Fr. Henry Woods, SJ, Standardization and its Abuse (1928)

[45] To have followed year by year the meeting of our Association is to know how large a place standardization has had in its discussions. One can neither grudge the time spent nor complain of the prominence granted. The supremacy claimed for standardization in education has made it a vital question.

Standardization is closely connected with order. Generically it brings in order by referring many things to one taken as the expression of attainable perfection. Thus it is natural to the intelligent creature. His every action supposes it. The adjectives and adverbs of his speech imply it. Operations are right or wrong. He performs each more or less perfectly. In all, efficiency and standardization go hand in hand. Man extends his field of activity by perfecting standards.

Standardization is sought, not for itself, but for the end it facilitates. Its efficiency determines its limits. Once the critical point has been passed, standardization becomes an impediment to personal initiative. Its problem is how to blend these two so as to get the best result. The solution must depend on the nature of the things to be standardized, of the means employed, and of the end to be obtained. Let us begin with what modern educators seek to standardize.

Of all God's creatures man alone is of universal adaptability to the world. Every other living being has its natural habitat. Domestic animals, however wide their range, cannot, like man, live and thrive everywhere. His use of creatures is equally universal. [46] Whatever distributed amongst others is food for life, becomes his sustenance. Their wool and fur and silk and down are his raiment. His intelligence contrives daily more profitable uses of the contents of earth. In the briefest space, one reared in luxury can change to savage life. Another passes after years of toil to wealthy ease as if to the manner born. "For the heaven of heavens is the Lord's: the earth He has given to the children of men."

This singular universality of human capacity must have its correlative in a singular individualism of human initiative, which reduces the standardization of man to a minimum. Whether we consider man's nature or the immense field of his operation, we see that to act humanly is to act freely, to choose from a multitudinous complexity of motives limited only by the actual limits of his intelligence and the actual capacity of things to receive his activity, the proximate reasons of his action. In the irrational creature the specific activity of its nature fixes our attention. In man this specific activity is, as it were, eclipsed by the supreme individualism of the person.

Standardization presupposes in things to be standardized various potentialities which the standardizer by the intelligent employment of means can actuate or not as he wills and to whatever degree he sees fit. These, when actuated, are in a natural harmony, which the standardizer upsets to develop artificially now one potency now another. Learning by experience the limits set by nature to such developments, he establishes permanent standards. Thus in the wild horse is the potentiality of the draught-horse's strength, of the racer's speed, of the action of the carriage-horse, of the charger's mettle and grace. By his art man brings out the standard draught-horse, the standard racehorse, the standard carriage-horse, the standard charger.

Standardization, then, from the point of view of the thing standardized, means sacrifice. In the development of speed much of the horse's natural strength and endurance is lost. The racehorse lasts for a mile, a mile and a half, perhaps for two or three miles at a marvelous pace. To travel at a natural gait twenty or thirty miles a day for a month would be its ruin. The draught-horse retains no trace of equine speed or grace or beauty. So [47] it is always; and the greater the number and variety of potentialities, the greater the sacrifice. In man the exigency of this law is the strictest. To reach a standard in any line one must withdraw from whatever implies dissipation of energy.

"To shun delights and live laborious days"

is the universal canon of excellence.

Since standardization, though within the limits of nature, does, nevertheless, a certain violence to nature, its supreme norm must be the will of the Creator of all nature. Should one question the lawfulness of its dealings with lower creatures, it will not do to answer: "We do them no wrong, since lacking intelligence, they have no rights." It is true that the irrational creatures can have no rights. But it is equally true that in His creatures the Creator has rights supreme and absolute. By the principle alleged we defend our use of creatures according to the divine concession: "The heaven of heavens is the Lord's : the earth He has given to the children of men." But the concessions itself is our sole adequate justification in standardizing the irrational creature. In harmony with universal nature, though doing violence to particular natures, we use irrational creatures to serve our own ends.

With regard to the rational creature the question takes a very different aspect. None is too humble to share in the Creator's gift. It is his because he needs the irrational creature, not only for his temporal wants but also as the means of working out his title to the eternal good. This is a matter purely personal. With the individual must rest the final decision as to how he will use the creature. Laws and their sanctions, governments, social organizations are necessary helps to a right decision because man's nature is social. Nevertheless they are but things of time, ministers only to the heir of eternity.

