A Proposal for the Fulfillment of Catholic
Liberal Education
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I. THE CRISIS IN THE CATHOLIC COLLEGE
American Catholics are becoming increasingly aware of the
growing tendency of Catholic colleges to secularize themselves--that
is, to loosen their connection with the teaching Church and
to diminish deliberately their Catholic character. Catholic
parents in particular are becoming alarmed at the effects
that this secularization has or threatens to have on the intellectual
and moral formation of their children. The colleges themselves
display a growing inability to define themselves in such a
way as to justify their continued existence as Catholic institutions.
At first glance, the cause of this tendency appears to be
economic. A growing number of administrators and controlling
boards are trusting to the strategy that by secularizing their
institutions they will enhance their eligibility to receive
monies from educational foundations and from the government.
It is questionable, however, whether the strategy has been
thought through, for it is far from clear that Catholic parents
will send their children to an institution that calls itself
a Catholic college but that appears indistinguishable, except
in cost of attending, from the nearest tuition-free state
college.
And if Catholic parents should find themselves unable to
distinguish between the Catholic college and the secular institution,
their confusion would not be without basis in the actual character
of the emerging Catholic college itself. For, fundamentally,
the explanation of the growing secularization of American
Catholic higher education is doctrinal rather than economic.
The willingness of a college to secularize itself in the hope
of monetary gain presupposes that it already views its Catholicity
as something that is subject to negotiation, which in turn
presupposes that it has rejected the traditional doctrine
that the essential purpose of a Catholic college is to educate
under the light of the faith. We find, in fact, that the most
outspoken proponents of the secularization of the Catholic
colleges are not arguing about economic considerations but
are attacking the very idea of a college that educates under
the light of the faith. We find, further, that Catholic college
graduates, students and professors are, by and large, unable
and unwilling to resist these attacks. Indeed, the most virulent
attacks now being made on Catholic education--as well as on
the Church itself--emanate from some of these graduates, students
and professors. That this should happen points to a grave
deficiency in Catholic education; institutions whose essential
purpose is to combine Catholic wisdom and secular learning
have given birth to a generation of teachers and learners
who in large part reject such a purpose as irrelevant or contradictory.
Inescapable is the realization that the Catholic college has
not been true to its purpose. Yet this realization, somber
as it may be, should not be surprising, for a brief look at
the American Catholic college as we have known it in the past
reveals fundamental flaws which, given time to bear their
fruit, have made the present crisis inevitable.
There was a time when the Catholic college justified its
existence by saying that it gave its students, almost all
of them Catholics, an education which had as some of its components
courses in Catholic philosophy and religion. This meant that
all its students took mandatory courses in these disciplines,
whose truths, it was hoped, would permeate them and shape
their lives. The rest of the curriculum was put together in
imitation of the pattern of courses existing in secular schools
and was assumed to achieve the same purposes as were achieved
by secular education. Hence it was the boast of the Catholic
college that it had all that secular education had and more;
it was Catholic without ceasing to be secular, and in fact
it was thought to prepare its students even better than other
schools for this world because it gave them a philosophical
formation which would sustain them in whatever state of life
they chose.
But there were certain anomalies: a) While the college was
boasting that its curriculum was up-to-date, that it had courses
in the latest disciplines such as sociology and modern psychology,
whose paradigm is Newtonian mechanics, it was also proposing
philosophy courses based upon a general conception of reality
opposed to the philosophical presuppositions of sociology
and modern psychology. Similarly, its courses in physics and
chemistry presupposed, without question, a philosophical view
about the nature of matter and motion which contradicted what
was taught in the philosophy courses. b) But even within the
philosophy curriculum itself anomalies existed. The philosophical
formation of the students was essentially faulty in that faculties
themselves were fundamentally divided on the question of whether
there is philosophy or merely philosophies. The effect of
this division was to propose to the students that philosophical
education would at once lead to a certain understanding of
reality, which understanding was at the same time relative
basically to the changes of time and place. This opposition
was in effect between those who claim something can be known
and those who are skeptics--and the resultant effect on the
students, who quite naturally attempted to integrate both
positions, was skepticism. Skepticism, of course, defeats
the purpose of the intellectual life by denying the possibility
of knowing anything. c) The proponents of perennial philosophy
sought to be true to the nature of Catholic education as traditionally
understood by the Church and, more particularly, as repeatedly
emphasized by the papal encyclicals since Leo XIII, but even
here the American Catholic college has been troubled by yet
another failing. Where the papal encyclicals made it plain
that the perennial wisdom was to be studied through the works
of the great masters themselves, and above all through the
writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, it has been more often the
case that students have rather become acquainted with this
wisdom through textbook versions. In this attempt to proportion
such wisdom to the modern student's mind so as to minimize
its intrinsic difficulties, the proper character of this wisdom
was distorted and misrepresented in various ways. In part
this misrepresentation was due to the impossibility of simplifying
these difficulties and in part the result of attempting to
restate traditional doctrines through the thoughts and language
of contemporary philosophies which in fact understand reality
in ways incompatible with this wisdom. In the measure that
this was true, the perennial philosophy was lost. d) Even
more seriously, the religion courses were isolated, and in
no way performed a sapiential function with respect to the
rest of the curriculum, contenting themselves with a superficial
restatement of the truths of Catholicism. No attempt was made
to acquaint students with the greatest Fathers and Doctors
of the Church, or to deepen their understanding of the richness
of the Catholic heritage. Theology was not treated as the
science it is, and as a means to the intellectual, as well
as to the moral growth of the student. The possible penetration
he might have had into the highest truths was little realized.
