Wisdom in Education

Extract

Some weeks ago in two articles in The Tablet, entitled: “Education and Technique”, J. B. Sandeman, O.S.B., described the rejection by the 1944 Education Act of the idea of liberal education and asked what the Wisdom of Christ’s Church has to say and do at this time. He epitomised the historical facts thus: “In 1870 we abolished God, or at least reduced him to the rank of an idea . . . And now we are engaged in the abolition of man, for he too, in his turn, is to be sacrificed to something lower than himself, to the exigencies of technique”.

The State rejects liberal education because it only understands it as a pagan thing, as the practice of traditions, which, rising from the noble but pagan ideal, “mens sana in corpore sano”, have become corrupt and moribund, lacking the principle of life; it rejects a “classical education” because it knows no reason for its existence. When the Holy Spirit ceased to pour the water of life through Christ’s Church into our schools, when in fact, “God was abolished, or at least, reduced to the rank of an idea”, the virtue went out of our schools, the virtue went out of liberal education. When the study of the classics became an end in itself, instead of being part of the means and methods of training minds to logical and later to theological thought, in fact when man was abolished or at least “in his turn sacrificed to something lower than himself, to the exigencies of technique”, the idea of a classical education came into disrepute. But the Church lives still in Europe.