Robert Gannon, Jesuit Education of the Future (1940)

[128] [Footnote attached to the article title: An address delivered at the 54th annual convention of Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools at Atlantic City, New Jersey, November 23, 1940.]

When I found that there was no escape from the honor of addressing you this morning, I asked that the authorities assign me a subject on which the audience had even less information than I had. They answered that that would be possible only if the audience were composed exclusively of college presidents. So the next best thing was a seance of crystal gazing in which we could all have our feet well off the ground. "What will the Jesuit education of the future be?" proved to be an excellent question for such an occasion, because the proper approach to an answer that might apply in even a single country, presupposes a few such simple questions as these: How long will the present war last? Who, if anyone, is going to win it? Are we, perhaps, going to take a hand ourselves? If so, will our own form of government remain unchanged? Even if it does, shall we have a Secretary of Education? Will she be known as the Secretary of Propaganda, or will she simply be such in fact? How long will private institutions be allowed to grant degrees? How long will they be tax exempt? How long will they be able, in any case, to pay the grocer? It is all pretty foggy of course except on the supposition that our form of government in the United States will change eventually to the Russian or the German model. Only in that case can we be relatively definite in predicting the future of Jesuit education in America. For then will it most certainly be one with Nineveh and Tyre. Come the revolution, we Jesuits are prepared to dangle from 5,000 telegraph poles, beginning with the rock-bound coast of Maine. We may dangle Jesuitically, in a clever diabolical manner that no one ever expected, but the breathing is sure to be awkward and in any case the Ratio Studiorum will be done for until, of course, we return again, as we always do. (It would be un-American to say that we have been thrown out of better countries than this. But no one can deny that we have had a lot of practice!)

Suppose, however, that democracy not only endures, but triumphs, that education is able to resist strangulation at the hands of the Federal Government, a strangulation that has been threatening for nearly twenty years; suppose that the public comes to realize the immense debt this country owes to private institutions and the irreparable loss that would be suffered if all the small colleges of liberal arts were to be crushed. In other [129] words, suppose that the next sixty years turn out to be something like the last. What can we predict with any amount of confidence? Only such things as may be called essential to our ideals.

As Abraham Flexner once said, "Subjects change, problems change, activities change, but ideas and qualities abide." In the course of our four hundred years, we have ourselves seen many changes in subject matter, or more accurately perhaps, changes in the emphasis placed on various subjects in the curriculum. The vernacular, for example, was not entirely ignored, even in the sixteenth century, and the physical and social sciences were all familiar, in a way, to a boy attending a Jesuit college in the time of Henry of Navarre. For even then, in his study of the classics, he went far beyond the problems of grammar and strove for a grasp of the varied content found in the old historians, scientists, and statesmen. To a still greater extent, in his study of systematic philosophy was he concerned with questions no relegated not only to sociology and government, but to physics, biology, and chemistry. Yet the emphasis now placed on modern languages, and the social and physical sciences, to say nothing of the de-emphasis evident with regard to Latin and Greek and philosophy would certainly have amazed the Very Reverend Father Claudius Aquaviva. So, too, would the complexity of our problems in preparing students for modern life. It is a far cry from the days when university graduates were expected merely to be teachers, statesmen, gentlemen of leisure, or clerics. The value of the old classical training for such was fairly obvious. Their financial and political problems were different too. It was one thing to receive a foundation of so many golden ducats from the Duke of Gandia or the municipality of Hildesheim, so that one could operate in tranquillity as a free school, and quite another to begin in a log cabin and live on one's wits. The presidents of our older institutions were saintly and scholarly men who left a tremendous impression on their two or three hundred pupils. Now we have to find the type that can stay out late and wake up cheerful, eat rich food and keep the old figure down, shake hands like a Rotarian, pass the tambourine, and preserve the King's peace among some four hundred and fifty faculty members. Similar changes may be anticipated for the future in subject emphasis, social problems, and activities. Professional schools will of course as in the past, change most radically, being concerned chiefly with changeable elements, new discoveries, and skills. But these we mention only in passing, because there is nothing distinctly Jesuit in even our own schools of engineering and medicine. Our college of liberal arts, however, will certainly change the least. For its principal purpose, the training of the intellect and will, its principal subjects Divine and human nature, and its principal instruments, literature and philosophy, will always be essential in any civilized country [130] at any time. I should not be surprised (though this of course is shameless crystal gazing) if the numbers in our liberal arts were drastically reduced before my golden jubilee. Neither should I be a bit displeased. For like all other American institutions, we have our own proportion of spoiled house painters working for an arts degree. I expect, however, to see a time when only those will take up the liberal arts who can profit by them, and trade schools and professional schools in abundance will look after the other boys and girls. For the shadow of vocationalism, the constant demand for ad hoc training which comes today from so many parents and students and which more than anything else has caused a loss of confidence in our traditional college course, would vanish if schools with irreconcilable purposes existed side by side, frankly different, without any effort at compromise, the large ones teaching their students how to make a living, the small ones how to live a full, rich, intellectual life. It is true that most of the students who will thus be able undisturbed to give their hours to Aristotle and Sophocles will have to learn eventually how to make a living, too, since these schools will be too small and few to absorb all their own graduates as teachers. For them, however, vocationalism will wait on culture and be in the nature of graduate work, the time element being remedied by getting our students through their undergraduate studies at eighteen and nineteen years of age—an end devoutly to be wished, and not impossible.

