Bismarck in Germany, Croce in Italy (according to some), Dewey in America, Lenin in Russia (although he never wrote an article on pedagogy), Rousseau in France, and many others, changed the education systems to the new liberalism, which was both atheistic and humanistic in nature. That the State could determine what a "good citizen" would study, was the agenda of the military strategist or the philosophical pragmatist, who denied the spiritual soul and the life of religion in the cultural, social and political sphere.
We see the results in all the countries of the world, and I burst out laughing when an Englishman, who is a teacher, complained that the Finnish system was successful because it is socialist. The British system has failed because it is socialist.j If Ronald Reagan had succeeded in either reining in or destroying the federal Department of Education, we would not be in quite the mess we are as a Nation.
But, as St. Anselm knew, whose feast day is coming up next week, an educated clergy needed Classical Education; that is the study of the greatest minds of the Classical World, along with religion, philosophy, logic, astronomy, grammar, history, even manners. He invented a system of Classical Education spread through-out the world by the Benedictines until recent times, when they, too, feel into the trap of Bismarckian "gymnasium" and not the "academy".
The Trivium and Quadrivium are not merely quaint educational methodologies, but the basis for Western Education. Without a philosophy of education which is rooted in the soul and spirit of humankind, which has a goal of eternal Truth and Life, education becomes a tool in the hand of those in power, creating a lackluster citizenry easy to overpower. Classical Education created thinkers, a real threat to those who idolize the State.
This is the new slavery and we see it now. Children cannot take control of their own destinies, nor make choices for noble causes, unless they are exceptionally holy. Adults in the West have become mere emotional responders to whatever crisis is at hand, be it economic or social.
The syndicalists, anarchists, communists and socialists have won in many countries in Europe. Watch the elections in France...
Almost ninety years ago, Gramsci wrote the phrase, "the crisis of the West". How is it that Catholics, who created Western Civilization in the Greco-Roman tradition, along with Revelation and the Tradition of the Catholic Church, missed this crisis?
It has been a long time brewing....