Wherefore the same Creator who grants the rational creature the fullest useful service of the irrational, allows no such exploiting of man by men, whether individual or organized. Man is social. He engages himself naturally to serve others; and in doing so obliges himself to attain a serviceable standard. He has [48] his duty to the society of which he is a member, and must fit himself for its performance. But because society is a union of wills, though he must avail himself of social direction, he discharges his obligation of his own initiative. Should he fail, the individual or the society could enforce compliance. This, however, would be abnormal, a transient vindication of violated right, not the normal exercise of constant right Man has not been given to the State merely to be formed by it and used for its own purpose.

Coming now to the end to be obtained by a legitimate standardization of education, we must not attenuate essential facts to propitiate those who would hold the fate of the rising generation in the hollow of their hands. To do so would be to betray our trust as Christian teachers, to desert those to whose service we are consecrated, to imperil souls Christ died to save. Should those who have assumed control of education prove so averse to the truth in this matter as to reject as inefficient all education based on it or to exact concessions that will rob the truth of its vitality, mutual understanding must become impossible.

The end of education is the end of man's creation. It is so to train the youth as to incline the man to live a life leading to immortal bliss. We do not say that formal religious teaching should meet the pupil at every turn. As in his after life [i.e. adult life] there will be religious exercises and secular pursuits, so in his pupilage, education will be religious and secular. Yet, as revealed religion must underlie all secular activity, the universal rule to determine the right and wrong of things, giving its color to the entire life; so religion must permeate education, its motive and its norm for both teacher and pupil. A system which separates religion and education, confining this to the affairs of time, excluding from it peremptorily the very mention of God, man's beginning and his last end, provides for its own condemnation.

With this clearly understood, it is plain that education so intimately connected with man's last end cannot be a matter merely social, to be controlled by the civil power. It is supremely personal. Though it is a personal interest in which the child depends necessarily on others, it is so sacred in itself as to generate in those others most sacred obligations. So sacred is it that [49] God Himself indicates those others on whom those sacred obligations rest. To direct the beginnings of education He provides the parent. Because He has raised its end to the supernatural order, making it in a word salvation, He has confided the general direction of education to those to whom the word was spoken: "Go, teach all nations." It is not within the competence of the secular power to define for the citizen the education he is to receive. State standardization is a euphemism for State-usurpation.

For if the putting of the child in the way of salvation be a personal work, it connotes in school, college and teacher an individuality which will enable parent and child to find what the individual practical judgment determines to be most conducive to the satisfaction of the personal obligation. Until recent years such individualism was a matter of course. Christendom could not have understood anything else. Religion permeated all education. Ecclesiastical authority watched over it, protected and encouraged it, leaving its formal provision to individual initiative. Even when an ecclesiastic became a founder, he was such in his personal, not in his official, capacity. William of Wykeham, not the Bishop of Winchester, founded Winchester and New College. The mere material of education was everywhere much the same. Methods, traditions, the genius loci gave to each school its character, that each impressed on its own. To speak of what we are more familiar with, nothing is more plainly recognizable than the distinction between the Oxford and the Cambridge touch. And this was in perfect accord with Christian society so wonderfully organized and compacted of subordinate associations manifold in their variety. The Oxford man had a brother in every Oxford man who would stand by him in any quarrel touching him as an Oxford man. The Cambridge man was brother to all Cambridge men. So too was it of the great schools. Even to-day Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Shrewsbury, Rugby, Harrow, have their own personality, each giving its own formation. The same is true of the London schools, Charterhouse, St. Paul's, Merchant Taylors, Christ's Hospital. The minor schools, hardly less famous, such as, Manchester, Bedford Grammar, Abingdon had each its own character; and [50] when to meet the demands of the new age, Marlborough, Clifton, Wellington and their fellows were established, each grew up in its own place an individual complete in itself, distinct from all others, the principle of its own activity, neither seeking favors from universities or associations, nor tolerating discrimination.

