Replace the Keystone

Seldom before had the challenge to U.S. education been made so sharp and clear: "The knowledge and skills of Modern Civilization have outrun the moral and spiritual resources for their direction and control, in this land of plenty, glutted with wealth, we lack the essential ethical currency for its use, and so we are threatened with cultural bankruptcy." The challenger was Henry P. Van Dusen, president of the faculty of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary. Last week, in a tightly reasoned "tract for the times"--God in Education (Scribner; $2)--Van Dusen sounded a call for a fundamental reversal in the whole philosophy of U.S. education.

What Van Dusen wants is a great return to religion in U.S. schools, from the primary grades to the universities--and not merely as a course in itself, but also as the guiding principle of the whole educational process. "Our world cries pitiably for the fruits of Christian Faith," says Van Dusen. "What is required--what alone might prove adequate--is revolution, conversion, an about-face, in both the assumptions and the goals of our living; and, likewise, of the training of our youth . . . Every aspect of the philosophy and structure and spirit of education cries for radical remaking."

The Modern Fallacy. Theologian Van Dusen bases his case on a fundamental disagreement with French Philosopher Rene Descartes (Cogito; ergo sum), the symbol of modern skepticism, who believed that each man must start alone and anew to find the truth. Descartes' assumption that each individual must find truth in his own way is one of the great modern fallacies, Van Dusen argues. On the contrary, the correct assumption is "that youth of 17 to 20 years of age is not competent to decide the essentials of his own education."

But Descartes' most disastrous bequest, says Van Dusen, was his distinction between thought and matter--a dualism which became in Kant the divorce between reality as revealed by faith, and reality as revealed through the senses. The result today is the frightening schism "between facts and values, between the realm of science and the realm of art and religion; more recently between the secular and the spiritual." (Ironically, says Van Dusen, both Descartes and Kant had been illumined by a firm faith in God as the ultimate truth. "The history of human thought knows no more pathetic paradox than the contrast between the intended effect and the actual effect of the thought of these two great men.")

Lavish Cafeteria. Against a "nearer background," Van Dusen follows the subsequent course of education in the U.S. Originally, he points out, "the church was the parent and sponsor of education. And religion was the keystone of the educational arch." But as the nation and its knowledge expanded, so did education. Courses and colleges multiplied, and education more and more became afflicted with the curse of specialization ("so stunting to large-mindedness, so fatal to comprehension of the whole truth, that is, the real truth"). And with specialization came secularization.

"No longer is religion the keystone of the educational arch, but rather one stone among many . . . Our educational system has lost what had been its principle of coherence and its instrument of cohesion . . . The contemporary university curriculum reminds one of nothing so much as a lavish cafeteria, where unnumbered tasty intellectual delicacies are strung along a moving belt for individual selection without benefit of dietary advice or caloric balance . . ."

Queen of the Sciences. The only way to cure "civilization's sickness," says Van Dusen, is to restore to education the coherence it once knew. That means "the organic unity of truth, each several part being what it is by virtue of its place within the Whole . . . But, if truth is an organic whole, how does it come to be so?" ... To answer that, "we are being driven hard up against the question of God.

"Religion, that is, a true knowledge of God . . . is the Queen of the Sciences . . . This is its rightful position, not because the churches say so ... but because of the nature of Reality--because if there be a God at all, He must be the ultimate and controlling Reality through which all else derives its being; and the truth concerning Him . . . must be the keystone of the ever-incomplete arch of human knowledge."

In bringing religion back to education, there need be no fear that any particular faith will dominate another, since the three major faiths of the Western world are agreed on "their conceptions of God and of His relation to Truth . . . The success of Great Britain in developing 'agreed syllabi' for the teaching of religion in all publicly supported schools, with the full concurrence and support of the three major faiths, supplies the proof. It should challenge American educators to fresh efforts to restore religion to its appropriate place . . ."

Does the U.S.'s traditional principle of separation of church and state stand in the way? Van Dusen's answer: no. "At the present hour, this cherished American principle is being refurbished and redefined to ends for which it was never intended. The Constitutional guarantees of 'freedom of religion' have lately been reinterpreted by no less august a body than the United States Supreme Court with meanings which were never foreseen by, and which, it may safely be suggested, would have outraged, the framers of the Constitution."

It was not the intention of the Founding Fathers to rear up "a nation without religious faith, or [build] a system of education for that nation's youth without implicit, and probably explicit, recognition of God as the ground of Truth . . . It has been aptly said: they were seeking to provide freedom of religion, not freedom from religion . . ." In its recent decisions, therefore, the court has travestied history.* The theory of separation "as currently propounded, far from being a perpetuation of the national tradition, represents a novel innovation in direct contradiction to the convictions of our forebears and the established habits of the nation."

Determining Principle. But what primarily concerns Van Dusen is a return in U.S. education to religion as the determining principle in the educational process as a whole.

Says Van Dusen: "Let us be clear what is required. Not an uncritical return to ancient days and old ways. Not the slavish reproduction in this modern time of many familiar features of earlier philosophy and social organization. Not the rejection or loss of a single sound achievement of recent centuries.

"What is required is something at once far more fundamental, far more drastic and far more embracing--the recovery of the inherent principles which guided and empowered 'the great tradition.' More specifically, the reaffirmation of the organic unity of Truth, and therefore of true knowledge . . . the restoration of religion to a position of necessary and unchallenged centrality; and the acknowledgment of the reality and regnancy of the Living God as the foundation of both learning and life."

-* Commented Princeton Professor Edward S. Corwin on the court's decision in the McCollum ("released time") case: "Undoubtedly the court has the right to make history . . . but it has no right to remake it."

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