Educational Review DECEMBER, 1911 THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL OF EDUCATION The student of the history of education, if he is to derive profit from his study, should not be content with ascertaining the facts about educational systems, but should strive to separate from the mass of historical data the content, the method, and the ideal, in each period and in each country whose educational institutions and systems he studies. He should devote special attention to the ideal, which, he will find, dominates and determines both the content and the method. And he should not hesitate to criticise the ideal; he should try to form an estimate of it, and compare it with other ideals that preceded it or followed it. The Catholic student is justified in adopting the Christian ideal and using it both retrospectively and prospectively. That is, he should judge pre-Christian systems according to the degree in which they approximate the Christian ideal, or embody one element of it, and he should estimate the different educational systems of Christian times according as they deviate from the Christian ideal or exhibit some phase of the historical development of that ideal. What, then, is the Christian ideal of education and how does it stand related to pre-Christian ideals? In the first place, pagan education never fully grasped the principle that each individual human being has an independent personal value. Education among savages and primitive races subjected the individual to tribal cus tom. It knew no educational principle except that of imitation, and the imitation which it recognized was of the most elementary, static, unprogressive, mechanical, soulkilling kind. Its model was the adult member of the tribe, and its method aimed at the exact reproduction in the young savage of the manner and measure of success exhibited by the adult. It placed no premium on progress, condemning all innovations as not only harmful but in some indefinite way, unholy. When education aimed at recapitulation, as it did among the Chinese, the recapitulation also was mechanical, and left no room for individual departure from the standard imposed by custom or national tradition. The Hindus and the Egyptians educated for the caste, the fixed social or religious determination of values. They subordinated the aspirations and needs of the individual to the requirements of the social or religious institution. They took into consideration neither the present constitution, mental and physical, of the individual, nor the possibilities that lay before him in the future. With their attention fixed steadily on the past, they strove to fit the pupil to carry on unimpaired, but also without augment or improvement, the heritage of the past: they did not encourage him either to add to his inheritance or to improve his own condition by the acquisition of qualities that would make him individually better or happier. The Persians and the Spartans educated for citizenship. They broke to some extent with fixed tradition and the restrictions of the caste system. They were consequently progressive along the lines of progress which they chose. Our criticism of their educational system is that they drew those lines too closely around the individual. They assigned too narrow a scope to human endeavor. For man is intended not merely to be a citizen or a soldier. As we understand it, man's destiny implies the development of factors spiritual, moral, intellectual and physical which do, indeed, make him a good citizen and a good soldier, but which make him also a good man, and consequently a good citizen or a good soldier. The Greeks and the Romans understood this. They did not exclude good citizenship from their educational ideal. At the same time, they aimed higher than citizenship by educating for human excellence according to a purely human standard. The Greeks educated for beauty and happiness, the Romans for success and effectiveness. They both included civic virtue and devotion to the service of the state in their standard of excellence. Nevertheless, we judge that standard to be too low, because, aiming at what is purely natural, it was inevitable that they should fall below the standard of nature, like the marksman who, aiming directly at the mark, hits below the mark, owing to the force of gravitation. The Greeks and Romans made education free, by removing the limitations and restrictions of tribe, caste and national custom. But they did not make it entirely free. For, they exposed to death, that is, murdered, weak and deformed children; they slaughtered the defenceless slave and captive, "butchered to make a Roman holiday"; they treated woman as a chattel; in a word they failed to recognize that each and every individual, no matter how apparently useless to the state, has a claim on society and a right to life and happiness. This Christianity did. It taught from the beginning that God is Father of all mankind, that every child born into the world is impressed with the image and likeness of God, that human life is a sacred thing, and that no system of education may be tolerated which overlooks or forgets the infinite value of a soul, even though it be the soul of a slave, an outcast, or a weak and defective infant. Freedom means the recognition of the value of the individual. Greece introduced freedom in the political, the intellectual, the moral and the esthetic order. But it furnished no enduring foundation of freedom. Christianity, by insisting on the value of every human soul, granted the first magna charta, the first great charter of freedom, and can claim what no other institution can claim, that it first made man truly free, with the freedom of the children of God. This, then, is the first point in our description of the Christian ideal: Christianity emancipated the individual from the restrictions of tribe, caste, or nation and the limitations of imperfect human standards. In the next place, Christianity, as is well known, struck at the root of some of the grossest evils of paganism. It taught the sanctity of home. Even among the Romans, whose worship of the household deities (lares et penates) typified a hallowed instinct of domestic ties, the home was but imperfectly consecrated. It was dominated by the irresponsible power, the possible tyranny, of the father, who ruled by virtue of the patria potestas, and could rear his children or discard them to perish by starvation, as he saw fit. In Christian times the power of the head of the family has been limited not only in law but also in conscience. His authority is not absolute but fiduciary. He is responsible to God for the lives and souls of his children, and while they are in their minority he is bound both by law and by conscience to support them. Christianity taught the sacredness of the marriage tie. We know what the institution of marriage was in imperial Rome. The satirists and the comic poets found in the frequency and facility of divorce a fruitful theme for their jibes, and the moralists deplored in vain the promiscuity, for it amounted to that, which had taken the place of the stern conjugal fidelity of earlier days. Christianity taught that marriage is a sacred thing, a sacrament typified by no less august a union than that of Christ with his Church. It taught, and still teaches, when, as in the Catholic Church, it is faithful to its traditions, that the marriage tie is indissoluble, and that divorce is as unchristian as it is opposed to the best interests of the state. Christianity taught the sacredness of child-life. The Romans had, indeed, a saying, “Maxima pueris debetur reverentia." They meant that older people should forbear in the presence of children, and not sully youthful souls with words and thoughts destructive of childlike innocence. They did not, however, value the soul of a child as Christianity has taught us to do. They were allowed by their laws to sacrifice the lives of children whom they considered defective. We believe that every soul has a priceless value, that every human being has a right to the life which God has given him, and that when Christ took little children in his arms and blessed them He consecrated child-life and made it a thing sacred and inviolate. One could go farther in this comparison between pagan and Christian ideas. Enough has, however, been said to establish the point that Christianity brought a remedy for some of the grossest evils of paganism, evils which had a direct influence on pagan ideals of education. In the third place, Christianity taught in a definite manner that there is a life beyond the grave, and that there are, consequently, values spiritual, moral and intellectual, which are superior to merely temporal and economic values. "What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?" Life and its interests are to be judged, human institutions customs and observances, above all, education which is a preparation for life-all these are to be judged, not by the standard of time, but by the standard of eternity. The spiritual interests of man are supreme. Here we have the heart, so to speak, of the whole subject, the dominant idea in Christianity, by which all pre-Christian education is judged and found wanting and which, in the various phases of its historical development, is the key |