Education: Find the Balance

“It is our hope,” said Rector and Headmaster John O. Patterson of Connecticut’s Kent School, “that this meeting may be a means of regaining and restating what general education could be within a Christ-centered culture.” Rector Patterson was addressing a group of theologians and scholars of many faiths who had come for a special symposium marking Episcopal Kent’s soth birthday. Now published in book form (The Christian Idea of Education; Yale University; $4), the papers and discussions of that symposium cast fresh light on one of modern education’s greatest lacks and needs.

Drastically One-Sided. One reason why the Christian idea of education has been so rarely realized, said William Pollard, executive director of the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies and an ordained Episcopal priest, is that the modern Western world has focused on its Greco-Roman heritage to the almost total exclusion of the Judaeo-Christian. A student may study history from the ancient world to the present, “but concerning our Judaeo-Christian stem, he will know nothing of any real, historic, cultural root. [He] will be aware of it only through the fall of Rome and the seamy side of the medieval Church . . . In short, he will emerge with a drastically one-sided, biased and prejudiced view of his own history.”

Though he will respond to Plato or Thucydides. he may find the Bible, yanked out of its cultural setting, an alien book. “The great Biblical themes of redemption and judgment in history, of freedom and grace and sin . . . seem strangely vague, far away, and unrelated to the ebb and flow of life and history as he understands it.” However much the world “may have retained the institutions and outward forms of its Judaeo-Christian cultural stem, it has well-nigh completely lost the capacity to respond sympathetically and understandingly to that heritage.”

“What is demanded,” added Princeton’s Philosopher Jacques Maritain, a Roman Catholic, “is to get rid of those absurd prejudices which can be traced back to the Renaissance and which banish from the blessed land of educational curricula a number of authors and matters under the pretext that they are specifically religious, and therefore not ‘classical,’ though they matter essentially to the common treasure of culture. The writings of the Fathers of the Church are an integral part of the humanities as well as, or more than, those of the Elizabethan dramatists.” The traditional classical concept of the humanities is both narrow and provincial, for today’s humanities must reach beyond the Western world to embrace—just as does Christianity—the total human experience. “Our watchword should be enlargement, Christian-inspired enlargement, not narrowing, even Christian-centered narrowing, of the humanities.”

Crucial Insight. Though liberal-arts education can never be completely Christian, or Christian education wholly liberal, said Princeton Historian E. Harris Harbison, a Presbyterian, the two are really indispensable to each other. “The goal of the liberal arts is to provide hindsight and foresight [in] this universe of things and events; the part of Christian belief is to provide insight, [which] is of crucial significance for living . . . William James remarked . . . ‘When we see all things in God and refer all things to Him, we read in common matters superior expressions of meaning . . .’ Here is the essence of the relationship of Christian insight to the data of liberal education. In every concrete fact and temporal event there is potential meaning that beggars the imagination. A liberal education does not reach its own goal unless a student senses something of this meaning.”

Indeed, said Jesuit John Courtney Murray, “the first church-related school [founded by Origen in the 3rd century] came into being in answer to an inner need of the human spirit as it was caught in the clashing encounter between Christianity and all the knowledge symbolized by the Alexandrian Museum. This encounter is permanently joined, for ‘the Museum’ is a permanent institution, and so too is the Church . . . What the human spirit endowed with Christian faith permanently needs is that these two knowledges should be related in a universe of intellectual order . . . The Christian school therefore undertakes to provide an area of experience in which the Church may meet the Museum in deliberate encounter.”

The Higher Freedom. “The school is not the Church nor is it the home. It is a sort of city—an area both of protection and of prudentexposure . . . It is a city of freedom in which intelligence may be released freely to grow. And it is a city of order in which the growing intelligence freely gives itself to the guidance of what is lovelier than itself to be led to the higher freedom with which the Word of God makes men free.”

In spite of their many differences, the Kent visitors seemed basically agreed. Education as it stands can never be whole until it finds the proper balance between two great traditions, two kinds of knowledge, and two ways of apprehension.

“If we look at the total human drama,” said Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, “we can find no conclusion within it but only the perplexing development of both good and evil possibilities. History most surely points beyond itself for the completion of its meanings and these completions can only be apprehended by faith rather than by reason. This is why the Biblical-Hebraic faith must remain the bearer of the religious content of our culture. The faith of the Bible seeks to penetrate the mysteries and meanings of life above and beyond the rational intelligibilities. It is not for this reason ‘otherworldly.’ Rather it has a firm grasp upon the meanings of life in history and does not reduce them to meaninglessness by seeking to comprehend them too simply into some realm of rationality. ‘Deeper than life the plan of life doth lie.’ “