In recent lessons, we have followed a series of anti-Catholic developments in human thought and practice. We saw three massive movements which declared open war on Catholic tradition: the Protestant Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the foundation of the secular American school system. Each of these movements, when looked at carefully, may be characterized by the attempt to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church and undo the effects Christianity has had on human civilization since its founding.
In this lesson we will look deeper into the philosophical and historical context of the American public school system to understand how it evolved from a Protestant endeavor to create an anti-Catholic American citizenry into a secular machine for cultural change. Prepare yourself to see the fruits by which we may know that the string of revolutions that occurred between 1600 and 1900 were not the work of God. For our Lord Himself taught us that “a good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit.” When the fruits are confusion, despair, unbelief, moral disorder, the weakening of family authority, and the reduction of man to a tool of production, we must not flatter ourselves that the root was holy. We must judge a movement not by the slogans that promoted it, but by the kind of men it produces.
The Fruits of the Scientific Revolution
We studied the writing of Francis Bacon, in which he argued—contrary to all Christian and classical history—that the senses, empowered by scientific instruments, would lead men out from the “dark age” of faith-based reasoning brought to its zenith by St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Many of his ideas, along with those of his fellow scientists, were couched in religious language, as they needed to be to find acceptance among religious hearers. The early modern mind was not ready to be told plainly that the purpose of knowledge was being changed. The age still spoke in Christian words while quietly shifting to anti-Christian ends. The seeds were thus sown for consequences that would later appear as though they were unavoidable “progress,” when in truth they were the deliberate effects of a new philosophy of life.
As scientists gained greater knowledge of the forces and workings of nature, the time came to set them to practical use. Since ancient times, human society was centered on a relatively unchanged system of agricultural production, whereby the production of goods took place at the speed of nature. A man could not rush the seasons. He could not command the rain. He could not force the soil to yield beyond its measure. This natural slowness, though often burdensome, restrained human pride. It made man aware that he lived under God, not above Him, and that his life depended upon realities he did not control.
The famous Roman Cato summed up the happiness of the agricultural life when he wrote sometime before 150 BC:
“It is true that to obtain money by trade is sometimes more profitable, were it not so hazardous; and likewise money-lending, if it were as honourable…The trader I consider to be an energetic man, and one bent on making money; but, as I said above, it is a dangerous career and one subject to disaster. On the other hand, it is from the farming class that the bravest men and the sturdiest soldiers come, their calling is most highly respected, their livelihood is most assured and is looked on with the least hostility, and those who are engaged in that pursuit are least inclined to be disaffected.” (De Agricultura)
The point is not that every man was virtuous because he worked the land. The point is that the form of life itself trained men in realities that city life rarely teaches: patience, dependence, and submission to the limits God built into nature. Moreover, communities were close-knit and largely self-sufficient. The economy was local, the household was productive, and the family was not simply a place of affection but a place of labor, apprenticeship, and moral formation. Children did not grow up in artificial worlds designed for them by planners; they grew up in real worlds that demanded responsibility.
Most children were raised for a life of manual labor and but a small percentage were sent off to the university for liberal arts studies. William Cobbett captured this reality in the 1820s when he wrote:
“You should bear constantly in mind, that nine-tenths of us are, from the very nature and necessities of the world, born to gain our livelihood by the sweat of our brow. If they be, as now and then one will be, endued with extraordinary powers of mind, those powers may have an opportunity of developing themselves; and if they never have that opportunity, the harm is not very great to us or to them.” (Cottage Economy)
Cobbett’s blunt statement reminds us of something modern minds resist: not all men are meant for academic leisure, and not all societies can be healthy when they force everyone into the same educational mold. The classical world understood this clearly and therefore distinguished between liberal and servile arts. This was not contempt for labor. It was realism about the needs of life and the nature of intellectual formation.
However, the practical applications of scientific discoveries were made in the areas of manufacturing and agriculture—precisely those by which the common people gained their livelihood. The improved ability to produce metals allowed the construction of complex machines. The development of steam power replaced the need for draft animals and human effort with machines. Machines were built to make bigger and stronger machines. The common people, along with their animals, watched as their skills were rendered obsolete by metal creatures developed in laboratories and workshops. The scientific harnessing of natural forces and mechanical advantages gained were employed to replace manual labor, and the social and economic earthquake that resulted is known as the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution
The applications of scientific discoveries targeted five fundamental areas of life:
- Textile production,
- Metallurgy,
- Mining,
- Agriculture, and
- Transportation.