And this individualism passed over into our own land. Though John Harvard would fain have named his foundation after his Alma Mater, he could not transplant the spirit of Cambridge to the new world. The name persists by the Charles River. But Harvard is simply Harvard, and could be nothing else. Yale and Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, and William and Mary matured in well-marked personality. Individualism characterized Phillips Andover, Phillips Exeter, Roxbury Latin, Boston Latin and all later foundations on similar lines. Attempts to introduce the English public school into the United States have resulted only in new American schools, each with a character all its own. The old common school—the very antithesis of the modern public—expressing the mind of the community administering it, was intensely individualistic; while our Catholic schools and colleges, embodying the methods and traditions of the orders and congregations, vivified by religion diffused through their entire organism—individualism was their very life.

Coming now to the means and methods of standardization, no one can pretend that the old time individualism made for anything but efficiency. Each school or college or university was standardized for efficiency, not by any outside agency destroying individual character, but by the intrinsic methods, traditions, personal history, which formed that character. The expression of the standard of an institution was in its own performance. In this was its success, the guarantee of its endurance. The inefficient school had no support. It was not an element in a vast system, its existence in inefficiency ensued because any competition had become impossible. Fulfilling its purpose it flourished. Failing to do so it was deserted. If things went wrong, tradition was the standard of reformation. There was no blaming of the essential system, no running after new methods, no proclaiming of a new panacea. This was reserved for the standardizers of to-day, who about every decade announce the failure of what they [51] took up so enthusiastically, and impose upon educators the working out of some fresh theory destined to be abandoned in turn.

It is hard to see how any intelligent being can grant as a principle not to be questioned, that because schools B, C, D, E, differ each in its own method from that of a dominating institution A, they are inefficient and must change what has stood the test of time for methods new and tentative. Saul thought to secure efficiency by standardizing David. Had David consented we should be telling the history of Goliath in another way.

Were the standardizer a logician he would interpose: "Your example betrays you. Your argument is an ignoratio elenchi. You assume that we would standardize men by means of education. Our only aim is to standardize education for the good of man." To answer will, in carrying us to the root of the matter, compel the mention of things painful to hear.

To standardize education for man's good, suppose a norm of excellence drawn from his nature, according to which the education elaborated is an evident good. Such a good is either absolute or relative. There is but one good absolute, the final term of man's progressive nature. Education must be a relative good, a means, as we have seen, to the absolute. But we have already shown that education cannot be standardized according to this norm by those who, as a rule, deny its reality, and insist unanimously on its exclusion. One may say that modern standardized education can be used as a means to the supreme good. This may be true. If so, it comes from man's natural tendency to that good, and God's grace enabling him to overcome the obstacles raised by modern education, much as his longing after liberty enables the prisoner to make a pen-knife and a file the instruments of his freedom. But such a use is entirely outside the standardizing intention. This, the condemnation of religious education, the substitution of education purely secular, proves conclusively.

The term of a standardization ignoring the supreme end of man, operating constantly for the extinction of every method making that end its central element, is obvious. It is man oblivious of his personal end, oblivious, therefore, of his personal rights, of his personal duties; of the same personal rights and [52] duties in every other man; of the obligation of social authority to respect and protect those rights, to facilitate the performance of those duties. What is this but to reform man, to destroy in him as far as possible the image of God, to standardize him according to another standard than that established by the Creator in the creature?

"But citizens must be educated up to the standard of the Republic." Noting that here is an acknowledgment that the standardizer aims at the standardization of man, let us analyze his principle. It seems to mean that to form the American citizen needs a long specialized training. This would imply in our Constitution an unnatural character which every American should reject. Monkeys are by nature gregarious and imitative. With this foundation it is possible to dress and arm them like soldiers and to teach them some military exercises and evolutions. To do so would be to superimpose upon their nature an artificial habit, not without much labor. Not altogether alien from this is the modern notion of educating for citizenship, a corollary perhaps of the popular theory of evolutionary human and social origins. We think better of the American citizen than to make him an artificial product. Our Republic is a noble concept because nobly human. Its theory embodies the largest human liberty. The theory actualized meets an intelligent subordination that has never been surpassed. In the new nation conceived in the spirit of liberty, no special discipline was provided. Men went out to it spontaneously because of its harmony with human nature. Hence it has been wisely said that in every well-ordered commonwealth civic instruction is confined to the positive law; and is the more efficacious as it is easier, briefer and complete according to the subject's condition.

