Fr. George Bull, Present Tendencies in Our Educational System (1938)

[5] [Footnote on the first page attached to the article title: Paper read at the meeting of the Jesuit Educational Association, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wis., April 22, 1938.]

The few remarks which I have to make are not intended to be more than an attempt on my part to start a discussion. This is what I was asked to do. I intend merely to draw attention to tendencies in our education at present. I do not intend to establish factually, how general these tendencies may be. It is less important to know how widespread these things are, than it is to know whether we want them to continue, if they exist. And if I seem to be speaking ex cathedra anywhere, please remember I have no delusions of grandeur; at least no conscious ones. The exigencies of time have forced me to compress and quite possibly, therefore, to over-state. I have entitled my remarks Notes on Present Tendencies in our Educational System and I intend that they be "notes” and nothing else.

I

The education of the Society has been traditionally a liberal education; that is, the teaching of such subjects and in such a manner as to turn out Catholics with a deep and keen interest in the things of the mind for their own sake. We have believed that, in the long run, this is a surer preparation for life than to instruct students in some useful art or technique directly connected with earning a living. Above all things, we have believed that this is the only way to bring out a strong, highly cultured class of Catholic intellectuals who will, in time, leaven the whole mass of American life.

II

Vocationalism is the denial of this attitude. It believes in preparing the student directly to earn a living, rather than for [6] knowing how to live. It is the direct result of a philosophy of life which is the antithesis of our own. It is this-worldly rather than other-worldly and it is naturalistic or monistic, having its roots in the worship of the physical sciences as they were idolized in the nineteenth century. It is called "scientism" because, among other things, it held that the only certain knowledge was knowledge that came through the use of methods apt for the physical sciences. Hence, utility was its persistent objective. It is the spirit which, under many forms, has operated to make the finis cui of education not the human being as a human being, but the human being as an economic unit, as a political unit, or as an item subordinated to the welfare of the race, or to some other extrinsic temporal end.

III

Vocationalism, it seems to me, has been creeping into our educational system in many ways. We are in the strange position of denying the whole philosophy which gave vocationalism the entry and the dominence [sic] in modern education, yet of attempting to imitate the secular schools in the product of this philosophy.

A. First, this seems to appear in the curriculum of studies. There has been a tendency to modify our courses of study in this direction: Bachelor of Science courses have been introduced which have sacrificed almost entirely our ideal of liberal education in the colleges. Science courses are introduced into high school to take the place of Greek. Business courses and commercial courses have been introduced into the college and it was even suggested that we have such courses in the high school. Even in the Bachelor of Arts courses in college so much time is given to Chemistry and Physics as to impair the truly liberal studies. This is done to try to prepare students for professional schools.

In some places, we have already gone the whole way. There are three different kinds of B.A. courses. One is a general arts course which does not require Greek but does require, as an alternative, mathematics. The other two are arranged so that, in the electives, standard pre-medical or pre-law requirements may be met. There are six science courses leading to B.S., in Biology, [7] in Chemistry, in Physics, in Education, in Social Sciences, and in History. In other places we have not gone so far as that; but we have admitted the principle when, e.g., we have a course called B.S. which is an attempt to give a course in Business, while keeping philosophy, but not Latin or Greek.

B. Secondly, this seems to appear in the organization of our institutions. Not only in our curricula, but also in the organization of our institutions has the spirit of Vocationalism [sic] begun to appear. In the Society's tradition, education up to the end of what we would now call the Sophomore year has always been a unit. It has never been our tradition that the high school be a self-contained unit. It was always held to be part of a six-year training at least. This is still the system in Europe, e.g., at Eton, Harrow, Stonyhurst, and in the Gymnasia of Germany, and the Lycee of France. American Education, under the influence of Utilitarianism in education, broke up this unity, so that the high school became an end in itself; while, paradoxically, the college which would be a self-contained unit has become, under the influence of the same idea, a place of preparation for Professional Schools or Graduate Schools. So far, we have not explicitely [sic] succombed [sic] to this Vocationalism in College organizations. Thn [sic] tendency is, however, to admit the concept of the high school as a unit distinct and unconnected with the college. But the tendency to admit that the college should be substantially modified so as to prepare students for entrance into professional and graduate schools is becoming very strong. It was evident some years ago, when the proposal was seriously made to cut down philosophy in the colleges, so as to allow boys to get more "credits" in subjects they intended to pursue later on after graduation. Happily, that proposal was defeated. But strangely enough, it was defeated precisely by the "ad hoc" view of education I am deploring. For, as I shall mention later, philosophy is being taught now, not for its liberalizing power over the human mind, but predominantly if not exclusively, to show boys how they can give an answer to the atheist, the evolutionist, the sceptic, the communist or the birth-controller.

C. Another example of the seepage of vocationalism into our educational thinking as far as organization is concerned is the [8] gradual and tacit admission as we organize our institutions of the Principle of Equivalence of Subjects.

