The Necessary Subordination of Educational Theories to Sound Sociology (1922)

[385] Is man a sociable, or a social being? Perhaps there are professed sociologists to whom the question has never occurred. The terms seem almost identical. Nevertheless the ideas behind them differ with all the difference that lies between Rousseau's fable of man everywhere in chains, and the reality of man free in his necessary social relations; that distinguishes the figment of the social contract from society, the spontaneous outcome of human nature; that divides the artificial State created by the Revolution from the State developing naturally under Christian influences; that marks off the State using the individual as its tool from the State serving the individual's perfection. To say that man is sociable is to say that essentially he is indifferent to the solitary life or the social; that if he chooses the latter he docs so merely for its advantages to buy which he pays, as price, some of his individual rights. In a word, it is to affirm the social contract with all its consequences as seen in the modern State. On the other hand to say that man is social is to say that his very nature demands life in society; that society began simultaneously with the race; that it is morally impossible for men to live permanently in the same place unassociated; that the savage state with its pretended individual rights never existed; that the social contract is a myth, invented to promote the Revolution and continued because it falls in so neatly with that other baseless invention, evolution. United they give the modern theory of the State, with every logical conclusion deduced from it.

Let us see one very important conclusion. Were man merely sociable and actual social union a free contract, the individual could have no natural antecedent rights against society, nor [386] society any necessary natural obligation towards the individual. Every subsequent social right or obligation would arise from the contract and be confined to its stipulations. The price once paid in individual rights would have no further exchangeable value. Ameliorations never dreamed of at the making of the contract would have to be paid for with new surrenders, in exacting which society would be found a creditor hard as flint. Describing the day of mourning over Jerusalem, purchased yearly by the Jews from their Roman conquerors, St. Jerome tells us how, notwithstanding the great price already received and the sight of cheeks wet with tears that might well have moved to pity, the callous soldiery compelled the mourners begging a little more time for sorrow, to open their purses afresh and pay the price of further weeping. A society pretending to originate in a social contract would refuse to its members the freedom granted to the conquered. These were free to protract their weeping or not. Only when they resolved to renew their tears had they to pay the price. A society according to Rousseau's theory would impose its dubious benefits on the very individuals Rousseau is supposed to have freed, and then compel them to pay for the imposition.

On the other hand, to say that man is social is to say that society is so necessary that without it the normal life in the exercise of his natural faculties would be impossible. It is to assert his antecedent right to all that society can give him. It is to say that society is naturally no loose association of individuals, the artificial result of a voluntary contract, but a closely compacted organization of subordinate, incomplete societies, the result of man's constant need of cooperation, of his constant impulse towards association with his fellows, into one complete, supreme society, the State. Let us illustrate. In a society, even the most primitive, A would need the cooperation of B for clothing, of C for food, of D for any journey he might make, of E and F for shelter. In the same way B, C, D, E, F, would need cooperation reaching out to G, H, I, J, etc. Here we discern the rudiments of organization. In its development A and B could no longer between them provide material and make it up into clothes, such as the more perfect social life requires. [387] Hence would arise the various trades, and in the same way the various professions, with the same natural tendency in each association drawing the members into union for cooperation and mutual support. So in fact each became an inchoate society developing with the community in which it originated; and as villages became cities and their inhabitants citizens, these found themselves in their new life, not mere individuals, but members of their pre-existing associations, which thus became the elements immediately constituting the larger unit, as this was the immediate element of the supreme society. Nowhere did the individual stand alone. Everywhere he had his fellows with the immediate social superior to be the guardian of his liberty, his protection against wrong.

Of this society so perfect in its unity, so complex in its organization, the modern evolutionary sociologist knows little or nothing. It was never found but under the shadow of the cross in that Christian civilization which religion effected in the barbarian conquerors of Europe, and was found in its perfection only in the ages of faith. Why this was so we cannot examine here. Suffice it to note that, as the loosely organized despotism, characteristic of idolatry and Mohammedanism, with its tyrant, lord of all, and its incoherent multitude at his absolute disposal, was the reproduction on earth of the kingdom of Satan, the typical tyrant defying all order, trampling on every right; so in the compact, highly organized Christian society was seen the analogue of that abode of perfect order arising from the perfect blending of mutual rights and duties through the long, closely linked order of superior and inferior, of which the crown is Christ the King, the perfect custodian and vindicator of obligation and right.