For let us consider. Why do men live peacefully and happily obedient to lawful authority? Not, evidently, through fear of punishment. There are some such in every civil society, for whom are provided police, criminal courts, prisons and death. But they are relatively few. Neither is it through any special study of the nature of society, the origin of authority, the source of supreme civil power. The citizen obeys the law spontaneously. The most learned sociologist follows the direction of the traffic [53] officer without a thought of his science, as readily as his humblest neighbor. The universal reason is man's social nature, whereby he lives intelligently in the society of his fellows with the habitual will to attain the common good as determined by the social intellect and resolved on by the social will. To this add his universal adaptability, which we have already considered, and the adequate reason appears why man lives peaceably and happily in habitual obedience to any mode of legitimate government. Civic virtue, a part of patriotism, is therefore a substantial habit growing out of man's nature, not an acquired habit superadded to nature. Obedience to parents in the family, to the teacher in the school will strengthen it; but no civic instruction could implant it. Because the American Constitution rightly understood is so consonant with nature, those born under it grew up in its spirit; those coming from without were so quickly assimilated as to be hardly distinguishable by any civic note from the native-born. If at times they fell short of the perfect Americanism, it was but an episode in the history of the immigrant population, whence came the American people of to-day. Moreover this must never be forgotten, that whatever civic corruption obtained among the foreign-born, there were always Americans of purest blood to make it possible, to protect it, to profit by it; and there was always the great mass of citizens native and immigrant alike, to reprobate, chastise, and expel it.

"But you cannot deny in the immigrant of to-day a special need of civic instruction." Even so, the immigrant's special need cannot be made the general standard of all American education. The modern civic instruction, therefore, is for the American formed by the traditions of his fathers and the principles of our fundamental Constitution. He it is, not the adventitious alien, who is out of harmony with the new education. As for the alien, his need is not so much of instruction in American principles, as of the extirpation of false social doctrine. One and all must know that between the principles of our government and the theories of the European revolutionist there can be nothing in common. That the fundamental Constitution of the Republic is in danger becomes daily more evident. But the peril is not from the immigrant, but from ourselves. Despising the old education full of [54] the influences of religion recognized by our forefathers as a necessary foundation of the nation, Americans brought in deliberately from Europe its very antithesis, a system saturated with atheism, pregnant with the worst of all tyrannies, the impersonal State. The standardization of modern education works for the fuller development of that system. Vain then, is the hope of Americanizing by such education those who see it ready to reproduce in the land of liberty conditions from which they fled, or of eradicating from their minds destructive social principles embraced through antagonism to those conditions, when they see the fear of such conditions generating the same principles in Americans themselves, in even the very teachers to whom their Americanization has been entrusted.

That the omnipotent, irresistible State, using the citizen for its own purposes, is the term of public education to-day, no one can fail to see. That the effect of all our standardizing is to rivet the chains, intellectual and moral, of such a slavery, is no less evident. Seeking the standardizers we find men and women acting, apparently, through their own initiative. Whether they perceive the trend of their operations is not to the point. We give them the benefit of every doubt. Nevertheless they have assumed exclusive control of education, not only fixing and multiplying standards, but also intimating disaster as the result of not conforming to their rules. Behind them is the whole organization of state-education, controlled at present rather loosely by each State within its own boundaries, yet tending to become a national function organized down to the last detail as a department of the Federal Government. Should this be brought about standardizing will have its full effect, the loss of liberty of teaching, the elimination of the personal element in school and scholar, a new slavery as surely destructive of the nation "conceived in the spirit of liberty" as that other from which the nation was purified in the blood and flame of civil war.

