A guest article by Joseph Bevan, author of Two Families and Traddy Daddy.
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| School children in 1947 (source) |
How it started
My own father, who had taught in schools for over 50 years, liked to explain: “there are three essential items needed for the education of children: Kennedy’s Latin Primer, a bible and a cane.” This notion, also favoured in the 19th century by the likes of Doctor Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School and featured in Tom Brown’s School Days, was the main principle behind the foundation of the Protestant English public schools and lasted until the 1960s.
These ideas were also adopted by the new Catholic schools which were staffed by monks and priests after emancipation in the 1850s, but with the addition of a fourth element: the formation of souls. The original purpose of schools such as Ampleforth, Downside, Belmont, Stonyhurst and others, was partly to foster vocations into the sponsoring religious orders which ran the schools, such as the Benedictines and the Jesuits. To a large extent, this approach was successful as young men and girls left school and joined the monastery or convent.
The 1950s represented a high watermark in the history of the Catholic private school as many of them were over-subscribed and the sponsoring religious houses were often over-full with recruits. The late Father Hugh Thwaites SJ once told me that in those days there were simply too many priests and monks, more than could be coped with. The seminary in Northern England, Ushaw, records over 300 young men training for the priesthood in one year. Whilst on the subject of Ushaw, there is a short video on Youtube which gives a guided tour of the seminary, now in ruins and overgrown with brambles.
What is education?
I regret having to contradict the wisdom of my father, but I excuse him on the grounds that he was talking about a past era, when pupils under his tutelage mainly came from good Catholic families and were largely well brought up by their parents. The rebelliousness of the younger generation would have been a novel concept to him as he surveyed his classroom, containing peaceful and well-mannered children. With the advent of experimental and ‘experiential’ methods of teaching, which have produced a generation of illiterates and amorals, we need to return to the basic precepts required for teaching our kids.
The main principle, which I propose, is that secondary education should be a privilege and not a right. It had once been thus, and I can prove this by confirming that prior to the advent of state education, if a child was capable of benefitting from going up to a secondary school, it would go, regardless of family background. The whole private school system, Catholic and non-Catholic, operated as educational charities where many of the pupils were educated either free of charge or on substantially reduced fees. The whole concept of mass state education is flawed, and we are now facing a situation where the state is operating a child-minding service for parents who both go out to work. Comprehensive schoolteachers will readily admit that most of the kids don’t want to be at their schools, that the parents do not support the school and, as a result, the teachers themselves feel demoralised and ill-treated. They also would rather quit the profession, as many are now doing.
What is teaching?
I submit that the three core principles of education, in order of priority, are firstly, the training of the soul, secondly, the training of the memory, and thirdly, the training of the powers of reasoning.
The training of the soul
Education without authority is impossible. All authority comes from God and is passed down to the pupils via the teacher, just as it is passed from the parent to the pre-school infant. Ideally the child will have already learned the virtue of obedience and respect for authority before starting school. Sadly, many parents fall short in this God-given duty to be a child’s first educator. Once at school pupils must accept without rebellion all that they receive from the teacher. Of course, the kids must question the information they receive for clarification and to assist understanding, but on no account can they question the authority of Mrs Jones. As authority is a supernatural concept, the school must adopt supernatural means to impress it on its children. This is achieved through a common life of prayer and the sacraments, fortified with religious instruction.
I do acknowledge, however, that even these days, there are still excellent and dedicated teachers who command respect from their charges. These men and women have mastered ‘pupil skills’ and are able to get the best out of their kids. Unfortunately, this is based on the modern fallacy that ‘respect has to be earned.’ Not so! The teachers who are able to get results may feel that they have gained the respect of their pupils, but what about other teachers, the majority of them, I submit, who aren’t so gifted? Respect is something which should be afforded to the teacher by absolute right and therefore doesn’t have to be ‘earned.’ However unworthy Mrs Jones may be in handling a class of teenagers from broken homes, she is entitled to respect. Without this respect and the necessary ‘docility’ there is little prospect of anyone learning anything. So, what does Mrs Jones do? Short of shouting herself hoarse and having a nervous breakdown, all she can do is to introduce gimmicks and teaching aids, such as videos, the wretched educational computer games or, worse still, try to make the subject ‘fun!’ This explains why would-be teachers are trained to be more like classroom entertainers and also have learn all sorts of psychological techniques to maintain order in the classroom.
