. Hutchins, introduced the Great Books movement in the early decades of the twentieth century. It was Hutchins’s ambition to create a college curriculum based on the study of the great authors of the Western world from biblical times to the modern world. Aided by the editors of Everyman’s Library and the Modern Library, the movement caught on, and one of the consequences was a renewed interest in classical learning. Richard McKeon, dean of the college under Hutchins, edited a widely used collection, The Basic Works of Aristotle.⁵ Mortimer Adler, another Hutchins appointee at Chicago, edited with Charles Van Doren his own multi-volume collection, The Great Books of the Western World.⁶ Similar efforts to promote classical philosophy, notably the realism of Aristotle, are to be found in the mid-decades under the leadership of John Wild at Yale University and John Herman Randall, Jr., and Mark Van Doren at Columbia. Classicists like John Burnet and A. E. Taylor were not without influence. In spite of some success, the trend toward specialized education to the neglect of the liberal component has continued unabated.

Allan Bloom, in his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind,⁷ describes the loss of educational standards in the 1960s, exemplified, he holds, by the abandonment of the traditional core curriculum, the decline in the study of languages, both ancient and modern, and, significantly, the disappearance of “the King’s English.” He speaks of “the collapse of the entire educational structure, recognized by all parties when they talk about the need to go back to basics.”⁸ The breakdown of standards and the repudiation of tradition is directly traceable, he believes, to both the teachings and the deeds of universities in the sixties. It may take some future historian to identify fully the causes and explain how we entered what we now call the “terrible sixties,” but Bloom offers a partial insight.

One is struck by Bloom’s claim that the greatest thoughts and political principles exemplified in our founding documents became the exclusive provenance of our universities. Those principles, he believes, never became embodied in a living or self-perpetuating class of men. “Neither aristocrats nor priests, the natural bearers of high intellectual tradition, exist in any meaningful sense in America.”⁹ Since the home in America of those founding principles has been the universities, the violation of that home, Bloom holds, became the crime of the sixties. Tradition once broken, he reminds us, is not easy to recover: “one cannot jump on and off tradition like a train.”¹⁰ Bloom ends in a pessimistic tone, convinced that it will not be easy to recover the knowledge of philosophy, history, and literature that was trashed. The need, he makes apparent. When education is organized on wholly utilitarian lines, Bloom tells us, we are deprived of a broadly educated class who possess the wisdom, speculative and practical, to deal with contingencies in the light of the time-honored wisdom of the race.¹¹

Writing twenty years after Bloom, Harry R. Lewis, former dean of Harvard College, describes a similar loss of the core curriculum and its consequences at Harvard.¹² In the absence of a core curriculum, Lewis says, professors teach what they want to teach, and students take what they want to take. Lost is the sense that some things are more important than others. Research and teaching, Lewis maintains, have become so specialized that a press run of a mere 300 copies is not uncommon for academic titles.¹³

As the West is challenged by a self-confident and militant Islam, the value of a liberal education may come to be recognized, if for no other reason than the need to define the distinctive features of Western culture. Without a knowledge of the great thinkers of the past, it is impossible to understand who we are, to understand anything of the development of mankind, civilization, culture, and science. To make one’s own the wisdom of the ancients, it behooves every generation to read Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. “Reading Plato,” Jacques Maritain reminds us, “is ever a blessing, even if you disagree with the tenets of Platonism.”¹⁴ Historians tell us that in periods of cultural decline, generations have resorted to classical learning to set things aright. Edmund Husserl, speaking of Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century in his 1935 lecture, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” offered an analysis of Europe’s spiritual and intellectual crisis that looked to ancient Greece as a way out of the crisis facing the West. Husserl found in the Greek spirit of philosophical inquiry the sources for “free and universal reflection that would serve as a model for a “supra-national ideal of reason.” In Husserl’s words, “There are only two escapes from the crisis of European existence: the downfall of Europe and its estrangement from its own rational sense of life, its fall into hostility toward the spiritual, into barbarity; or the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through a heroism of reason that overcomes naturalism once and for all.”¹⁵

Clearly ours is not the first generation to look for a remedy in the face of cultural decline. Cicero, writing in the first century before Christ and addressing a troubled time when men felt that the Roman state had declined, laid out the conditions of leadership. In Book V of On the Commonwealth, he speaks of inherited standards that “brought forth distinguished men, eminent men who cherished the ways and customs of our ancestors.”¹⁶ Cicero was convinced that he who would rule ought to be a man of consummate ability and learning. In addition to his understanding of law, a governor must have studied Greek to gain access to Athenian philosophy. Cicero himself acknowledges a debt to Plato.¹⁷