Textile production, rather than depending on the shearing and spinning of local workers, was increasingly performed by machines. Advances in metal production allowed wood to be replaced as the primary material used for tools and equipment. The steam engine allowed water to be pumped out of deep mine shafts, allowing coal to be extracted in greater quantities than before. The development of metal ploughs, seed drills, and steam-powered tractors eliminated the use of draft animals and manual farm labor, allowing landowners to work greater tracts of land with fewer and fewer men. The construction of canals and railways allowed natural resources to be drawn from lands previously untouched and products to be transported into areas previously too distant from centers of trade for men to develop. Steam power allowed mills to be built in places where water-powered mills would not have been able to exist. In essence, human and animal labor was replaced by machinery as the foundation of human economy.
Of course, the industrialists celebrated these developments as improvements to the human condition, and for them they were indeed. But the moral question is not whether a machine can produce more cloth than a woman at a spinning wheel. The moral question is what kind of life is built when production becomes centralized, families become dependent upon wages, and the household ceases to be a place where children learn what it means to contribute to real necessity.
Wealth gathered into the hands of the machine owners, while the traditional social structure of the farm and neighborhood was destroyed. Machines were gathered into “factories” so that manufacturing could take place under a single roof before being sent to a worldwide marketplace. Men without work in the country had to relocate to cities to find work in factories, on railways, or in mines. Eventually their families followed and found work of their own.
The managers of factories were seeking efficiency and profit, and that meant bypassing elder laborers for women and children. After all, the new jobs were often not heavily physical and required little more than supervision or repetition—work suited to children. Children were put to work for entire days and, along with women, were given unhealthy and dangerous tasks. They were worked so badly that the first labor laws limited work by children under eighteen years old to twelve hours per day. The mind should pause here. A society that must legally protect children from being worked to death is not advancing morally. It is advancing materially while descending spiritually.
As the upper classes worked for the protection of women and children from exploitation, child labor laws were established. Ultimately child labor was made illegal. This meant that children were no longer needed on the farm and could not work in factories. The traditional school calendar and schedule were based around the assumption that children had to help at home. But urbanization produced by the Industrial Revolution led to the development of a new school model. The child was no longer a productive member of the household; he became, in practice, a managed creature whose time had to be filled by institutions.
The effects of this cultural revolution were described by the philosopher John Dewey in 1900:
“The change…that overshadows and even controls all others, is the industrial one?the application of science resulting in the great inventions that have utilized the forces of nature on a vast and inexpensive scale: the growth of a world-wide market as the object of production, of vast manufacturing centers to supply this market, of cheap and rapid means of communication and distribution between all its parts. Even as to its feebler beginnings, this change is not much more than a century old; in many of its most important aspects it falls within the short span of those now living. One can hardly believe there has been a revolution in all history so rapid, so extensive, so complete…Even our moral and religious ideas and interests…are profoundly affected.” (John Dewey, School and Society)
Dewey’s observation is crucial: he admits the revolution is not merely economic. It reaches into moral and religious life. This is the very thing modern people are trained not to notice. We are told that technology is neutral, that economics is separate from morality, that schools can be “non-sectarian.” Dewey, though an enemy of the Faith, is more honest than many Christians. He admits plainly that the revolution touches the deepest things.
An Education Suited to the New Society
The summary of the effects of the Industrial Revolution above were provided by John Dewey, who is no mere historian or sociologist. Dewey was an atheist who is recognized as a key contributor to several philosophical movements of the early twentieth century including pragmatism, secular humanism, and progressivism. His unbelief is not a footnote. It is the key. A man who denies God will necessarily deny man’s final end. And when man’s final end is denied, education must be redesigned. It can no longer aim at holiness and wisdom. It must aim at social function.
More important to our discussion is the profound influence Dewey had on American education. He taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia University’s Teachers College, two of the most influential institutions for the development of modern educational theory in the early 1900s. We must reflect on the fact that his explanation of the historical situation reveals how conscious educational theorists were of the changes they were making. They understood that the revolution was comprehensive and unprecedented. Notice the adjectives: vast, rapid, extensive, complete, hurriedly, startling, abrupt. It is not normally good when changes take place that are deep, extensive, and rapid. Such changes leave men disoriented. They break continuity. They dissolve tradition. They produce a generation that knows only the new world and cannot imagine the old.
What is frightening about this movement is not merely the history of discoveries and applications, but the opportunity Dewey and his fellow pragmatists seized to implement equally radical and rapid changes in education. Today we look back at traditional Catholic culture and wonder where it went as though it was slowly lost by accident. Dewey’s words show that the leaders were not confused. They were purposeful. They saw the old world dying and decided to design a new one.
He wrote:
“That this revolution should not affect education in some other than a formal and superficial fashion is inconceivable…”
He then describes the household and neighborhood system—how clothing was made, food was produced, tools were forged, furniture was built, mills operated, and children were initiated gradually into real work. He admits openly that this life formed discipline, order, responsibility, obligation, cooperation, judgment, and a sense of reality. He also admits that no “object lessons” or training exercises can replace the education of living among real things and real necessity. His admission is devastating to modern educational pride: the old life educated better than the new schools ever could.
