La Salle University - Explorer Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

Page 9 text:

a tnc our age have made intensive technical training, par- ticularly in the fields of science and business, an es- sential element of the modem educational program, and that the techniques of such training should in- evitably modify our thinking on the subject. But we feel that in the course of this modification it has be- come habitual with us to regard the cultivation of the whole of human nature, as such and for its own sake, as secondary to the cultivation of some single func- tion of human nature, inquisitive or acquisitive. It is against precisely this inversion of value that a careful attention to Newman ' s ideas on education would be able to protect us; and we hope that one effect of this publication will be a stimulation of interest in those ideas among Catholic students.

Page 8 text:

It has been almost a century since Cardinal New- man delivered the lectures on education which sub- sequently became known as the Idea of a University. His views are as valid in our day as they were in his; but though widely admired as theory, they were just as widely neglected in educational practise. We have designed this yearbook to be a fresh statement of our Catholic conviction that the essence of education in the fullest sense of the term is in fact the cultivation of the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of the intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us which Newman understood it to be. We are aware that the practical requirements of

Page 10 text:

In a world not yet freed from the chains of i inor- ance, doubt and mistrust, St. John Baptist de La Salle and Cardinal Newman stand as two beacons lighting the way to intellectual franchisement and religious certitude. History often belies the meaning of the word progress , and it is only in the field of education that it can be accurately measured; for science has a way of destroying itself and men have a way of per- vertin their religion.