Jesuit Education in the Contemporary Scene: Dangers and Obstacles (1940)

[12] [Footnote attached to article title: Summary of a paper read at the general meeting of the Jesuit Educational Association, Kansas City, Missouri, March 26, 1940.]

The greatest danger for our American Jesuit educational system would seem to be the threat of extinction. Primum est vivere. We have been so accustomed to chart the progress of our schools by the annual increase of enrollment, we are so dependent for our support and the liquidation of our debts upon tuition fees, that a decline in numbers and revenue must inevitably sound like the first knell of our untimely interment. Yet competent students of population statistics assure us that the enrollment tide has been running out in the elementary grades, and the effects will soon be felt in secondary and higher institutions. Instead of worrying about how to find space for the students who clamor at our doors, how to discriminate and eliminate the less desirable, our successors, and even we ourselves before many years, will be hard put to it to utilize the buildings we have already provided. Competition with tax-supported institutions will become increasingly unequal as people become more habitually dependent upon public money for the various necessities and luxuries of life. Our smaller schools and colleges (and there are at least a dozen such) will naturally feel the pressure first; their death notice has already been given, and in some cases will undoubtedly be carried out, lessening insofar the national spread of our educational influence. But all of our institutions, even those in the largest urban centers, as recent studies have warned us, will have to face the task of adjusting themselves to a falling market.

But a more immediate danger is the threat to our independence. However favorably our educational liberty may compare with that enjoyed in other countries, absolutely speaking we are not free to apply our educational ideals to the fullest degree. I doubt if we ever will be. No institution is completely free that has recurring interest payments to meet. And even within the ambit of our means we are not free. The State has something to say about the type of courses we give and the accrediment [sic] thereof. A patent example is the business of teacher training and certification. When our students conceive the laudable ambition to enter this field, they subject themselves and us with them (if we wish to cooperate) to the standards [13] and examples of the state institutions. Our curriculum has in many instances to be adjusted, or else teacher preparation becomes a state monopoly. In either alternative liberty suffers. Similarly in the field of secondary education, certain services are made available at public expense for students of public high schools, scholarships are offered to the state's higher institutions; where occasionally the same or similar privileges are extended to students of private schools such as ours, it is only at the price of much of our own freedom.

Should we seek to throw off the educational shackles of the state and organize as independent institutions, we only take up the yoke of the various accrediting agencies, more tyrannical because more meticulous than the state. I do not wish unqualifiedly to decry these associations, or to cast any blame upon our predecessors who chose to ally us with them. On the contrary I can see many benefits that they brought us; for one notable example the better preparation of our teachers. But I insist that by their judicial function these associations are a constant danger to our independence, tending to reduce all institutions to the same pattern. Our colleges and universities in particular are noticeably hampered in their organization and division of classes by the fear of reprimands from higher commissions. Graduate work is rigidly controlled or eliminated by their ipse dixits; and thus the reputation if not the existence of our institutions is made dependent upon the beneplacitum of a strong pressure group.

It is true that a measure of this freedom may be perilously preserved by our faithful participation in the councils of these agencies. Thus we can expect to serve our turn in the offices and on the commissions that wield the power; we can for a change be the judges instead of the judged. We can even shape the policies and ideals of the other institutions to some extent. But to a very small extent. Our philosophy of education, like our psychology, is hopelessly alien to most of our non-Catholic educational colleagues, and for the few ideas of ours that they absorb, they subtly impose upon us a great many of their own. It takes stronger resistance than most of us have, not to imbibe ideals and criteria that are fallacious, if not harmful. By dint of filling out questionnaires we begin to accept implied quantitative standards and to value our institutions according to the number of learned magazines we subscribe to, and the conventions we attend.

The third danger to our educational integrity is the constant temptation to modify our traditional educational policy. The Jesuit code of education, though sometimes more honored in the breach than in the observance, has historically been committed to the Renaissance ideal of the liberal arts as opposed to vocationalism. Gradually by force of circumstances, a considerable growth of specialized non-liberal courses has been grafted on to our system so that now it is not always easy to recognize a Jesuit school or [14] college except by the black robes of some of the teachers. In the face of dwindling enrollments already foreseen, this deliberalizing tendency will go on unless we are seriously determined to stop it. Already more than half of the students in our higher institutions are in courses that cannot be classified as liberal, and there are clear indications that the trend is on the increase. Random sampling indicates that in our high schools too, in many sections of the country, a similar situation prevails. What is it that brought about this denial in practice of our four-century old theory of education? It is the fear of empty classrooms if we resist the vocational spirit of the times. Only the inveterate humanists, the belated followers of Newman will wistfully wonder whether a few distinctly Jesuit institutions are not a greater glory than a disparate group of complex institutes of applied arts. Or is it only the leader of a lost cause who says, "Sint ut sunt, aut non sint"? [NB: "Let them be as they are, or not at all."]

It may not be feasible or desirable to scrap immediately and everywhere all our courses and departments which do not properly come under the traditional scope of Jesuit education, but a beginning could be made forthwith. At least as a group we could subscribe to a clear-cut manifesto of our predominantly humanistic sympathies. Individually our administrators might pledge themselves for the quadricentennial year to a moratorium on expansion and experimentation; to the better publicising [sic], preparation, and conducting of our courses in the humanities, and to the leavening of all other curricula by a more generous injection of the liberal arts. Would not our whole educational system bask in the reflected glory of one strictly and uncompromisingly classical college? Why should not our high schools, when they exist side by side with other Catholic secondary schools, be reserved for those who are willing and able to follow the full classical curriculum? Are we not obliged in justice to take every possible means that our students secure that type of education for which we are the best fitted by training and tradition, and which moreover we consider the best system yet evolved for the cultivation of the human mind?

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Source: Andrew C. Smith, S.J., "Jesuit Education in the Contemporary Scene: Dangers and Obstacles," Jesuit Educational Quarterly 3, no. 1 (June 1940): 12–14.