Education in a Christian Society

MY DEAR OLDHAM, My only justification for attempting to write about education in a Christian society is that no one else has so far done so. The problems of education in a secular society – but perhaps the right word is neither secular nor pagan, but infidel – have been dealt with again and again by those who can speak from vocation, knowledge, and experience; and some of the writers who speak with authority on these problems are men of strong Christian convictions. And the subject of religious instruction in schools, under contemporary conditions, is receiving a good deal of attention. My subject is education in a society which should be Christian in the sense and to the degree indicated in my book The Idea of a Christian Society. I was not there concerned with the means to be employed to bring such a society into existence; and I am not here concerned with the means of realizing a Christian education. Yet I maintain that it is well to have some notion of where we want to go before we arrange to start upon a journey; and, accordingly, while I am concerned with the end and not the means, I believe that our conception of the end should not be wholly without influence upon our action.

What Is Our End?

The lack of any clear notion of the end seems to me to impair much contemporary discussion of education. One error into which we may fall is that of assuming that our social framework is always going to be what it has been and elaborating our reforms within that frame: this might be described as an attempt to give our fathers and grandfathers a better education – and our fathers and grandfathers are no longer in need of any re-education that we could give them. The other mistake, and one to which in these times we are more prone, is to plan for a “changing world” – but on the assumption, that we all too readily make, that we have a pretty shrewd idea of what the changes are going to be. This form of gambling has the disadvantage that however the world changes – and I concede that our world is likely to change with great rapidity – a great deal of change will be unexpected, and some of it unrecognized when it comes. It is like cutting cloths for a child which is growing fast, but not at a steady rate and in regular proportions: the child will always be finding itself in a new suit which doesn’t fit, and which never will fit. All that we can say for such reforms is that, if they do not give us a better education, they will at least give us one which is not wrong in the same respects. Prudence advises us to restrict our reforms to patching and changing here and there, not committing ourselves to a desperate hazard on what the future is going to be like. But at the same time reason counsels us to avoid surrendering ourselves either to a present which is already past or to a future which is unknown, and to look below the surface of apparent fixity or inscrutable change in search of those educational values which can be regarded as permanent. We hear a good deal of “social philosophy” and of the “philosophy of education,” as well as of the “sociological attitude”: but if the philosophy is to be more than a philosophy of flux, it must endeavor to determine what are these permanent values.

The Essential Values

I suggest that the values which we most ignore, the recognition of which we most seldom find in writings on education, are those of Wisdom and Holiness, the values of the sage and of the saint. I have no need, in the Christian News-Letter, to attempt to define these terms; but it is as well to remind ourselves that there are innumerable people today to whom the terms would be meaningless if I defined them. In the East, and in pre-Christian Europe, the sage and the saint have been hardly distinguishable from each other. We must recognize the truth in both the Oriental and the Christian views. In the East, it must be remembered, the sage as the educated man at the highest stage – the sadhu, or mahatma, or whatever other word you use – was a person who had educated his emotions and sensibility, as well as his mind, by the most arduous application to study. The Christian West, on the other hand, while ready to recognize and to canonize the union of intellectual and spiritual excellence in one person (St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross are two types of such union) has held a doctrine of divine grace unknown to the Orient, and has always recognized saintliness in the humble and unlearned as well. I believe, of course, that Christianity is right; but Christianity in its decayed forms could learn much from the East. For our tendency has been to identify wisdom with knowledge, saintliness with natural goodness, to minimize not only the operation of grace but self-training, to divorce holiness from education. Education has come to mean education of the mind only; and an education which is only of the mind – of the mind in its restricted sense – can lead to scholarship, to efficiency, to worldly achievement and to power, but not to wisdom.

What is known as “education for culture” and what is known as “character-building” are the atrophied vestiges of wisdom and holiness. In a Christian Society we should not educate primarily either for culture or for character; but culture and character might be by-products of our education, as technical efficiency would be incidental to it.

Three Purposes of Education

In this context I may refer to the classification of Max Weber, which, as I only know it at second hand, I should be diffident in mentioning, but that it may be known to readers of this paper from Professor Clarke’s Education and Social Change. Weber distinguishes three main types of education throughout history: charismatic education, education on culture, specialist education. I shall not criticize such a classification without having read the defense of it, which no doubt the inventor gives. As an account of historical process from primitive times to the present day, it may be very satisfactory within the author’s frame of reference. The term charismatic education does not sound very happy, inasmuch as “charismatic” means “pertaining to a favor or grace from God”; and the relation between grace and education is not clear. But it probably meant more to Professor Weber than it does to Professor Clarke: to whom, in the book I have just mentioned, it seems to mean hardly more than the practice by which Sir John Falstaff lost his voice – “hallowing and singing of anthems.” Professor Mannheim defines charismatic education clearly by saying that it

I can hardly suppose that this is meant to comprehend the whole of education of the “primitive races” any more than of the higher races in their religious phase; because in the highly organized societies of Polynesia, surely, you can find all three types of education: charismatic, cultural, and specialized very well coordinated. And in the higher religious education of India a great deal of what Mannheim, in the passage quoted above, calls “transfer of concrete contents” takes place: the study of the sacred Scriptures. Nevertheless the category of charismatic education seems to approximate most nearly of the three to what I mean by the central values of Christian education – with this reservation, that it looks very different from the inside.

What Type of Man?

