The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical EditionVol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946

The Christian Conception of Education

There are several problems which are distinct but intimately related: which, therefore, should neither be confused nor considered without reference to each other. There is first the problem of what should be done about Religious Education in the educational system as we have it at present. There is the problem of its place in a system reformed according to the sort of pattern that is likely or possible in the immediate future. There is also the question of whether we need a specifically Christian doctrine of education in general. It is with the third that this paper is concerned. This paper is not concerned with ideals and methods of teaching Divinity, or with such reforms in education as we may advocate as humane and enlightened people. It is not concerned with point 2 of the statement by the Archbishops, the Cardinal-Archbishop and the Moderator, which reads as follows:

Every child, regardless of race or class, should have equal opportunities of education, suitable for the development of his peculiar capacities. ²

Within the scope of my paper, this point is not an educational point at all. The question whether every child should have equal opportunities of education, and if so how the opportunities are to be equalized, is primarily a question of social justice. The question of education is primarily the question of what education is and what sort of knowledge is in itself desirable. This question is sometimes ignored by those who see the problem of education only in terms of adapting our system to a changed and changing world, if they do not stop to enquire whether there are any permanent principles of education to which a changed and changing world should itself be brought to conform. What I am concerned with here, as I have said, is the need for a specifically Christian doctrine of education. I make no attempt to indicate what that doctrine should be; I am only urging the case for recognizing the need for it.

My question “whether the leadership of the Church requires a conception of education” is secondary to another, which can be put as follows: “is an adequate and purposeful conception of education possible without the leadership of the Church?” If our answer to this second question is in the affirmative, the leadership of the Church is superfluous, and our answer to the first question must be in the negative: for if education can get on without the Church, the Church had better make up its mind not to meddle where it is not needed, and to confine itself to the struggle, in which it is already interesting itself, for an adequate and universal religious instruction in schools. If, on the other hand, we conclude that no adequate conception of education is possible without the leadership of the Church, then our policy about religious instruction will be considerably altered and extended; for it must become a policy not only of fitting religious instruction into whatever system of education happens to prevail, but a programme of what ought to be the system of education into which that religious instruction has to be fitted.

We must recognize at this point that the system according to which only religious instruction comes within the province of the Church, while the remainder of the educational field is a neutral territory in which the theologian and Christian philosopher has, as such, no interest, itself implies a theory of education – a theory so generally accepted that it remains implicit, and therefore all the more difficult to disturb. It is important to consider how this state of affairs came about. I can only offer a few hints of what has happened, leaving their amplification and correction to those who are better qualified.

During the nineteenth century two tendencies in education are observable. The first is the tendency, already noted by the prescient mind of Coleridge, for education to develop as instruction in an increasing number and variety of subjects which came to be assigned equal value, and from which no significant pattern was formed. This...