<\/a>Triumph \n The USCC Department of Education is \u201chelping\u201d the American bishops to produce a pastoral letter on Catholic education, the provisional text of which I recently had occasion to see. It characterizes the rival, public education, as a \u201csystem which does not systematically embrace faith-inspired values. Such a school system,\u201d the pastoral continues, \u201cmay seek \u2018neutrality\u2019 with regard to religious and moral values; but neutrality is impossible, since all education involves values, and morality is deeply imbedded in all formal education.\u201d\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n This is a smoothly constructed pair of sentences, constructed to resemble a critique of public education while carefully avoiding the terms of a persuasive critique (such as the one launched last winter by Cardinal O\u2019Boyle). It says that public schools are just not \u201csystematic\u201d about what they really do and that they try to remedy this lack by \u201cseeking\u201d to do something that nobody can do: an inconsistency floundering toward an impossibility. The truth, of course, is that public education is thoroughly consistent about what it really does and inconsistent only about what it pretends to do. It pretends to inculcate humane \u201cvalues\u201d without sectarian overtones or specifics, but what it really does is to inculcate the dogmas of an anti-religion, or ersatz religion, called secular humanism. This charge is exactly the one leveled by Cardinal O\u2019Boyle and, for that matter, by hundreds of other reflective Catholics, including, oh, everybody from Farley Clinton to Michael Novak. The secular humanist propaganda of public education is a fact too blatant to overlook\u2014for anybody who is not himself a secular humanist. Which observation raises interesting questions about why the USCC overlooked it.\n<\/p>\n \n I called the acting director of the Department of Education, USCC, a Dr. H. Giles Schmid. We chatted about the forthcoming pastoral, who had written it, how people like it and so forth. I mentioned the above-quoted passage, saying I thought it was an \u201cinteresting\u201d argument and rather a new slant. Dr. Schmid corrected me: \u201cNo, this is something we\u2019ve been saying for years, that behind the facade of neutrality the public schools are not really value-free but are teaching Protestantism.\u201d I didn\u2019t challenge the point, but I could scarcely believe it. This<\/em> ancient argument! The charge that was true a century ago is still being applied as the<\/em> real case against the school system that gave us the incandescent youth of the Sixties and that promises us an even groovier product in the future, what with SIECUS and NIMH lending a hand. It\u2019s preposterous. Yet there is no denying that Schmid\u2019s thesis exactly explains the wording of the proposed pastoral: \u201ca system that does not systematically embrace faith- inspired [i.e. Protestant] values.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n Dr. Schmid hastened on to corollary points. What we need to do, he said, is to \u201cconvince the public schools that you can\u2019t avoid teaching values but that you can replace the Protestant values with genuinely non-denominational values. These wouldn\u2019t be Protestant, wouldn\u2019t be Catholic; but they\u2019d be true and human and something on which you could then build in your explicitly Catholic education.\u201d This was the admission I was hoping to hear (journalistically, of course; as a Catholic, I wept inwardly). Out loud, I suspected that the public schools wouldn\u2019t be too hard to \u201cconvince\u201d on this precise subject. I wondered, though, whether these \u201chuman\u201d values might be something like the natural law. Dr. Schmid didn\u2019t seem to have any opinion on that question, as though the idea had never occurred to him or, perhaps, as though the terminology were unfamiliar. With a few parting words, we rang off.\n<\/p>\n \n The top bureaucrat for education for the whole American Church, it seems, holds to the possibility of a theory which the Church has spent just over 120 years saying was impossible. Beginning with Pius IX\u2019s allocution Quibus luctuosissimis,<\/em> going through a whole series of important documents by Leo XIII, and reaching a climax, perhaps, in the stunning declarations of the French episcopate in 1908 and 1909, the Holy Catholic Church has flatly declared that public (non-Catholic) education is intrinsically perverse. The Church has a long and painful familiarity with state-run school systems that claim to be neutral (not in the absurd sense of value-free, as the USCC seems to believe, but) precisely in the sense that although they do not teach Catholic dogmas and take no stand on the validity of the Church\u2019s claims, they nevertheless give children a sound and morally acceptable secular formation. The Church\u2019s rejection of this position, please note, is not based on the claim that there is no truth or moral wisdom apart from God\u2019s revelation (the Reformation\u2019s view). \u201cLook before you leap\u201d is a fine maxim and, like \u201cwear a smile,\u201d not noticeably dependent on scriptural authority. But the Church does insist that little \u201cattitudinal lessons\u201d of this kind are not the stuff of education. Education, to be worthy of the name, must put a man in touch with reality and with his own history as a man, for example, of Western culture. Education, in other words, involves vastly more than nice little \u201chumane\u201d values: it involves philosophical principles and historical facts. Now the Incarnation is an historical fact which \u201cpublic\u201d education refuses to teach. The existence of God is a rigorously provable philosophical conclusion which public \u201ceducation\u201d refuses to deduce. In other words, the trouble with \u201cneutral\u201d education is that it is an intellectual cheat. Its neutrality is gained not at the expense of sectarianism but at the expense of truth.\n<\/p>\n \n Oh, yes, and lest we forget: the other reason the Church won\u2019t put up with public education is because the job belongs to parents by divine and natural right. Is this, perhaps, another idea which never occurred to Dr. Schmid?\n<\/p>\n Click here for PDF<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Send This Man To School W. H. MARSHNER Triumph Vol. VII No. 5 May 1972 The USCC Department of Education is \u201chelping\u201d the American bishops to produce a pastoral letter on Catholic education, the provisional text of which I recently had occasion to see. It characterizes the rival, public education, as a \u201csystem which does … Continue reading “Send This Man To School”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[725],"tags":[392,733,5,103,734,720,105,49],"class_list":["post-1568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-triumph","tag-education","tag-h-giles-schmid","tag-pastoral","tag-patrick-a-oboyle","tag-pope-leo-xiii","tag-pope-pius-ix","tag-siecus","tag-uscc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marshner.christendom.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marshner.christendom.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marshner.christendom.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marshner.christendom.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marshner.christendom.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1568"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marshner.christendom.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1571,"href":"https:\/\/marshner.christendom.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions\/1571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marshner.christendom.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marshner.christendom.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marshner.christendom.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nVol. VII No. 5
\nMay 1972\n<\/p>\n