Having thus solved the modern problem of vocationalism by reserving the liberal arts for those who are fit for them, let us imagine ourselves a board of inspectors visiting a Jesuit college in the year of our Lord 2000. The first room we enter, presided over by a middle-aged Father who will have been born about 1960, is doing the Pro Marcello, reading the Latin with emotion, analyzing the power of the speech, trying to transfer some of its beauty into English. Next door, a somewhat smaller group will be getting ready to produce Antigone, arguing about the difficult meter of the choruses. For our persistence in defending the ancient classics is not vestigial; it is not a mere habit that was formed in a simpler time when people had less to learn and much more leisure. It is a matter of dispassionate conviction arising from arguments which will probably be as valid in the year 2000 as they are at present. Then, as now, it will be desirable to know some other civilization with familiarity in order that we may better know our own. Then, as now, the splendor, depth, and completeness of Greece and Rome will be more impressive than that of China, Carthage, or Victorian England, not to mention Rooseveltian [sic] America or the worm-eaten Europe of the twentieth century. They will always have, moreover, immensely greater value than any other civilization as being two of the principal fountain heads of modern life. Then, as now, the sympathetic [131] understanding of another civilization will involve a knowledge of its language. And when you add the further advantage in the present instance that these languages are themselves so beautifully and so logically developed that their mastery tends to form invaluable habits of the intellect, you can readily understand why Jesuit colleges of liberal arts have no intention of abandoning Latin and Greek. The same is even more true of systematic philosophy. Sixty years from now our students will still be learning to think, not in bunches, but in an orderly process that turns all the stones and picks up loose threads as it goes. They will still be learning to analyze, a rare enough thing even now in this age of synthesis. They will still be welding together more through philosophy than any other means all their literature and their social and physical sciences; welding them into a definite interpretation of their own experience and of the world in which they will be living at that time. Science, will, as always, have its place. But it will be a place definitely subordinate to literature and philosophy. For we can anticipate nothing that will change our conviction with regard to the end of the liberal arts. While we remain what we are, we can never regard that end as the accumulation of facts or skills. We shall always be content to train the attitudes of our students, to let others train their hands. We shall never try to evaluate an ode of Horace in terms of dollars and cents. We shall always be absorbed in the thrilling task of enriching the taste, sharpening the intellect, and strengthening the will of future leaders of men. We have consistently resisted a dozen will-of-the-wisps through three generations of American floundering. We are not likely to follow any new ones in the next sixty years. The most influential of the present crop whose spirit has permeated every state of the Union with socialism, pragmatism, and exaggerated experimentalism, has left us happily unscathed. We esteem the individual too highly to be thorough-going socialists. We are too devoted to principles which we regard as eternal to be entirely pragmatic. We are too impressed by the accumulated wisdom of the human race, by that treasure of experience to which each generation adds its small deposit of true gold, ever to have our schools ignore the past and start again as though no one else had ever lived before us. Sixty years from now, we shall still strive to honor the individual, to honor eternal principles and traditions but above all, to honor God, who is the reason for honoring all the rest.

