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

I. The Origins of the Western Tradition of Education

3 i The Origins of the Western Tradition of Education Culture, as its name denotes, is an artificial product. it is like a city that has been built up laboriously by the work of successive generations, not a jungle which has grown up spontaneously by the blind pressure of natural forces. it is the essence of culture that it is communicated and acquired, and although it is inherited by one generation from another, it is a social not a biological inheritance, a tradition of learning, an accumulated capital of knowledge and a community of “folkways” into which the individual has to be initiated. hence it is clear that culture is inseparable from education, since education in the widest sense of the word is what the anthropologists term “enculturation,” i.e., the process by which culture is handed on by the society and acquired by the individual. no doubt this is a far wider process than what is commonly known as education, for we apply the word “education” only to a very specialized type of enculturation— the formal teaching of particular kinds of knowledge and behavior to the younger members of the community through particular institutions . and the most important of all the processes by which culture is transmitted—the acquisition of speech—takes place before formal education begins. in the past education was an exceptional privilege which was confined to the ruling elements of society, especially the priesthood, and it is only during the last two centuries that any attempt has been made to extend it to the whole society. But it would be a mistake to suppose that in the past the common man was completely uneducated. he was 4 The Crisis of Western Education no less “enculturated” than modern man, but he acquired his culture orally and practically by tradition and folklore, by craftmanship and apprenticeship, and through religion and art. even among primitive peoples this “enculturation” is quite a conscious systematic process, and the youth is initiated into the life and traditions of the tribe by a regular system of training and instruction which finds its climax in the initiation rites. such systems may occasionally produce quite an elaborate form of oral education, as in West africa and still more in Polynesia, but it is only in literate and civilized societies, beginning with those of ancient sumeria and egypt, that education in the modern specialized sense became a necessary function in the life of society. The temple schools of ancient sumer were the seeds of that tree of knowledge which has grown with civilization until it has filled the world. But even in its first beginnings it already possessed many of the characteristics that distinguish the scholar, the scientist and the man of learning. owing to the difficulty of the original hieroglyphic scripts and their close association with the temple service, the literate class was from the first a privileged minority which tended to become an exclusive corporation. it was not necessarily the ruling class, and it might even be different from the latter in race and language, as seems to have been the case in Babylonia under the Kassites, and thus it involved the possibility of a cleavage or dualism of culture which had important sociological consequences. nevertheless it possessed an immense prestige as the guardian of the sacred tradition on which the very existence of the civilization depended. The most remarkable example of this is to be seen in China, where there has been an unbroken tradition of education and scholarship that has continued for thousands of years almost to our own times. here the Confucian scholars were not merely the guardians of a classical tradition , they were the cement that held Chinese society together. again and again China was invaded and conquered by the barbarians, and on each occasion the conquerors were eventually obliged to use the services of the scholars without whom the administration of the empire could not be carried on. Before long the servants became the teachers of the conquerors, and the latter were proud to take their appointed place in the ordered hierarchy of the Chinese society. Origins of the Western Tradition 5 The case of China is an exceptionally clear example of the way in which the survival of a civilization is dependent on the continuity of its educational tradition. But a similar relation is to be found in every advanced culture. a common educational tradition creates...