The Crisis of Western Education (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

VIII. Education and the State

viii Education and the State anyone who surveys the literature of modern education cannot help feeling discouraged by the thought of the immense amount of time and labor which has been expended with so little apparent fruit. Yet we must not forget that behind this smokescreen of blue-books and hand-books great forces are at work which have changed the lives and thoughts of men more effectively than the arbitrary power of dictators or the violence of political revolutions. during the last hundred or two hundred years mankind has been subjected to a process which makes for uniformity and universality. for example, there is universal military service, there is universal suffrage and finally there is universal education. We cannot say that any one of these has caused the others, but they have all influenced one another and they are all presumably the expression of similar or identical forces operating in different fields. of these three examples i have given, universal suffrage is usually regarded as the most important. But it is less typical than the others because it is less compulsory. indeed in the past the use of political suffrage has never been universal, even in societies in which every adult possessed the right to vote. universal military service, on the other hand, has had less attention paid to it than it deserves. it is the earliest of the three and has its roots deepest in history. it is also the one in which the element of compulsion is strongest and most effective. in england, however, and still more in the united states and the dominions , its introduction has been so long delayed that it is still regarded as an exceptional emergency measure and has not fully been assimilated by our society and culture. 77 There remains universal education, which is in fact the most universal of the three, since it has now extended all over the world. Moreover it goes deeper than the other two, since it is directly concerned with the human mind and with the formation of character. it is moreover a continually expanding force, for when once the state has accepted full responsibility for the education of the whole youth of the nation, it is obliged to extend its control further and further into new fields: to the physical welfare of its pupils—to their feeding and medical care—to their amusements and the use of their spare time—and finally to their moral welfare and their psychological guidance. Thus universal education involves the creation of an immense machinery of organization and control which must go on growing in power and influence until it covers the whole field of culture and embraces every form of educational institution from the nursery school to the university. hence the modern movement towards universal education inevitably tends to become the rival or the alternative to the Church, which is also a universal institution and is also concerned directly with the human mind and with the formation of character. and in fact there is no doubt that the progress of universal education has coincided with the secularization of modern culture and has been very largely responsible for it. in the philosophy of the enlightenment which inspired the educational policy of the french revolution and of Continental Liberalism, the Church and the influence of religion were regarded as powers of darkness that were responsible for the backward condition of the masses , and consequently the movement for universal education was a crusade of enlightenment which was inevitably anticlerical in spirit. even in england, as recently as 1870, Joseph Chamberlain could declare that “the object of the Liberal party in england, throughout the continent of europe and in america has been to wrest the education of the young out of the hands of the priests, to whatever denomination they might belong.” in practice no doubt, universal education in england as in Germany and many other countries was the result either of a process of cooperation between Church and state or at least of some kind of modus 78 The Crisis of Western Education Education and the State 79 vivendi between them. nevertheless at best it was an unequal partnership : the fact that secular education is universal and compulsory, while religious education is partial and voluntary, inevitably favors the former and places the Church at a very great disadvantage in educational matters. This is not merely due to the disproportion in wealth...