Reading and Education
DISCUSSION OF EDUCATION is for ever being muddled by two confusions, between Education and Literacy and between Education and Scholarship. The first confusion is gross and easily cleared up; the second is subtle and needs the very closest scrutiny.
There is a kind of superstition about Literacy: you are told that in one country ninety per cent of the people can read and write; while in another ninety per cent cannot. Intellectually the figures mean little. Reading is scarcely an intellectual activity at all; the power to take words off a page is in itself little more than an extra sense. By hearing, for example, what is said reaches the brain through the ear; by reading, what is said reaches the brain through the eye. The whole question is what happens to it when it reaches the brain, and literacy statistics cannot tell you that. Or again, we are delighted that so high a proportion of our fellow-countrymen can read and write; it would be too cruel to ask what can they write; but even if you stop short with the question what do they read, the answer is not a matter for great exultation.
The trouble about reading is that it is the name for two totally different activities. Reading—serious reading—the great means of contact with the world about us and our fathers before us, is an educational activity in the fullest sense. Education cannot proceed without it; a defective education can be rectified by it; what a man reads is a surer measure of his education than any number of degrees. But there is a game of the same name, played with similar implements—the pastime called reading. Its genesis is easy to trace. Men hate having anything to do. But men also hate having nothing to do. The human race therefore has always been fertile in the invention of things to do which are equivalent to nothing— things which will pass the time. This accounts for most of our reading; nothing happens in the mind—simply the time passes.
Now obviously everyone wants to pass some time, and the most intellectually active of men will do a certain amount of pastime reading. The question is how much time can one afford merely to pass. The problem is pressing for this reason also, that a man tends to become what he reads; and while real reading may become a passion, this second thing becomes a craving, like smoking, of which the intellectual value is about the same. The trouble is that anyone can read to pass the time, but one has to learn how to read in the proper sense.
When Carlyle said that the aim of all education was to teach men to read, he certainly did not mean a mere equipment of alphabets and spelling-books and ink on a page. It is only when all this is mastered, that one can begin to learn to read. That stage reached, the choice lies before every man; either he will make the effort and learn to read, or he will devote his newly acquired technical equipment solely to the passing of the time. In the second case he possibly makes an occasional effort at better things: reads some real book—history, biography, theology, philosophy, poetry; tries to read it at the same pace as the pastime books—not realizing the difference—as though one tried to eat meat as fast as jelly; at that pace makes nothing of it, and gives it up for ever. There is a discipline of reading as of every other good thing. It involves a certain self-conquest. If we are not prepared for that discipline then our universally literate generation will be worse off than the Middle Ages by one more sedative. With this question of reading, the whole of education is bound up, for the greatest thought of mankind is in books and the greatest living teacher can do no higher thing in the intellectual order than teach his pupil to read.
Education fits a man for living. Man exists in a universe: man is: other things are: successful living means a right relation between man and all else that is. A treatise on education would work this out in relation to all man’s faculties and powers—mind, will, imagination, emotions. But this is not a treatise on education, and our only concern here is with education as it affects the mind. Successful living, as we have seen, means a right relation between man and all else that is. The mind’s part is to come to the knowledge of that right relation. An educated man is one whose mind is responsive to being, to everything that is. It will be noted that the words ‘all’ and ‘everything’ have kept recurring in this paragraph. This is of the very essence of education. You cannot fully know anything until you know everything: less cryptically, the parts get their significance from their place in the totality. If you know only a part but not the whole, you do not even know the part.
Thus we come to the second great distinction, between Education and Scholarship. Scholarship is necessary to education, and an educational system which claims to mould character and neglects learning is charlatanism. Yet a great scholar may fail to achieve that right mental relationship to all that is, which is of the very definition of education. The explanation has already been suggested; he knows an enormous amount about something or other; but he does not see the totality; lacking a view of the whole, he is unbalanced by what he knows of the part. Scholarship is pure gain to the mind that knows the totality: to any other it is, in greater or less degree, an eccentricity. Only the educated mind is at home in the universe. A very crude example will make clear what I am trying to say. The human eye is very beautiful—in the human face. Put that same eye on a plate, and though in one sense it can be investigated more closely and thoroughly, it has lost its beauty and even its significance. A being who knew only eyes and not faces would not even know eyes. A being who knew masses of facts about each feature separately but did not know how the features were arranged in a human face, could imagine only a nightmare and no face.
The process of education thus requires two elements. First, the mind must see the universe of being as a totality, with all its constituents in right relation to one another: it does not know everything but it knows where everything is. Second, there must be the study of individual things. Given such a total view as has been described, then every new piece of knowledge is an enrichment. Indeed the value of this individual knowledge is immense. If it is true that the part lacks significance to one who does not see the whole, it is also true that the whole lacks reality to a person of small knowledge. After all the totality is a totality of being and we must study not only totality (which as seen by the mind is a matter of shape and arrangement) but also being (which is the stuff thus shaped and arranged); being comes to us in the individual thing learnt and there is no limit to our progress in the realization of it. Everything that is, has something to contribute to our knowledge of being in its immeasurable richness and variety.