The foregoing is not to suggest that a liberal education consists solely in a reverence for the ancient. In addition to languages and to history, a liberal education necessarily includes training in logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences. Some training in the sciences is important, not to create physicists or chemists, but to give the student an understanding of the meaning or nature of physics and chemistry. The same could be said of philosophy and theology. An appreciation of poetry and the fine arts and some knowledge of moral and political philosophy flow naturally when the basic liberal components are in place. Whether all are capable of a liberal education is a matter of dispute, but where it does prevail, it opens one to a life of intellect, facilitates cross-disciplinary communication, and provides general standards of judgment. The purpose of education is primarily self-perfection, a quenching of the desire to know. Only secondarily does it foster the advancement of knowledge in general, clearly a vocation to which not all are called. The technical or practical fruit of knowledge pursued for its own sake is inevitable. One can agree with Francis Bacon that “knowledge is power” without making power or technical skill the primary objective of education.

The core curriculum described above was common to America’s colleges through the 1950s. Its loss has resulted in a largely uneducated media and political class, whose lack of an intellectual and moral compass has affected the culture of the nation. Indeed, a question raised on both sides of the Atlantic is whether Western civilization can survive without being reanchored in its sources. If an intellectual and political class, for whatever reason, repudiates or ignores the Hellenic and Christian sources of Western culture, can European civilization survive? Charles A. Murray, in promoting his book, Human Accomplishment, commented, “I write at a time when Europe’s run appears to be over. Bleaker yet, there is reason to wonder whether European culture as we have known it will exist even at the end of this century.”¹⁸

Pessimists abound. Nearly a century ago, Oswald Spengler, following Nietzsche, sounded the alarm that culture is not something abiding. One does not have to subscribe to Spengler’s cyclical view of history or to Murray’s recent assessment to recognize that something is amiss. The Enlightenment project to secularize Europe has taken its toll, not only in Europe but wherever European culture has heretofore flourished. We may ask: Is it possible to reclaim and to reintroduce the Hellenic and Christian sources of Western culture into the curricula of our common schools? And if so, to what quarter should we look to stimulate the restoration? I do not have the answer. Given the amorphous state of our politicized universities, religion may assume a new importance in the battle for cultural survival, for religion easily produces among the many that which philosophy engenders in only a few.

1. Henry T. Edmonson, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education (Wilmington, Del., 2006).
2. Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book (New York, 1940).
3. Mark Van Doren, The Liberal Education (New York, 1943).
4. Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306, 313 (1952).
5. The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941).
6. Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, eds., The Great Books of the Western World, 61 vols. (Chicago, 1990).
7. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York, 1987).
8. Ibid., 321.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. A similar observation was made by Dorothy Sayers in a lecture delivered at Oxford in 1947. In speaking of the loss of the basic intellectual tools, namely the Trivium and Quadrivium that were once integral to the education of youth, she said, “The truth is that for the last three hundred years or so we have been living upon our educational capital…. But one cannot live on capital forever. However firmly a tradition is rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies.” (This lecture is available in its entirety on the Internet at: www.cambridgestudycenter.com, “Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning.”)
12. Harry R. Lewis, Excellence without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (New York, 2006).
13. Ibid.,268.
14. Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads (New Haven, 1960), 73.
15. Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” in The Crisis of European Sciences and the Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, 1970), 299. Martin Heidegger, like his mentor Husserl, similarly attempted to show that a revival of the Greeks was essential to the future of the West. “When the spiritual strength of the West fails, the West starts to come apart at the seams.” Notably in his several speeches on the Hellenic patrimony of the West, Heidegger omits any reference to Christianity and Roman humanism (Rector’s Address: “The Self-Assertion of the German University” in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering [New York, 1990], 19).
16. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Commonwealth, Book V, Ch. 1, trans. G. H. Sabine and S. B. Smith, The History of the Liberal Arts (Indianapolis, 1929), 243.
17. It is not commonly recognized that in the months before he became president of the United States, Harry Truman said as much in a charming letter to his seventeen-year-old daughter. In writing to Margaret, Truman said, “Ancient history is one of the most interesting of all studies. By it you find out why a lot of things happen today…. You will find out that people did the same things, made the same mistakes, and followed the same trends as we do today.” (Margaret Truman, Harry S Truman [New York, 1973], 141).
18. Quoted from promotional literature on behalf of his book, Human Accomplishment (New York, 2003).