It will not do to say that in the standardizing of the individual denominational school, is sought only the subordination of private interests to the public welfare. Were this all, it would nevertheless rest on an entirely wrong concept of government. This [55] is not primarily the subordination of private interests to public welfare, which would lead inevitably to the exaggeration of the omnipotent State and the neglect of personal rights; but the promotion of the common good by the protection, promotion and harmonizing of private rights. As a matter of fact, however, standardizing as it is being practiced works out for all that is worst in the modem world, for libertinism of thought, the breaking up of the family, the extirpation of Christianity, the denial of God. For instance: "The standard college must have a money-endowment." This gives neither a guarantee of efficiency nor a remedy against inefficiency. Its natural effect is the extinction of all colleges of which the endowment is the consecration to God of teachers, both men and women, who, by their traditions, their talents, their long preparation, their methods and their motives, have proved themselves most efficient educators. We would not say that an endowed denominational school is impossible. We do maintain that secularism is the open road to endowment, and that thirst for further endowment has led one endowed denominational institution after another to change to undenominationalism. Again: "In a standard institution the higher chairs must be held by Doctors of Philosophy." In practice the degree will come from some university purely secular. Thus will prevail in all schools a philosophy always reducible, whatever its momentary form, to its evolutionary Hegelian stock. "The standard college must have a working library, in which students may practice research." Such a library can be obtained at brief notice only from our chief publishers, whose catalogues rarely show anything that is not at least rationalistic. Whether the cribbing a bit here, a bit there from such books can be called research, is very doubtful: the result, however, is certain. "The standard college must therefore promote private study and restrict public teaching." Thus the pupil is to be free to absorb error: the teacher who would save him is to be gagged.

These are some of the more notable examples. Others touching the lower schools will occur to you, all tending the same way. There is no sadder demonstration of the gulf between the older school in which without noisy display loyalty to country and its banner flowed as a sacred duty from man's obligation to his [56] Creator and the modern public school with its tediously unconvincing civic instruction setting before pupils only the impersonal State—than the substitution for daily religious exercise, of the daily salute to the flag, the need of which appeared only when God's place in education had been forgotten.

To sum up, the modern abuse of standardization is: first, unnatural and therefore unphilosophical. Secondly, it wrongs the parent, the child, the individual school. Thirdly, a false ideal of education having been introduced, standardization is used to maintain it. Fourthly, God has been shut out of education; standardization is made to turn the key on Him. Fifthly, it standardizes, not education for the benefit of the citizen, but the citizen for the benefit of the State.

DISCUSSION

RT. REV. MSGR. FRANCIS T. MORAN, D. D.: The philosophy of Father Woods on standardization will not be questioned. The learned educator adequately accounts for the purpose of uniformity and concedes its necessity within certain bounds to promote harmony. In weights and measures it is undoubtedly necessary. But in education there must be allowed a large latitude to meet the individual initiative. Otherwise education will sink to a dead level, and scholars will become automatons doing a set piece of work and unable to venture beyond a particular task. Mass production may be the requirement of industrialism, but after the formulas, as for instance of the four fundamentals of mathematics are fixed, freedom of development should be encouraged in the training of the mind.

It is not surprising that Father Woods takes the position he does. It would be surprising if the member of a great order, one of whose chief purposes is education, with a tradition of several centuries of achievement and the heir to many centuries of tradition, could be definitely led to any other conclusion. The exigencies of the present moment and new conditions may seem to suggest new methods. But an old educational institution of world-wide experience will rightly hesitate before breaking with the past and responding readily to the invitation to reject freedom and to adopt limitation.

The Jesuit Order if so disposed may point with pride to a record in the educational field that has not been surpassed and will not be surpassed for many a day if ever by any body of teachers in the whole world. The libraries are filled with their books. They have produced a multitude of scholars eminent in canon law, exegetics, philosophy, theology, the natural sciences, and in every branch of learning. They have staffed high schools, lyceums, colleges and universities in every country and continent, and their [57] opinion therefore in educational matters is of the highest value and is worthy of the greatest respect. We must not be carried away by the clamor of the period. Each individual has a tendency to think that the world was created the day he was born. Mankind or a given portion of it, is prone to be deceived by the voices of a prevailing sentiment. How far is this true in the matter of standardization? It is well to inquire carefully before making a definite committal.

The conditions in the development of education in our country have been such as to suggest standardization. The country was new. It is only yesterday that we came out of the little red school house. There was a consuming passion for knowledge amongst the masses increased often by the isolation in which they lived. The form of government, participated in by the people, encouraged a desire on the part of the individual to discuss public questions intelligently and to fit himself for the holding of official position. Opportunity for success in the mercantile and industrial fields was abundant and became more assured when accompanied by adequate mental equipment. As a result, schools of all kinds sprang up all over the land. Each school was practically a law unto itself. It speaks well for the earnestness of the people in their pursuit of learning that they came to the determination that the wheat should be sifted from the chaff, and that the dishonest purveyors of distinctions and degrees, the frauds and charlatans, should be driven out. Things had come to a pretty pass when a fake educator could hang out a shingle on an office and advertise university degrees at ten dollars or one hundred dollars or more, according to the gullibility of the recipient. It would seem high time to standardize. This was one reason but of course there were many other reasons for establishing some kind of uniformity so that a student from one institution could readily find his place in another, either in the same course or in a progressive course of advancement. There can be only general sympathy with the purpose of standardization in these conditions.