Yet, all the while, the religion courses claimed to be the
important part of Catholic education.
A critique of Catholic education would seriously fall short
of accomplishing its objective if it overlooked the purely
educational weaknesses that Catholic education shares with
all American colleges in the area of liberal education. The
American college has long ago abandoned genuine liberal education.
In its place it has in part substituted vocational education
for what once was an education for man simply as man. And
in another part where it has preserved certain studies that
do not lead to some practical application it has done so only
because they lead the student to a greater appreciation of
the "learning" and "culture" of his civilization.
The second part goes by the name of humanism so as
to designate its subjects precisely to be those things that
are from man as distinguished from those things that come
from nature. These two parts make up an indiscriminate whole
and are both called education univocally. This profound confusion
which is now bearing its unhappy fruit in the irrational academic
uprisings and revolutions, with their endless and aimless
proposals for reform, has for a long time been adopted, somewhat
unwittingly, by the Catholic colleges themselves.
In a more particular way this general debility of the American
secular college, which served as the model for the Catholic
college in areas other than philosophy and theology, has these
effects. The secular college does retain vestigial requirements
in some areas of liberal education, but it was settled long
ago that the main function of the college was to train students
for the professions by meeting the demands of professional
and graduate schools. The student had to begin specialization
early in his college career lest he fall behind in the race
toward professional success. Educators were not always happy
with the growing trend toward specialization, but it was realistic
to assume that this was what most students wanted. Educators
could find solace in the dogma of instrumentalist pedagogy
that successful education occurs in direct proportion to its
compliance with the interests of the student--an interest
which is assumed to be antecedent to enrollment and already
fully determinate. Finally, since few educators were prepared
to defend the proposition that one course of instruction might
be of itself more educative than another (or the proposition
that there is a discoverable order among the existing disciplines),
no one was able to resist the deluge of course proliferation
which created the modern college catalogue. Indeed, few spoke
out against it, and there were those who maintained that the
student's academic freedom had, in a significant sense, been
enhanced by the multiplication of options set before him.
Until the anarchic events of the late nineteen sixties, few
seemed to realize the potentially disastrous consequences
of the principle that the student himself is the best judge
of which studies are most relevant to his intellectual development.
Nor was it noticed how undergraduate dialogue would be restricted
by full specialization of interests on the part of both faculty
and student body. The professor in his specialty becomes more
and more insular and removed from both his students and his
fellow educators. He meets his students in the lecture hall,
and he meets his colleagues in learned journals and at conventions,
and while these functions do not altogether exhaust his responsibilities,
they are certainly the functions which define his role. The
very excellence of specialization itself multiplies and widens
the divisions of academia.
The Catholic colleges had hoped to overcome the adverse effects
of the elective system and of premature specialization by
casting philosophy and theology in the role of sapiential
or integrating disciplines. To some extent this project was
successful, but the overall effect was less than what had
been hoped for. The philosophy and theology departments were
victims of their own specialization, and not fully prepared
to engage other disciplines in dialogue. Moreover, with the
general decay of the liberal arts because of the elective
system, philosophy and theology could not often be taught
with sufficient emphasis on their inner structure qua
intellectual disciplines. As a result they often assumed a
needless and unbecoming authoritarian stance, which not rarely
made them unpopular. Pressures now exist within the student
bodies of most Catholic colleges, if not in most of the faculties,
to abandon the traditional requirements in philosophy and
theology. Most colleges have already reduced the number of
hours required.
It is not surprising, therefore, that under the pressure
of ever widening vocationalism and humanism, Catholic education,
immersed in this tide, is capsizing. Blurred in its vision,
it cannot well distinguish and justify true liberal education
apart from vocational and professional training, in a time
when technical and technological progress seem to be everything
that is commonly regarded as worthwhile. Correlated with man's
hope in technology is his despair in knowing the truth about
reality, which desperation gave rise originally to humanism.
Even against the humanistic part of modern "liberal education,"
wherein man turns back upon himself for the meaning of all
things, which view always favors the "world" against
God, and man against his Creator, the benighted Catholic college
has found itself defenseless. This capitulation shows on the
one hand the general lassitude and dullness to which we are
all heir, but on the other hand it shows more importantly
what was noted above: the Catholic college has never really
understood itself, has never, that is, thought out the exigencies
of a liberal education which is undertaken in subordination
to the teaching of the Church, and which has as its aim an
intellectual perfection which is possible and proper to the
Catholic alone. Such an education demands that all the parts
of the curriculum not ordered to technical concerns should
be conducted with a view to understanding the Catholic Faith,
and that the Faith itself should be the light under which
the curriculum is conducted.
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