But in the revolutionary State, whether it be empire, kingdom, republic, or social anarchy, the form is immaterial, is always found the approximation to the old barbarous despotism, the disintegration of the Christian State. There is no medium between the two. The prevalence of the former implies the the destruction of the latter. According to the revolutionary theory, man, freed from his chains, stands in a regenerated society an individual of the sovereign people, with neither patron, [388] nor lord, nor social class to mar his dignity, or to come between him and his servant delegated to public authority. How different the actual fact! Stripped of the protection and support of his fellows, powerless to withstand the force working remorselessly to make him a simple unit expendable by the State functioning towards its revolutionary ideal, man would stand alone were he not saved from utter solitariness by the inextinguishable workings of his social nature impelling him to reach out to every helping hand that offers. Such, despite its intensely monarchical exterior, was the Prussian system, bureaucratic and impersonal to the last degree. Such was never the system of the United States. Resting on the inalienable rights of man our Constitution makes the humblest citizen's personal liberty its characteristic note.

There is no essential reason why the colonies going out from the old nations after the sixteenth century should not have carried with them this natural society. It is indifferent to every form of government; it is adaptable to all. In England it was one kind of monarchy; in France, another. It had a special organization in the Holy Roman Empire. We find it democratic in Florence and other Italian cities, while in Venice it was oligarchic. It could be feudal in Teutonic lands; in others founded on commerce. It could have lived on American soil; nay more, no diligence will reveal, nor ingenuity invent a system more conducive to the American ideal, personal liberty under just government. That it did not cross the seas was accidental, due to this, that before general emigration from Europe had begun, the corruption of the Renaissance, the inflowing of gold from the Indies, the Protestant Reformation had sapped the foundations of the old order. Still, that it is the perfect natural order is clear from the instinct leading men inevitably to supply for the old natural subordinate societies, with artificial associations for mutual support and defense.

We may now put some conclusions which shall be the principles of our specific argument.

I. Since the permanence of a composite body depends on the permanence of its elements both in themselves and in their natural relations; and since society must by nature be as lasting [389] as possible, every supreme society demands the permanence of its subordinate societies, its constituent elements.

II. This permanence of the subordinate society implies necessarily stability in its members. Hence the stability of social man in his social surroundings, in other words, a permanent diversity of individuals in their respective social orders, is a necessary consequence of man's social nature.

III. From this it follows as regards each social order, that its members, if taken distributively, may each rise to a higher station; taken collectively they will, as a rule remain in that in which they are born.

These are natural principles, depending on no particular form of society. Rather society is peaceful and stable, or confused and mutable, according as they are allowed or refused their efficacy. They are therefore especially applicable in the matter of education, so potent to correct false sociology or to diffuse it. Wherefore we conclude justly that a system of universal education which ignores the natural distinctions in social order is a capital error. To attempt a system that will suit everybody, whatever his station in life, is to offer what will suit none. To say that the democratic ideal demands such a system, is to betray an imperfect concept of that ideal. It is easy to say that it requires perfect equality among citizens and no privilege: to define the meaning of this exactly is more difficult. The most authoritative expression of the democratic ideal, the Declaration of Independence, founds it on the primitive fact that all men are created free and equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The word created implies an essential equality in natural rights, not only not precluding acquired rights with the consequent accidental inequality of their subjects, but actually supporting them as their very foundation. Man is created a social being. Wherefore all find themselves equally members of society, with an equal right to be free from all hindrance in the perfecting of themselves as social individuals. For this a necessary means, inasmuch as they are social, is the procuring of the common good under the direction of competent authority. As long as life lasts that equality and freedom remains. The respecting of them in others is no small share of [390] each individual's action for the common good. Let none say that self-perfection and common action for the common good, are mutually repugnant, calling for accommodation based on mutual sacrifice. This notion, utterly false, is one of the immediate conclusions of the social contract, and one of its most noxious. Grasp the fundamental truth that man is by nature a social being, and you will see inevitably that he cannot perfect himself individually without perfecting himself in social action. To perfect oneself, to combine with others for the common good, in this to obey authority, are not repugnant but concordant. They work together; and in their perfect coordination is the perfection of social freedom, the only liberty of a being essentially social. Each member of society exists in his individual character and faculties with his essential right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Each as a social being recognizes and respects what others accomplish in virtue of their individual gifts of character and faculty. In these two is evident the foundation of consequent inequalities. These are so natural that when the revolution destroys legitimate society with its natural social distinctions, enduring because founded in right, it immediately sets up in its lawless society artificial distinctions, precarious because without title, to be maintained by violence.