The training of the memory
It was Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s government in the 1960’s, which condemned the importance of committing information to the memory. I can just remember his education secretary, Barbara Castle, condemning loudly: ‘learning by ROTE!’ (her emphasis). Castle, the first ever female secretary of state, studied at Bradford grammar school for girls and graduated from St Hugh’s College, Oxford, gaining a first-class degree. A conventional education free from experimentation never did her any harm! And I wonder how much Latin she was made to learn ‘by rote’ at her school, which was a very selective one?
The training of the memory is just that: teaching the brain to absorb information which either may, or may not, be of use in school and in later life. The information, naturally, has to be wholesome, such as the learning of Latin, French or German grammar and vocabulary. Also, general history has to be absorbed. That is, facts and dates, but with as little comment as possible. Likewise, mathematical formulae have to be learned the hard way. I have met a child of 12 who was telling me about her history class at school. When I asked what she was learning, she answered that the current subject was the Industrial Revolution. Further questioning elicited the fact that she knew absolutely nothing about the Middle Ages, the Tudors or the Romans.
Most kids leaving school often know a huge amount about very limited historical periods. I have noticed how much detail goes into teaching about Adolf Hitler, presumably because teachers find that this subject keeps their charges quiet for a time. Unless children are made to absorb a bird’s eye view of English history, the whole subject is useless to them.
The training of the powers of reason
Once a child has learned docility to authority and has memorised information until it is fit to burst, then, and only then, does it acquire the power to reason. It is so common nowadays for teachers (doubtless keen to maintain entertainment levels) to present a fact to children and ask: “how do you feel about this?” The children are reluctant to respond to this question, having little or no knowledge of the matter under examination. This is the result of the slavish devotion by modern educationalists to the idea that children must ‘participate and feel involved.’
But, as King Lear says: “nothing comes from nothing,” and the result is an educational non-event. With the acquisition of real knowledge, a child is far better equipped to analyse the issues with which it is presented. In the French traditional catholic schools, much emphasis is placed on the study of philosophy. This is regarded as the king of sciences as it teaches youngsters to think along established and recognised lines and to be logical. Philosophy abides by a set of timeless and enduring rules, such as the principle of ‘non-contradiction,’ in which a ‘thing’ cannot be another ‘thing’ at the same time. I am referring, of course, to Philosophy as taught by Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas.
I have to exclude from this anything coming out of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, the teaching of which, at the very least, leads to severe brain damage! True philosophy is always akin to common sense and, unfortunately, most of the modern stuff is intellectualised junk. I say this because broadly, modern philosophy is bent towards denying the existence of the supernatural and favouring agnosticism.
The results of modern education
The chief tragedy which inflicts children leaving both private and state schools is that they look the same, think the same and sound the same. I see groups of boys and girls emerging from school buildings and queuing for buses at the end of the school day. They all seem to be wearing the same clothes: tee-shirt, jeans and trainers. Not forgetting, of course, the ubiquitous mobile phone in one hand and a hamburger in the other. If I have the misfortune to overhear their conversation as I walk past them, they all seem to talk adopting the chest voice in what is known as the ‘Chelsea croak.’ Every sentence is completed by a rising tone, indicating an interrogatory. Most sentences are sprinkled with some of the most disgusting expletives I have ever heard.
By no means do I blame the children themselves for this state of affairs, far from it. The plain fact is that they have been betrayed by the intellectual elite who have masterminded the modern education system. Is the production of a generation of aliens a deliberate ploy? One wonders what chance these poor kids will have to lead useful and productive lives, and what about their own children when the time comes?