Therefore, of this one fact we are more certain than of all the other predictions about our future schools that have gone before, Jesuit education in the year of our Lord 2000 will still be definitely anti-naturalistic. It will be strong in its opposition to a system in which to quote de Hovre "mental life is reduced to psychology, psychology to physiology, physiology to biology and biology to mechanism," in which "concepts become [132] percepts, ideas become images or representations, intelligence becomes a function of the brain, the soul is reduced to matter, will is identified with instinct, freedom yields place to determinism." In which, to put it briefly, man is reduced to nature. You can be equally sure that all the symptoms and signs of naturalism will be absent, too. Relativity, with its fuzzy thinking about universal truth. Psychologism, with its desire to dissect human nature as one would the brain cells of a frog. Scorn of tradition, which makes everything old, seem absurd. Scientism, which accepts the laboratory as the only source of truth. Methodicism, with its worship of "how" at the expense of "what." Scepticism, which worships the pursuit of truth, rather than truth itself. Bibliolatry, which worships mere production for its own sake; which rates a teacher by the number of books he may have published.

Perhaps the rejection of all this will not be as individualizing in the year 2000 as it is today. Perhaps this naturalism, with its easy and empty catch phrases may be as extinct as the white rhinoceros in another sixty years. Certainly American educators of today are not as openly enthusiastic about it as they were three generations ago. At that time, you may remember,  it was popularized by Comte in philosophy, by Darwin in science, by Spencer in education, and by Zola and Balzac in literature. It was so terrifically modern and so scientific in 1850, it was so easy to grasp and explained so much: "Nature is the source of all, all is explained by nature." My dear, it was as simple and as smart as stepping into a horse car. Then, too, it was so optimistic. All one had to do to be happy was to live in tune with nature. You know, clouds and rocks and things? Then, too, it had the distinct advantage of flattering the private judgment and doing away with the troublesome Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, however, the intervening century has emphasized the inadequacy of such a point of view, and now educators say they have abandoned naturalism. They haven't. They have abandoned only its name. All the derivative aberrations we mentioned above, beginning with Relativity and ending with Bibliolatry are still flourishing in American universities. It is still true that science is the main instrument of our national education, that it is still dehumanizing our schools, that it is still crowding out our liberal arts. As Max Scheler wrote in Person und Sache, "There is no point perhaps in which modern minds are more in accord than on this one, namely, that nature and machinery, things which man should control, have come to dominate man more and more, that things are becoming more powerful, more beautiful, more noble, that man is becoming smaller and more insignificant, a mere cog in the machine he has built." Sixty years from now, we Jesuits shall be still specializing in human nature. The tide may be with us or against us. It varies in different generations. We shall be just [133] as interested as ever in man's importance, man's absolute and relative importance. We shall still be absorbed in problems that center on the double role he plays as creature and lord of creation because when we cease to consider this, the starting point of all our education, we shall no longer be ourselves; our education will be something else.

In one way, therefore, our future is wholly unpredictable. Sixty years from now we may be just a picturesque chapter in the history of education, a phenomenon of the Renaissance that lasted into the bloody and barbarous twentieth century. If, however, the human race muddles through its difficulties and normal life returns, if the Jesuits are still conducting liberal arts colleges in a free United States, they will be following a rejuvenated, streamlined, but still quite recognizable Ratio Studiorum.

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Source: Robert I. Gannon, S.J., "Jesuit Education of the Future," Jesuit Educational Quarterly 3, no. 3 (December 1940): 128–133.