But there is the cry: "No privilege." What is privilege? It is an exemption of an individual from common order and obligation. Now nothing is clearer than that by no acquisition of private and personal rights can a social being generate a title against common order and obligation. This can come from the ordainer only of that common order, namely, public authority. On the other hand, that the duties and relations of citizens should follow the nature of things and conform to actual social conditions, calls for neither exemption nor concession, nor even formal recognition. It is then utterly foreign to the true notion of privilege.

It may be asked, whether a universal system in the primary and grammar grades be impossible. I would not say impossible. Reading, writing, arithmetic, are necessary for everyone, whatever his social condition be. But I will say that under existing conditions it can be proved impracticable. As we shall see in [391] the course of this paper, those grades, being the preparation of the higher, are infected with the errors prevailing in these. However, as this is but indirect, there is every reason to believe that the correction of methods in the high school would eliminate the errors in the grades below. Let us then begin with something born of a double error, of a wrong idea of what complete education is, and of the obligation of the State to provide it, namely, vocational training. For this I can find no other foundation than the assumption that a complete educational system must provide every pupil with the opportunity of rising above his native condition, with the consequence that the State must discharge the obligation. This is in flat contradiction to the natural principle we have established, that mankind taken collectively tends to remain in the station to which it is born, and that those who rise are the exceptions. These through their talent and character will ascend, and in this they must be helped. But from vocational training, with all it implies of a deficient foundation, they will gain little. Indeed that training if examined carefully, will be found to be an occasion of sinking rather than of rising. To make the son of a skillful mechanic or of a thrifty farmer, a barely competent engineer, a mediocre journalist, a lawyer rarely briefed, or a doctor with scanty practice, is not social progress. On the other hand, if he is to remain in his native condition, he will learn his trade at home far better than in any school. The vocational school, then, commits the capital error of basing its work on the needs of the few, which it treats as if they were those of the many.

We said that vocational schools imply deficient fundamental training. The lower grades, which through exaggerated notions of the importance of observation and classification, have become less intellectual in their work, are now hampered with the practical. Pupils are encouraged by their surroundings and their prospects to make little of things purely mental, and to resist attempts to retain them within the strict circle of the grammar school. Thus, while all recognize the gravest national peril in the widespread tendency to abandon the land and other callings, laborious indeed, but neither unprofitable nor dishonorable, for what, in so many cases turns out to be some petty employment; [392] and while many a plan is proposed to mitigate it; the schools, resting on a false social theory and an idea no less false of democratic equality, ignoring also the laws of man's social nature, encourage it. We do not look for the stoppage of the movement from the farm and the trade to the desk. Our social, commercial, economic conditions would make that hope vain. But to moderate it is possible; and the moderating of it is a function of education. What then, is to be thought of a system encouraging the evil, almost forcing it upon our young people?