But here again a careful distinction must be made: the new knowledge is of educational value not simply as an item known, adding one to the total of items remembered. Nothing is more instructive than to dig out the question-papers of old examinations—the examinations we passed in our youth. Usually we find that we do not know the answers—often enough we do not so much as know what the questions mean. Yet we knew once; we spent long years in acquiring the knowledge; education could not have proceeded without it. Education, then, is arrived at by learning things most of which we are destined ineluctably to forget; and this is not as wasteful as it might seem. Even the thing forgotten may be of high educational value.
The object of the mind is to know what is—that is, to know being. Being comes to it through fact, or event, or another man’s thought. The mind takes in the fact (of science, say) or event (of history) or thought (of this or that philosopher or poet). This is the mechanics of the educational process—this pushing into the mind of facts and events and the rest of it. All this is simply something done to the mind. Therefore in itself it is not education. Education is something that happens in the mind. What does happen in the mind? Often enough nothing. The fact learnt may lie there —not acting, not acted upon, quite useless—long enough to be written down in an examination; after which it can with impunity be forgotten, leaving the mind as unaffected by its passing as by its entry. In the better case the mind takes hold of it, thinks about it, extracts the kernel of being from it, enriches itself with that. Even if the individual fact or event or set of words in which that speck of being was clothed be forgotten, it is a great thing that the mind should thus have fed upon it. Fortunately we do not forget everything. Our minds hold on to certain truths, and the store of these increases. New relations of things are seen and new depths, carrying the mind further towards that right relation to all that is, which is its own special perfection.
What happens in the mind is educational. The really valuable knowledge is not that of which we can say—‘On such a day, in such a book, I learnt this.’ Facts can be shoved into the mind like books into a bag: and as usefully. Push in as many books as you please and the bag has still gained nothing. All that happens is that it bulges. A bag is no better for all that it has carried. Heads can similarly bulge from the mere mass of facts known but not assimilated into the mind’s substance. A phenomenon the student will have noticed, at first incredulously but with a growing callousness as the years pass, is that very learned people are often utter fools. And far from this being a paradox, one sees how it happens; so far from learning and foolishness being incompatible, they are comfortable bedfellows. There is no fool like the learned fool: a mind which merely takes in facts without assimilating them can obviously take in far more of them, since it can devote to learning new facts that time which better minds devote to nourishing themselves upon the old. The mind’s feeding upon being is education; examinations, alas, are mainly a test of what remains in the memory: the best kind of examination may go further and discover what has happened to the surface of the mind; but the educational reality—what has happened in the very depths of the mind—no examination has been devised to discover that.
To return to the totality: it will be clear that this is the indispensable element. The man who rightly sees the whole will gain an enormous amount from a mere handful of individual things known. It cannot too often be repeated that the man who knows only the individual things, will not know even them: for he will not know their context.
What then is this knowledge of the totality, and who can impart it? I was once talking on these matters at a Teachers’ College; and, arrived at this point, I said that for the total view which education demands one must know God; the air chilled instantly; plainly the educators I was addressing were disappointed in me. What, they felt, had God to do with education? Education was a matter for specialists. Yet two things seem to me clear: that unless we rightly see God, we have no true view of the totality; and that one who does not believe in God is by that very fact stating the sheer impossibility of a total view and so of education itself.
For the theist, the matter hardly needs stating. God is not simply the supreme Being, enthroned at the apex of all that is in such wise that the universe may be conceived as so many strata of being from the lowest to the highest and God over all: if that were so, one might conceive of a true study of the lower strata which should take no account of God. But the truth is that God is at the very centre of all things whatsoever. They come into existence only because He creates them; they remain in existence only because He sustains them. To omit God, therefore, from your study of things is to omit the one being that explains them: you begin your study of things by making them inexplicable! Further, all things are made not only by God but for God; in that lies their purpose and the relation of each thing to all others. For the believer in God, therefore, a view of the universe unrelated to God is a chaos far worse than a vision of features unrelated to a face.
This truth, which to the theist is a positive reason for knowing God that education may be a possibility, is for the atheist a sad condition making éducation impossible. If there be no mind directing the whole universe of being, then there is no universe, no totality. There is only a constantly fluctuating sum of individual things, accidental in their very origin (since no mind brought them into being), purposeless (since no mind meant them for anything and accidents have no purpose), a drift of things drifting nowhere. Nothing can be known save out of its context, for there is no context.