At this point, I make no doubt, many readers will have come to the conclusion that I am quite prepared to dispense altogether, in the Christian Society, with everything that they know and value by the name of education – to the conclusion, in fact, that my goal is in effect a relapse into barbarism. I will say, therefore, in the hope that it may help, that I recognize the need for laboratories and technical schools, as well as for institutions for the study of history and philosophy and ancient and modern languages, in any future society that I can desire or imagine. I am not envisaging, either, a society of saints or adepts. The important question is: What is the type of man which a society holds in highest honor? What is the type of man – below the heights of the greatest genius or of the greatest infusion of grace – which it is proudest to produce? Whatever ideals a society maintains (and it is not necessarily conscious of what its real ideals are) will insensibly influence its whole system of education, will affect the way in which it teaches, the way in which it acquires, the way in which it uses, the most apparently remote or specialized disciplines.

There is certainly no system to which we can go back. The ideals of The Governor, the ideals of John Locke, those of Thomas Arnold, are all equally exhausted and inapplicable to any future Christian society. And while wisdom and holiness are, of course, unchanging, yet the technique of attaining them will change, and the technique of inculcating a right attitude toward them on the part of the vast majority of human beings who can attain as a minimum (and it is no small thing to attain) the right attitude toward them – the right attitude which is the starting point from which salvation may be come by.

The scope of education is no longer the task of merely training individuals in and for a society, but also the much larger task of training a society itself – without our having any fundamental accepted principles on which to train it. The scope of education has been rapidly expanding as social organisms have broken down and been replaced by the mechanizations which increases, while it manipulates, the atomization of individuals.

Immediate Reforms

There results a good deal of confusion of motives about the immediate reforms that are advocated. A case in point is that of the school-leaving age. I do not hold any fixed opinion as to what this age should be. I am quite prepared to be persuaded that under the conditions in which the greater part of our population lives, there is everything to be said for raising the age to 18. I only suggest that we ought to consider whether it should not be our purpose to change these conditions, rather than merely adapt our system of education to them. It is better that boys and girls should be at school than that they should be subject to industrial exploitation, in an environment where family influence is negligible or even harmful, and where local community does not exist. But a change which is all to the good in certain circumstances is not necessarily a change for the better absolutely; and it makes all the difference whether we acknowledge that such a change is merely making the best of a bad job, or whether we pretend that it is good in itself. Is this further education necessarily going to make the majority wiser or better people?

I am excepting the number of those who possess the ability to acquire special techniques – as of the various kinds of engineering; assuming that their being trained to exercise this ability will be of advantage to society. But it is at least an open question, whether for the majority of human beings there is not an optimum amount of school instruction, and an optimum amount of knowledge, that they are able to acquire without excessive and deleterious strain. It is at least an open question, whether we cannot injure society and the individual as much by over-education, as by not providing enough.

I do not wish to prejudice the answer to such questions; I only say that they ought to be raised, and that they can only be rightly answered if we keep hold of the right ultimate values of education in right relation to the problems of society, and hold the right values there also.

I cannot help suspecting, however, that it is possible that education, in the meaning of the word which it has in contemporary society, is over-valued – by being contrasted simply with the absence of itself, and not with anything positive. With this thought in mind, I think that the claims of “equalization of opportunity,” and the “democratization of education” ought to be scrutinized very carefully. I trust that no one will suppose me to be a defender of a social order and an educational system based upon income – the best thing to be said for which is that it manages to keep up some pretense of being based upon breeding. I am only apprehensive lest, as is so common in human affairs, we see the defects and dangers of the system we would institute less clearly than those of that which we would replace. The concept of “opportunity” can be a very dangerous one if we are not severe in our standards of what it is desirable to have opportunity for. Unless society can exercise some unconscious pressure upon its members to want the right things, the right life, the opportunity given may be merely the opportunity to follow false lights, the opportunity to follow aims for which the individual is unsuited, or which are not to the advantage of society. There will (I hope) always be a few individuals who will follow their own aims, independent of the social influences by which they are surrounded, unfettered by fear or flattery: it is probably to the advantage of society, even, that it should nourish a few anti-social people. But for the great majority, “opportunity” may be no more than opportunity to aim to excel (or at least keep their end up) at whatever the people with whom they associate think admirable. I am not the enemy of opportunity; I only say that in providing opportunity you are assuming a very grave responsibility. Unless, at least, you hold a doctrine of the natural goodness of man (and even so you can hardly avoid admitting the corruption of society) you have the responsibility of inculcating the right values.

Equalization of opportunity, then, and democratization of education, are in danger of becoming uncriticized dogmas. They can come to imply, as an ultimate, a complete mobility of society – and of an atomized society. I mean by this that many of those who hold these two principles may be unconsciously carrying them over from nineteenth-century liberalism – and in so far as they sprang from liberalism they may end in totalitarianism. It is to think of the individual in isolation, apart from family and from local milieu, as having certain intellectual and sensitive capacities to be nurtured and developed to their full extent; and of a system of education as a vast calculating machine which would automatically sort out each generation afresh according to a culture-index of each child. The result might be to produce a race of spiritual nomads. Again, I wish only to raise issues, not to prejudice them. But it seems to me that there is a danger in simplifying the concept of society into the individual and the nation, and ignoring all the organic groupings in between; and it seems to me possible that in a healthy society there must be an element of fixity and an element of mobility, and that the problem lies in this adjustment.

These considerations may seem to have taken me far afield from the main point of this letter – the affirmation of the end values of Christian education as wisdom and holiness. I hope that anyone who makes this comment at this point may be persuaded to read again what I have said, and give me the benefit of another hearing; for I feel confident that it is only in the light of these two values that what I have just been saying can be appreciated.

 Yours sincerely,

 T. S. Eliot.

*The Christian News-Letter, March 13th, 1940; The Supplement No. 20