Let us pass from the schools to find ourselves in the university. On all sides magnificent buildings, commodious lecture halls, ample libraries and museums, with a host of professors and instructors, all at the public expense. Young people are there by the thousand. It is the climax of the false conclusion that, as every boy and girl taken distributively, has the right to rise above his or her native condition, the opportunity of doing so must be provided for all collectively. Hence to all the State offers a university education so complex and complete that from its courses may be had the proximate preparation for any career. Now if there be anything confined by its nature to a class and to a very small class at that, it is a university education. And here let me digress to meet a prejudice that may be growing in your minds. When I say a class, I do not mean the aristocracy, as found elsewhere. So far am I from this that I hold as a calamity the way we have fallen into, of looking to the English universities as models. To this is due much of the excessive sport that has made its way into our universities to the detriment of study, first into the private foundations, as Harvard and Yale, and then into the public institutions. It is bad enough to have young people using the university as a place of social enjoyment and physical prowess, when they do so at their own cost; it is infinitely worse when they thus divert from its legitimate end an institution furnished for them so lavishly at the public expense. But to resume, the function of a university is to provide general culture and special science for those who, engaging in their particular vocations, will promote the amelioration, progress and perfection of society. Such, for many reasons, must be relatively few. Now only are few capable of the task, but from the social [393] point of view few are needed for it. It is of the essence of leadership that the leaders cannot be many. The university, then, is not a place of resort for young people, unequal to such an education, to idle away in crowds a great part of their adolescence, during which they should he gaining in the school of experience habits of industry and thrift; to live at the expense of others, when, according to every natural social law they should be supporting themselves; and in the end to get a degree representing the minimum result of their long course in school and college paid for by the people. The thought of becoming something better than their fathers pushes boys and girls from the high school into the university unfit for university work. Over the ideals of professors mere numbers must prevail, and standards are lowered. The complaint is universal. Standardization, more spending of public money, additional qualifications in teachers of high school and grammar grades, degrees of various kinds in those of the undergraduate departments of colleges and universities, these, and other remedies are proposed. But there is no remedy for an evil that comes from the violation of the essential laws of man's social nature, other than a return to the observance of those laws.

The demand beginning to be heard from the universities for a restriction in the number of students, the acknowledgment now from one now from another, that as a teaching agent the small college has an efficiency all its own, are signs that some are beginning to comprehend in general the real cause of their trouble. But as long as the present theory lasts, and as long as the climax of the system built on it is found in the university, this cannot close its doors to high school graduates, the product of the system, however numerous and however imperfectly grounded. Efficacious reform must begin with the recognition of the utter falseness of the prevailing theory; must be continued by laying a safe foundation in the understanding of the nature of social man and of its necessary consequences in the development of all society; must be perfected by adapting all education to those necessary consequences.

For what is the end of education? We have shown from man's social nature that it is not to lift up our children in the [394] social scale, nor even to offer them collectively the opportunity of rising. It must be therefore to prepare them to discharge, as they should, the duties of the station to which they are born. The fleeing from this is for the multitude, as they learn too late, a fleeing to graver cares, to the losing of opportunity instead of to the gaining of it on a larger scale, and to disappointed hopes; while for the State it is the cause of serious disorder coming from the universal habit it generates of discontent and unrest. Our social infirmities are only too apparent: among the remedies devised is one much insisted on: — Education for citizenship. If this be taken, as seems to be the case, in the sense that pupils must leave the school with definite views on social reforms, that is, as a rule, with the personal ideas of a very fallible master, or those of the organization for social uplift prevailing in their part of the country, and a strong sense of the share they should take in putting such reform into execution, the dullest must see that this is nothing else than to put schools as instruments of propaganda into the hands of the huge organizations which daily usurp more and more the functions of government, dictating to executives, legislatures, judges, juries, the course to follow.

More than one case can be shown of action in obedience to this lawless moral forced which those charged with authority, had they been free, would have rejected as unprofitable and even unjust; and in the Convention of the Bar Association of the United States two years ago, this was dwelt upon as one of the gravest dangers threatening the nation. Such education for citizenship would be nothing else than vocational training assuming a most dangerous form. The only other is that which fits the individual morally and intellectually, to live honorably, industriously, soberly where his lot is cast; doing justice himself, and in common with his fellows, exacting it from others; paying authority rightful obedience, and requiring from it the protection which is his due. In a word, it is to give that moral and mental training which our Christian schools have given in the past, are giving now, and will always give, if they follow faithfully their own system, not a theory, but fundamental truth by long experience reduced to practice.

