Boston College - Sub Turri Yearbook (Boston, MA)

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SOB mmm ■ ' ' •a. Sntrobuctorp Jl )t Eisijt darter [i ' npijnghl, ly.iJi THE great advantage of the monastic training, which was the only educa- tional training Europe received for over a thousand years, the training which built up the whole of our civilization, was primarily its certitude — which involved continuity. It had one philosophy running throughout: therefore the order in which things were taught, the relative importance given to the subjects, the life which was emphasized as the right life to be led by those thus educated, was all known. It was not a matter of mere opinion, but formed part of the teacher and the taught. On this ac- count it created a permanent and stable society. If what it had taught had been false, or in as much as it had been false, that society would not have been stable — which it most eminently was. But the philosophy was true, and by means of the education based upon it our culture was rooted and estab- lished. On mere opinion or on changing philosophies nothing can be erected, least of all a system of education. But what is worse than a lack of certitude and almost worse than a lack of truth, is the effect upon education of abandoning the right order in which things should be taught. In the modern world the attempt at a right order has been simply abandoned. The principle is taken for granted that a right order cannot be discovered, and that therefore the only things certainly taught shall be the things immediately and material- ly necessary— and even those are left to the chance of changmg moods, so that, for instance, one kind of history is taught in one generation, and

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ilr. Pelloc in contributing the following introduction tor Sub Turri- I9J2, has done us a kindness, appreciation for which we cannot express in words other than those whose simplicity we know he will surely understand:

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- SOB SORBI o ' another in another; one set of subjects is omitted in one generation, and another in another: there is no permanence or continuity. Now the right order is manifestly to begin by teaching the philosophy itself, which is, in the case of a true philosophy, theology. The basis of all education must be the instilling of first principles upon right and wrong, the nature of man, his fate, his responsibilities. Today the nearest thing we get to that is the instill- ing of the religion of patriotism, the wor- ship of the nation, which is of course idolatry — not because the nation should not be served or loved, but because to make it the chief end of man ' s respect and activi- ties is to substitute the nation for God; and to substitute anything created and temporal for God is idolatry. So much being known, the next thing to teach was all that by which civilization had come to be what it was; therefore Latin was taught, because Latin was the language of our civilization and the common bond — the language not only of religious ritual but of wisdom and learning and intercourse between men of various local speech. There can be no Christendom without some common tongue of this kind. Only after the emphasis on this most important thing of all, and next to it the sense of continuity with the past, came immediately necessary material things. Further, it must be remarked that educa- tion meant, as it ought to mean today, not only the teaching of certain common facul- ties in reading and writing and counting, but the teaching of the arts: how to carry on whatever business you had taken up — husbandry, carpentry, building, writing, painting, sculpture, and the rest. Education which sacrifices such things to the mere power of reading print is on a false basis altogether — and on how false a basis we can see by the tyi e of i)rint that modern education causes to be read.