The Pivot of Education

The Crisis of Western Education, by Christopher Dawson. Sheed and Ward, $3.95 Mr. Christopher Dawson’s The Crisis of Western Education is a collection of essays, some of which were first published a few years ago in America, the Commonweal, and other Catholic journals of opinion. Together they advance Dawson’s proposal for a reform of the American Catholic liberal arts college. He calls for a heart to liberal studies, a hub from which the spokes of learning would span out in the direction of their own finalities and to which they would all return as to a fixed center. And he suggests that the most natural center for liberal education is the reality of Christian culture itself, the living organism which gave birth to our common intellectual inheritance and the soil in which that common inheritance has its being.

Every education that is liberal must be centered around some cultural tradition. Every education must be structured and located historically. Some integrating force must unite the several disciplines making up a liberal education. The older humanism centered itself around the reality of classical culture and introduced students not simply to a series of literary and philosophical subjects but to a world in the reality of which they were invited to participate. This common humanism cut across the divisions caused by the Reformation and enabled Europe to remain a common culture until the Enlightenment.

FW

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Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

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The Crisis of Western Education, by Christopher Dawson. Sheed and Ward, $3.95 Mr. Christopher Dawson’s The Crisis of Western Education is a collection of essays, some of which were first published a few years ago in America, the Commonweal, and other Catholic journals of opinion. Together they advance Dawson’s proposal for a reform of the American Catholic liberal arts college. He calls for a heart to liberal studies, a hub from which the spokes of learning would span out in the direction of their own finalities and to which they would all return as to a fixed center. And he suggests that the most natural center for liberal education is the reality of Christian culture itself, the living organism which gave birth to our common intellectual inheritance and the soil in which that common inheritance has its being.

Every education that is liberal must be centered around some cultural tradition. Every education must be structured and located historically. Some integrating force must unite the several disciplines making up a liberal education. The older humanism centered itself around the reality of classical culture and introduced students not simply to a series of literary and philosophical subjects but to a world in the reality of which they were invited to participate. This common humanism cut across the divisions caused by the Reformation and enabled Europe to remain a common culture until the Enlightenment.