False principles
Most events in history are chapters of accidents, and I do not believe that they are the results of bad guys planning the destruction of mankind in the privacy of a smoke-filled room while nursing glasses of brandy. The educational crisis, and most people on all sides of the debate will acknowledge that it is a crisis, is more the result of well-meaning men and women trying to do their best for our children.
Yet these educationalists are motivated by false principles. The chief fallacy underwriting modern educational theory is ‘good without God.’ As the Divine has been largely expunged from our schools, another alternative motivation has to be found which will ensure order in educational establishments. They have discovered a novel theory of ‘rights and responsibilities.’ I once visited a secondary school where there was a large notice in the entrance hall entitled: ‘Mission Statement.’ Underneath was written: ‘Rights and Responsibilities.’ It went on to suggest that, in exchange for the pupils showing ‘Kindness, Respect, Honesty, Commitment, Cooperation and Responsibility’ the school would offer the following: ‘we aim to develop well-rounded, responsible and compassionate individuals who contribute positively to society.’
All very sensible, one might argue. And yet the whole structure of ‘rights and responsibilities’ misses one fundamental point, and that is children simply do not behave themselves in order to secure all the ‘goodies’ which the school is offering. Nor, when they misbehave, are they deciding not to avail themselves of these things. The decision whether to be a teacher’s pet or whether to set fire to the school buildings is based on something quite different. The decision which a child makes to be disruptive may be caused by a number of factors such as boredom, lack of sleep, a broken home…one could go on. It may not even be a decision, but something like a loss of temper. When a child is troublesome it reflects the state of his or her soul and if he has had zero religious training, original sin will often make a pupil think nothing of rocking the boat. Most disorder in schools is more or less mindless and the last thing on the minds of disruptive children is ‘rights and responsibilities.’
And the future?
We have travelled a very long way from the traditional methods of teaching which were familiar to our ancestors. ‘Chalk ‘n talk’ has long gone and now we have the electronic blackboard which means that the teacher can write on it without taking his eyes off the class. The pupils cannot be out of sight of the teacher even for a few seconds! Some teachers are looking with growing anxiety at the proliferation of artificial intelligence. This allows a child to come to school with perfect homework, slightly altered with a few deliberate mistakes to make it look authentic. Needless to say, the cane has passed into oblivion and those teachers, long retired, who made use of the cane are facing historic child abuse accusations. In any case, corporal punishment without the accompanying Catholic principle of charity, was useless as it engendered fear and misery in a school. I lived through this fear myself at my prep school and I do not recommend it.
Again, the crisis in schools, in common with the crisis in society, has causes which lie in the supernatural and thus can only be cured by supernatural remedies. In other words, the problems risk being terminal and require divine intervention on a massive scale. Practical solutions are well-nigh impossible, further experimentation is useless and only makes things worse. The condition of our education system is merely a reflection of the state of society as a whole and it is the meltdown of the family, the Catholic Church and our public institutions which are mirrored in the condition of our schools.
The question arises: do most parents even acknowledge that a crisis exists in the education of their offspring? I fear not. Even to recognise the massive problems would be a step towards resolving them, but alas, people are blind and are content to go with the flow. As mum and dad get used to their teenage children spending most of the day in bed whilst listening to deafening pop music or buried in electronic media, how many of them merely accept this state of affairs and do not bother to investigate the causes? Even if perceptive parents embarked upon an analysis of the situation, they would end up in a blind alley because they would be seeking good without God.
Although schools cannot completely undo the damage done to children by neglectful or inadequate parenting, any attempt to instil good catholic principles will be effective. Many a child has received a truly beneficial education thanks to the efforts, and also the self-less love and dedication, of their teachers.
I am sorry not to have better news for parents but make no apologies for this ‘handwringing’ essay. My wife and I were very fortunate to be able to send all our ten children to French traditional Catholic schools, in which all the problems of modern education were circumvented. How did they do this? By teaching Christ crucified.