This principle asserts that all subjects are of equal worth as educational instruments. This defect is most prominent in our graduate schools; but it is implicit in such arrangements as the nine courses mentioned above, where a degree of B.S. in Social Science is a course on equal footing, as far as organization goes, with a course in B.A. Honors. (I might point out in passing: that "equivalence" of subjects never means equality in practice. It really means a preferential position for sciences and other utilitarian courses. Because, if boys are free to choose either, they naturally succomb to the utilitarianism of the age around them and choose "something they can use later on").

But in our Graduate Schools the thing is blatant. We have introduced department after department of purely vocational subjects. We have gone so far as to introduce courses in vocational guidance, i.e., courses which purport to show future teachers how they may train students for "vocations", i.e., for jobs in after life. We have, at least in some places, courses in "Occupational Opportunities and Placement," "College Guidance," "Occupational Analysis," "Personnel Administration," etc., etc., "Urban Sociology," "Community Hygiene," "Nursing," "Curriculum Problems," etc., etc.

Besides vocationalism as crass as that, we are paying tribute to the idea that education can be made a subject proper to a distinct department. We have distinct departments of the History and Philosophy of Education, Department of Educational Administration and Methods, and a Department of Educational Psychology and Measurements, etc.

Now a Department of Education in any sense is vocational. So much is this the case, that even the secular Universities look on it as a kind of fraud. When we strip these departments of what philosophy gives them of fundamental principles, and of what common sense gives any man who can hope rationally to be a teacher, there is nothing left but statistics. No one imagines that people take these courses with any other than a utilitarian or job motive. They do not come to get the basic principles of a well-defined [9] body of knowledge which is of permanent value. Yet in our graduate schools, these departments are co-equal with the classics, with philosophy, with literature. If they are to be run, our slender resources must be used to finance them, to provide sources and other books, teachers, administration heads., etc. We are saying implicitly that a course in educational methods and administration is as well worth three years of a student's life as a course in Arts or Philosophy. By that much we admit the principle of the equivalence of subjects and succomb to the principle which fathered it: namely, vocationalism and not liberality of mind and character as the end of education.

IV

Vocationalism in the Teacher's Attitude. I have given above examples of vocationalism as it seems to appear in our curricula and in the organization of our institutions. I now turn to a more subtle form of vocationalism, i.e., as it appears in the actual teaching of our students.

To begin with, there are instances where, due to the kind of organization we have succombed to, the teacher is almost forced into an ad hoc attitude. I mean instances where classes have been allowed to become so big that the teacher can do nothing but lecture and have almost no personal contact with his students. Now where there can be no personal contact, the class becomes merely the means of obtaining so much formularized [sic] knowledge with a view to have a ready answer for the examiner. There can be no personal stimulation of the student to read under direction, to think for himself, to personalize his mastery of the subject.

This attitude on the part of the teacher seems to run all through our present teaching. The teachers use "notes" almost exclusively, and highly formularized text books. In Philosophy, they are imparting philosophy, but not philosophizing. The result is that the formulae are dead in the student's mind and under the impact of actual life, later on, they gradually fade out of the student's mind altogether. He may keep his Faith. In the vast majority of cases he does. But I think this is one of the big reasons for the lack, at the present time, of a considerable body of influential Catholic thinkers and writers. Philosophy, as our boys have [10] received it, was predominantly a set of ready answers, against evolutionists, sceptics, agnostics, atheists, communists, abortionists, etc. It was not a habitus principiorum for life which kept them interested in the things of the mind, even when no antagonist was explicitly questioning their position.

Literature also is tending to be taught mainly from the formularistic angle. Demosthenes, Cicero, and e.g., Burke, are taught merely as examples of how to write a speech. They are not taught as crystallizations of the thought and feeling of mankind in the great and differing crises of the human spirit through the ages. Yet, it is only if they are taught this way also, that they can be called liberalizing or the "humanities." The content of the great classics is also of worth, as well as the form. Demosthenes and Burke are similar as rhetoricians, but each had his own way of reacting to a given crisis in the concrete circumstances of his time. Burke, e.g., had something of value as a man, not less than as a rhetorician and that personalizing element of his own time is of value as a humanizing agency, especially when it can be contrasted with the same elements in a genius so remote in time as Cicero or Demosthenes.

The same is true regarding the teaching of Poetry. Theocritus, Horace, Shelley or Wordsworth are taught predominantly as examples of the pastoral, or the lyric. The Illiad, the Aeneid, Paradise Lost are predominantly the formula for the epic. All this is due to an ad hoc attitude. The teachers very often have studied these works under the immediate necessity of learning them to teach them, not first and foremost to be able to contemplate them, know them for their own sake rather than for the use they are to make of them afterwards. This attitude is clear from the fact also that our teachers do almost no wide and deep reading on their own subjects. They are always looking for summaries, outlines, notes, which give them a handy knowledge for the classroom. It is not too much to say that they are not interested primarily in being scholarly and cultured men.