Again, for colleges and universities the one main assurance of stability was the investment in buildings and the endowment for maintenance and growth. At least such an institution could not run away over night. Situated as we Catholics are, with a large portion of our capital derived from the devoted efforts of our educators who labor without pay and because of their love for their fellowman and especially our youth, the first effect of a money endowment policy was to cause surprise and disquiet. I remember very well when my neighbors, the Jesuits of Cleveland, communicated in conversation their anxiety about the Hipes law which set up a pecuniary qualification. It seemed to involve a hardship and an attack on voluntary personal contribution in the education of the young. There was no such purpose; and when it was suggested that the requirements of the law would be met by capitalizing the voluntary service, a solution was found that the State as well as the different associations were quite willing to recognize. We should clearly understand that in the discussion [58] of standardization the good will of our fellow citizens is taken for granted. There is no intention to visit hardship on any honest effort. We can all therefore readily grasp hands on what makes for the good of the cause.

Now what is the good of the cause? Is it standard production or freedom for initiative for the institution and the individual? Undoubtedly the latter. It was on this basis that the old universities came to achieve their special excellences. Salerno had eminence in medicine, Bologna in law. Paris in theology. We have learned something since the ninth and tenth centuries when these universities were established. This is true, but we have not learned to depart from fundamental principles and formulas. With the impulse given by these great universities there came others in rapid development reaching up to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Salamanca, Pavia, Padua and many others. Each seemed to have its own specialty; each was working with its own earnestness. There certainly was not standardization in the sense in which we know it. Scholars were held in esteem and exercised the largest influence on their own and succeeding times. Alcuin, Venerable Bede, Peter Lombard, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure are names resplendent in light and shedding a lustre over the whole field of learning. One such name is a luminary outshining in brilliancy a whole host of twinkling stars. But the stars also give light and brighten the skies.

With change of times there comes change of methods. In our day industrialism makes its demands, and while this may connote an improvement in living conditions beyond those of the Middle Ages, or at least we need not argue the comparison, it will not be maintained that industrialism should set the standards for education. The mind is above matter; the spirit is more than the body. The smokestack may be the symbol of our prosperity but it should not be the symbol of our education. The Cathedral of an olden day was the shining mirror in which man beheld himself. Here art and religion met. Better by far was it in the development of the race that, let us say, after the time of Gregory VII, 1073, the Cathedral exhibited the hopes and aspirations of mankind than that the era of industrialism should have set in with the smokestack for its chiefest ornament. My plea in brief is: Back to the mind, back to the spirit. Let our universities lead the way and let them stand again for law, medicine, theology. Let the liberal arts be cultivated. If industrialism demands the technical school and manual training, so be it; but let not our whole educational process be based on this material foundation.

I would argue that we should maintain our independence in our educational policy. Surely there should be cooperation and friendship. But we have a heritage in education. We have traditions age-old and we have achievements of renown. We carried the torch through long centuries and our experience is worthy of great consideration. It is incumbent on us to know our own mind and to formulate our own program, and while [59] looking at the subject from our own standpoint to make an honest endeavor to see it from the other man's standpoint.

American educators see the shortcomings of the present system and show an admirable spirit in the candor and frankness in which they discuss them. It is a sincere conviction that if our Catholic educators who have the responsibility of our Catholic higher education will discuss and study and weigh all the elements of this problem and outline some policy or perhaps formulate some program; and if this program has the cordial approval and united support of the Bishops of the country, the position of Catholic education will command the attention and respect of the educators of the country.

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Source: Fr. Henry Woods, S.J., "Standardization and Its Abuse," The National Catholic Educational Association Bulletin 25, no. 1 (Nov. 1928): 45–59.