But the place of God in our view of the totality of things—and so of education—is not simply a matter of recognizing Him as first cause and last end and sustainer in being more intimate to each being than it is to itself; there is also His revelation of the purpose for which He made man—not simply that He made man for Himself but just what this involves in terms of man’s being and action. This question of purpose is a point overlooked in most educational discussion, yet it is quite primary. How can you fit a man’s mind for living if you do not know what the purpose of man’s life is? You can have no reasonable understanding of any activity—Iiving as a totality or any of its departments—if you do not know its purpose. You do not even know what is good or bad for a man till you know the purpose of his existence, for this is the only test of goodness or badness—if a thing helps a man in the achievement of the purpose for which he exists, then it is good for him; if not, it is bad. And the one quite certain way to find out the purpose of anything is to ask its maker. Otherwise you can only guess. The Catholic knows that man has a Maker and that the Maker has said what He made man for. Therefore—not of himself but by the revelation of God—the Catholic knows the purpose of human life and if he be an educator he has the answer to this primary question. He may be a thoroughly bad educator—perhaps through being like so many of us a born fool—but he has the first requirement. For the life of me I cannot see how anyone else can have it or can even think he has it.
Beyond these elementary truths about God, there is His further revelation of His own nature, and of the means by which man may achieve fulfilment. There are refinements here which belong only to the theologian, but there is also a mass of truth necessary for all men in the sense that without it their view of the whole will be falsified and for that very reason they will know nothing properly. That there is a God; what He is; that man’s destiny is to do something which by nature he cannot do, so that he must receive from God powers to act above his nature; that his own dependence upon God is literally that of nothingness since apart from God’s will there is in man only nothingness; yet that man is not nothing but a being of eternal significance; that his dependence, absolute as it is, is not that of a machine upon a mad mechanic or a slave upon a mad king but of a child upon a father whose power and love are one single thing; that God’s incomprehensibility, the root of what we call mystery, is a matter of exultation since it assures us that the universe is controlled by a being infinite in perfection; that all things in life—suffering and failure included—are incidents in a universe directed by God and so can be for his own richest advantage—all these and a mass of truths beside are necessary to be known by man, and education is impossible without them.
And not only to be known in the sense that if we were asked about any of them we could think of the correct answer; but so known that they enter as a matter of course into every judgment that the mind forms. The test of maturity in a mind is precisely this: how much of what a man knows enters as a matter of course into all his judgments. Normally, if a man has to come to a decision, he will without effort take certain things into account—his own inclination, for instance, his bodily needs, the effect upon his wife and children, the reaction of his employer, the run of public opinion; a man may do so much who has never received any education at all. If he as naturally takes into account the will of God, the purpose of his own life, the relation of the temporal to the eternal, the relation of his own partial knowledge to God’s total knowledge, the fact of Calvary, his relationship to other men in God, his relationship to other members of the Mystical Body—then, and only then, has he the first essential of an educated mind.
The upshot of all this is that education has as its one indispensable requisite something that only a Catholic can give. This is the strictly educational argument for Catholic education. There are other arguments of a moral and theological order, but the two sets of arguments must be sharply distinguished. A non-Catholic institution may be dangerous to Catholic faith and practice and that is the most serious consideration of all. But my point here is that a non-Catholic institution cannot give an education; it can give a magnificent mass of scholarship and a rich mental training; but in the intellectual order there is one thing necessary, a comprehensive view of the totality of being, and this it cannot give. This does not mean that a Catholic institution will inevitably succeed. It may fail on the side of scholarship and the minds of its students, not fed on truth to the measure of their power, will emerge all feeble—even if the total view has been given to them, they will have it only as a skeleton; or it may fail in the communication of the total view, teaching religion as simply one subject in the curriculum and a rather dull subject at that.
But whether he goes to a non-Catholic college or not, the Catholic will find himself soon enough in the largest non-Catholic institution of all—the world of real life. This precisely is the problem for all of us. In papers, movies, novels, in daily conversation, in normal practice we are constantly under the pressure of a different view from our own; no need to particularize; the plain truth is that the Church teaches us one universe and we live in another. If the superiority of the world’s view were treated in the world as matter of argument, it would be a help; but it is simply assumed. Argument might stimulate us to defence; indifference soothes us into apathy. The temptation is to accept one set of values by faith but to live by another set in daily practice. This temptation must be resisted with all our might. Yet to throw all the burden of resistance upon the will is sheer cruelty: the mind too must be fortified. The best fortification of the mind is the total possession of the true view—a possession fundamental and operating as a matter of course in every judgment; to a mind thus fortified, everything serves; falsehood is seen to be false and not given hospitality. Yet every falsehood may contain truth or suggest it; and this truth, too, the minds makes its own.
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