Now as to the Science courses: These courses are openly and barefacedly vocational. In the tradition of the Society, science should have no place as a dominant in our education. It should be [11] in our system only in so far as it is an instrument for liberalizing the mind. Science can be thus used, as Newman in his "Idea of a University" has shown. But this is not being done in Jesuit Colleges. Science courses are being taught frankly to get men ready for medicine, or for jobs with great industrial concerns. And in the Arts course there is so much science, (taught by the same men and from the same point of view), that the traditionally liberal studies suffer.

V

Conclusion. My object in these notes is to point to tendencies so that before they are actuated we can see them and evaluate them. They are tendencies which twenty-five years ago were the unchallenged viewpoint of all American education. "Scientism" is the name for it, and at that time and until very recently our colleges kept to the old liberal ideal. Now, the secular colleges are throwing over that attitude. They have found that, in the long run, the liberal college is the best training, even for the "vocations" that the students may choose as specialties later on. President Hutchins of Chicago is the leader of the movement back to liberal studies. Recently, if I am correctly informed, he told a group of Catholic educators that we have the ideal and the idea, the organization and even the opportunity, but that we are not living up to it in the actual teaching of our institutions. We are, he said, trying to imitate curricula, organization and attitude of the secular places and that we are failing even to do this. We are twenty-five years behind them; and they are turning back to our ideal, while we are leaving it and turning to the position they are about to desert. We are spreading to all kinds of departments and courses, without asking ourselves how they can be reconciled with our fundamental ideal, (and will be replaced by new fads in a few years), merely because such courses and departments have found a place in the universities whose ideals and philosophies are not and cannot be ours. If at this moment we were to organize even one University strictly on the lines of our own tradition, excluding all vocational courses from high school, college and graduate school, reassert the unity of education in subjects of permanent [12] worth, the Classics, Philosophy, Literature, Mathematics and the Sciences, (as liberal studies), we would be at once the rallying point for the movement which has just begun in the secular schools. But, of course, together with this, we should have to come back to the Society's ideal of teachers who are eager to make cultured minds rather than minds that can get a job at once. We should see our teachers doing constant and persistent reading. Their "notes" would be constantly changing and not fixed in perennial formulae as they are now. We should see our students learning to love and to read under our direction the great books of the ages and not merely the little notes or textbooks which absorb them almost completely now. We should see them, when they have left us, still interested in the things of the mind; finding solace and comfort in reading all through their lives, instead of being, as at present, almost undistinguishable [sic] from the mob that never went to college, the practical men who have business brains and movie culture. We should see, in the course of time, a growing nucleus of first-class Catholic minds, molding our civilization, leavening it and spreading the Catholic idea, at least by their very presence and personality. And inevitably, from the stimulation they would afford, brilliant Catholic writers would emerge to influence not only the outside world, but Catholics themselves.

Now it is at this point I find an answer to the most common objection made against our reassertion of our own ideal of education. Some of Ours say that the Church and soul would suffer, if we did not compromise with our ideals. It is much better that we should have boys under our influence, they say, than that we should lose them by insisting on a non-vocational education.

My reply would be this: First, the assumption that the Church does not suffer more, in the long run, from the lack of any considerable body of genuinely educated Catholics would have to be proved. The Catholic College men who can merely give the "ready answer" and who have no deep and abiding interest in the things of the mind do not seem to be of much assistance to the Church in our day and in the great moral and religious crisis we are facing. They seem as bewildered about the rational basis of Catholicism as the people who never went to our colleges at all. And every [13] once in a while, one of them known as a good Catholic will say something on politics or economics, etc., which shows that, while his Catholic faith is intact, his Catholic reason is not.

But I think the root reply to the objection is this: If the day has come when, in order to keep youth under our influence, we must give up the ideal of producing graduates genuinely interested in the things of the mind, let us do so and realize that we do it. Let us say, at least to ourselves, that we can no longer function as educators; that we do not any longer run educational institutions, but institutes of instruction in various vocational techniques. We should drop the idea of the educator for that of the missionary. It is one thing, sadly to recognize that an ideal is no longer feasible and another to do violence to that ideal and even to betray it, by procedures which it forbids.

However, I do not think that such a day has arrived. On the contrary, from all I observe and read, I am convinced that never since scientism first took possession of American Universities, has the opportunity been so good for the reassertion of all that we believe in, and of all that made the Society of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the most influential educational body in the Church. The Society of those days did not save souls only as a missionary. It realized that though the finis ultimus of all our activities is the glory of God and the salvation of souls, the finis proximus of each activity specified that activity. The end of education as such is specific and distinct from the end of missionary activity. To confound the ultimate end of both with the formal and immediate object of each is to introduce disorder into the whole Catholic scheme.

My whole point is this: let us settle whether vocationalism or the cultural education is the one we are to give. But let us avoid trying to do both, thus doing neither and destroying, in the long run, our prestige as educators. And we really try to do both, when we profess our own ideals and in practice add courses, organizations and attitudes which spring from a philosophical soil which is not ours and for the introduction of which we have no better reason than an attempt to imitate an alien system of education.

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Source: George D. Bull, S.J., "Present Tendencies in Our Educational System," Jesuit Educational Quarterly 1, no. 1 (June 1938): 5–13.