The Vital Importance of Education

The following is extracted from the letters of Condé B. Pallen to Henry an old friend who embraced the false ideologies of secularism.

The point you here urge as a plea for an indifferent(secular) education is the very reason I advanced in my first letter for the necessity of a religious education. It is the appalling spread of secularism in all departments of modern life, its subtle dangers and insidious temptations, its vast and persistent influence, exercised in a thousand remote and indirect ways, that should rouse us to our own peril and to the necessity of extraordinary measures for the preservation of the Faith. In short, it is that very distinction so sharply drawn between religion and the affairs of life, between the Church and practical human living, as the world now conceives it, that forces upon us the need of a thoroughly positive Catholic education. If we want to hold our own we must protect our own against the assault of the enemy, whether it come disguised or open. Secularism is the enemy, and its blight is deadly. To divorce practical life from the consideration of its eternal end is virtually to deny that end; it is practical atheism; it is to make God an abstract theory, a speculative nothing, and not that living God in whom we live and move and are so much for the general bearing of your argument; let us go to the particulars. You tell me that education has its secular side; that its immediate object is to prepare and equip the child for the practical struggle of life; to sharpen and develop his intelligence; to form his character in a practical way, that he may be the better able to make his way in the world. This is true, but it is not the whole truth. The general purpose of education is to make a stronger man in all respects. In your way of putting it, you ignore a consideration that is vital; education should not only make a man stronger in his mental capacities and abilities and in his resourcefulness to cope with the difficulties of life, for this is your meaning of character, but it should make the truer man, the righteous man, i.e., the man morally stronger, not only the man who can make his way in the world, but the man who can make his way against the world under the stress of its temptations, its deceits, and its snares. In other words, there is an ethical side of education, which is paramount and determines its true scope. Education may be secular in its immediate ends, but it must be moral in his ts ultimate end. It must, indeed, fit a man for the practical uses of life; but it must fit him in a certain way. Education, in reality, is a fundamental training of conduct. Ethics, as you know, concerns conduct; and conduct, or rational action, as you well know, is always measured by a final end. The norm of human acts is always fashioned upon man’s conception of his final end. The man who looks upon this life as the be-all and end-all will have an entirely different norm or moral standard from the man who finds the law of life founded in an eternal existence hereafter.

The man who looks upon time as the vestibule of eternity, and realized that his every act is charged with immortal issues, sees life from a standpoint radically different from that which, he has fashioned for himself who regards the sum of existence to be exhausted in the limits of time. Now, as education ultimately has to do with life as conduct, it must have an ethical basis. It will be postulated either upon the theory that life is merely secular, beginning and ending in time, or upon the theory that life is immortal, beginning in time and enduring through an eternity of misery or happiness as the result of conduct here. As you see, these two theories are sharply opposed. Education cannot escape this ethical necessity, and every educational system stands upon one or the other postulate. In our day all education is divided into one or the other of these camps. We arrive, then, at this position. You cannot hold that education is merely secular, unless you are prepared to accept as your premise the denial of the life hereafter. This, of course, as a Catholic, you repudiate, and must, therefore reject the conclusion. By the same logical process you are forced to hold that, though education is immediately connected with the preparation for practical life, in its ultimate intent it looks to the paramount interests of eternity. Your statement that there are many things in an educational curriculum that have no religious element or character, I pass over with the remark, that these studies by no means constitute an education; and I moreover add, that though there may be some courses indifferent in themselves, there are many, and these of the utmost importance, which have a direct and intimate relation relation with religion. You cannot touch history or literature without considering their religious bearings, or even geography, as it is now taught, without some allusion to religion; and it goes without saying, that philosophy has a most essential bearing upon theology. When you declare that religion can supply at home and at Sunday-school all that is necessary, it seems to me that you have woefully mistaken the significance and scope of true education; that you forget the weakness and limitations of human nature, and fail to realize the exigencies of our present conditions. When you instruct the mind apart from God, you are laying the foundations of religious indifference. The mind that has been taught without God in its knowledge, and even that God is to be excluded from its knowledge, soon grows into the habit of shutting out God from its mental horizon altogether. The mind that has been developed under a system which excludes God and the things of God from its consideration, soon logically learns to divorce God from its rational processes and to ignore Him in all its intellectual life. God at home and God at church will never make up in the child’s mind the banishment of God as school. Then the process of religious disintegration sets in; the God who does not reign at school, who has no relation to the intellectual life, nay, is ignominiously thrust out of doors in the temple of knowledge, is but a half God, not the all-powerful Creator and Judge who holds us in the hollow of His hand. Reverence for Him dies where He is thus negatively regarded. When Christ and His Church are barred from the schoolroom, it is not a long stride to banishing Christ and His Church from the heart. Never have the enemies of the Church calculated so shrewdly, devised so astutely, and struck more successfully at the Spouse of Christ, than when they laid their plans to divorce religion from education, and so wean the child from its Divine Mother by putting it to suckle the empoisoned breasts of the monster of secularism. And the Church, with the mother’s instinct and love, battles for her children. She fully realizes the danger. She is filled with the love of Christ and cries out with Him: “Suffer these little ones to come unto me; they are mine by the authority of Christ; they are mine under the responsibilities of their eternal salvation.” And she struggles and labors, in suffering and in sacrifice, to educate them in all that a Catholic education means. She is not satisfied with the crumbs or the half-loaf for her children; she gives them a full spiritual feast. She educates them all in all and is not content to give up half to God and half to the Moloch of secularism. Education does not consist merely in feeding the mind with knowledge, but in informing the mind with truth, the will with good, and training all the faculties to the fullness and completeness of the perfectly rounded character. Religion in the classroom is like the sunlight to the plant; it warms,it nourishes, it illuminates. It is not sufficient for the plant to gather the elements which it takes from the soil to assimilate into its own being; it must have the light and air of heaven, the vital principle of its energy, without which it soon languishes and dies. Religion should be the light and aroma of the classroom, to be absorbed by the child’s entire being. It should radiate into his soul through the intellect, energizes through his will, fashion and form his faculties until there is perfect balance of mind and heart and will in that moral harmony of his nature of his nature of which religion alone possesses the gift.

(Condé B. Pallen, PH.D., The Education of Boys)