[395] Leaving aside the moral training, as not immediately connected with our present argument, we say that education taken in its perfect term has for its object, scholarship; and this we take, not in the contracted sense it has acquired in these days of specialization, but for what it really is, a broad and exact culture. Now if this be so, — and it must be so, if education is not to be strictly vocational, but rather a broad foundation on which all callings in life can rest, each in its proper place — no more telling proof of the incompetence of the present system can be brought than the steady decline of scholarship in the higher education, as of exactness and thoroughness in the secondary and primary, during the latter years of the nineteenth century and these early years of the twentieth. There has been no stinting of money. It has been lavished on universities, colleges and schools. Yet as endowments and expenditure grew what was looked for from them decreased. "The Americans are bright men," was the testimony to the Rhodes scholars of a delegation from Oxford to visit American universities, "they have no little information, but thoroughness and exactness are lacking." That scholarship is failing we must confess, if we are able to understand that the seats vacated by the scholars of the earlier nineteenth century remain unfilled. How much scholarship means, we can judge from our loss. A leading member of the Bar Association of the United States, discussing existing political and constitutional conditions, pointed out that the Bench and Bar of earlier days were noteworthy for men, not only lawyers, but also statesmen, and did not hesitate to assert that in the present crisis, for we are really at a crisis of the Constitution, there is an absolute need of such men to save it. According to the ordinary law such men are the fruit of scholarship. Though of our statesmen, jurists, administrators, some were heaven-born, nevertheless even in these how much do we find of scholarship indirectly acquired, how little did they owe to mere technical training. Take but one example in but one man, the Gettysburg address of Abraham Lincoln. Direct scholarship he had none. Still there is a something about those two hundred words or so which all must perceive and the initiated can recognize as the skill of expression and exactness in word that only scholarship can give, in him the result of a [396] careful study the technically trained would view as purposeless, that of the writings, simply as writings, of those who had enjoyed what to him was denied, the liberal education of the scholar.

Though this culture in its fullness is the special work of the university, its foundation and no little of its development belongs to the purely educational secondary school, that aims at an adequate general discipline of the mind, without any further design than to send out young people, each with a training perfect in its degree, that fits them, as did their liberal culture the Athenians of Pericles' day, to enter into commerce or service, civil or military, or to continue in the university their preparation for the professions, or to make it their life career, with an easy versatility and perfect self-possession, the sign of one without fear of finding himself unequal to his undertaking.

Such schools imply as a necessary consequence others widely different for those to whom opportunity opens not the higher culture or whom inclination or natural gifts do not draw to it. In other words, they imply a system of education fitting in with the conditions arising from man's social nature, rather than one that, as far as possible, would abolish them. Sometimes indeed circumstances compel a material union of schools. From the Irish hedge-school and the Scottish village school have come scholars we should seek in vain from the American school to-day. But it was because the master, himself not without scholarship, seeing in this one or in that possibilities of greater things, gave him ungrudgingly a training other than that received by his less capable companions, a training in the old time-honored curriculum, Latin, Greek, Euclid, algebra; not one of them, the last excepted to a certain degree, of practical value in the eyes of the modern teacher, yet all combining wonderfully to effect what Cicero calls the subactio of the mind; that laborious deep ploughing which, if it be not culture itself, is in the intellect, as in the field, a condition without which there will be no real fruit of culture. But when the larger scale is reached, what the master did of his own initiative, must be done by system.

The answer is heard, of course, that the State considers the universal good, and cannot descend to minute particulars. But this cannot mean that therefore it has the right to impose a system [397] unnatural and therefore harmful to the universal good. Rather is it a confession that education is too complex an affair to be a function of the general government, and must be left to those whom nature designates as its own agents to bring it to successful issue. Thus what has been demonstrated again and again from parental and religious right, is proved anew from the very nature of man.

All this confirms me in the advice I gave last year. Be accommodating in non-essentials. Conciliate the authorities in boards and universities. But hold fast to our traditional methods founded on truth and exemplifying all I have said far better than I can say it. I see two rays of hope promising a better day. One is that the national intelligence is beginning to be conscious of the inroads upon the Constitution already made by bureaucratic methods, and measures imposed lawlessly by certain associations upon Congress and State legislatures. The other is, that a system which contradicts human nature cannot stand. Only an hour ago I read a complaint from a leader in the world of State education that only a comparatively small percentage of those of student age avail themselves of the opportunities offered them. It may be that Americans will prefer bureaucratic tyranny to constitutional liberty, and consent to have forced upon them what nature abhors. If so, then your career is ended. But you and I think better of American people. Lastly your position in the matter is much better than that of the colleges for men. You have a net-work [sic] of academies and parish schools all over the country that must give pause to any attack. The colleges stand isolated and alone. Their pupils could be taken up into existing institutions: yours would need new institutions to be provided. This is your safeguard and it is a real one.

---

Source: Fr. Henry Woods, S.J., "The Necessary Subordination of Educational Theories to Sound Sociology," The Catholic Educational Association Bulletin 19, no. 1 (Nov. 1922): 385–397.