And yet, having praised the old order, Dewey concludes that it is useless to bemoan its departure. Why? Because the goal is not to preserve what is good, but to adapt man to the new world. He declares:
“It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices.”
Here we see the heart of modern education: not the formation of man according to permanent truth, but the continual reformation of man according to changing social conditions. This is the exact opposite of classical Catholic education. Classical education assumes that human nature is stable, truth is stable, goodness is stable, and therefore the aims of education are stable. Dewey assumes that society is changing so rapidly that education must become a tool of social engineering. That is why “reform” never ends. The system cannot rest because its purpose is not wisdom but adaptation.
In essence, Dewey admits that the society being destroyed by the Industrial Revolution and urbanization was an excellent one in many moral respects. Children grew up with responsibility, respect, judgment, and community. He admits that no amount of school lessons could reproduce what those children learned through everyday experience at home and on the farm. Nevertheless, the changes demanded that something new be designed—no matter how good the old was and for how long.
What were the benefits of the revolution? Dewey lists them: worldwide markets, rapid communication, rapid transportation, rapid distribution, commercial necessity. Every benefit concerns material wealth. The losses concern the moral life of families and children. Here we see the real evil of these movements: the progress was material and temporal, while the impoverishment was moral and spiritual.
As we learned earlier, the Scientific Method was not unknown to the ancient philosophers, but undesired. Here we see why. All the so-called advances of the modern industrialized world belong to the needs of the body—and they do not come at no cost to the soul. As these changes were being made, the planners knew perfectly well what was happening. Dewey explains it with chilling clarity: the soul of man was being sold for the comforts of the flesh, and the schools would be the machinery used to train the next generation to accept the bargain as normal.
Democracy and Education
Dewey’s ultimate vision was to transform schools from places where children went to gain mastery of a handful of traditional academic subjects into a new society of its own. The school was no longer to be a place where the intellect is trained by grammar, logic, rhetoric, and the mathematical arts. It was to be a place where children are shaped socially, emotionally, politically, and economically. In such a vision, the old academic disciplines become optional, even burdensome, because they aim at contemplation and truth rather than productivity and social participation.
He believed that by creating a microcosm of the adult world children could learn to participate in a “free society,” learn to communicate, make social judgments, and develop the skills and interests they judged beneficial. But the key word in such a project is not education; it is democracy. Education becomes training for the state. It becomes preparation for participation in a human order that is assumed to be the highest end. This is why the modern school cannot be neutral. If it is designed as a miniature society, then it must adopt the ruling beliefs of the society it imitates. When the society becomes secular, the school becomes secular by necessity. The school is a mirror and a tool.
The preparation of a healthy, docile workforce, along with future inventors of new technologies, became the goal of schools. Inasmuch as the household and neighborhood systems of the past were to be relevant no more, relations between students and their parents were de-emphasized, and their relationship to peers and advisors within the system was given greater emphasis. Children needed to be trained not for family life, but for the new industrialized and democratic society. The school expanded from a schoolhouse to a laboratory with instruction in mechanical and industrial arts, home-making, natural and social sciences, health and physical education, fine and performing arts, and citizenship.
The advances made in assembly-line efficiency in factories were applied to the organization of schools, with each child being moved along in a row. The idea of education as an apprenticeship to wisdom was replaced by education as processing. Man was at last reduced to one more machine being manufactured and prepared for the cause of social progress. The classical Catholic view of man—as a rational creature ordered to God—was replaced by the modern view of man—as a social unit ordered to the state and economy.
Summary
Such were the ultimate fruits of the Scientific Revolution. Note that the legal efforts of Protestants to forbid Catholic participation in public schools provided precedents that ultimately allowed the secular takeover of schools, with Protestants drinking the cup of their own folly to the dregs. Their first rebellion against the Catholic Church was a sign that evil things were coming. The rest simply flowed out from the door they opened at the Reformation.
With the Industrial Revolution every aspect of society changed—and that often within a single generation. Families gave up the means of production and moved to cities to be near factories. Despite dangerous conditions, women and children worked in mines and factories until abuses were outlawed. Child labor was made illegal, and children who once learned responsibility through necessary work became idle in an urban world unless they were gathered into institutions.
The school leaders, including John Dewey, did not merely respond to these changes accidentally. They consciously redesigned the school so that it would no longer function as a meeting place where children learn a small number of traditional academic subjects, but as an artificial society in which children could be trained to embrace and enter into the brave new world outside. This is the dawn of modern education: not the perfection of man, but the adaptation of man; not wisdom, but usefulness; not the ordering of the soul to God, but the ordering of the child to the industrial democratic state.
Source: Understanding Classical Catholic Education.
