Gene Edward Veith, Christian Education in the New Dark Age

Review of Mark A. Noll and James Turner, The Future of Christian Learning: An Evangelical and Catholic Dialogue,

While it is true that there are a number of Catholic research universities and a very few aspiring evangelical research institutions, there are over 1000 liberal arts colleges in America. Some 200 are self-consciously “Catholic,” and about that many are “evangelical.” Perhaps a majority of the rest are “church-related” in one way or another.

True, most of these liberal arts institutions are trying to emulate the research universities with their specialized majors and even the “publish or perish” mentality for their professors. Most of them have forgotten what the liberal arts are, replacing the integrated breadth and depth of a liberal education with a small menu of general education electives.

But some of these Catholic and evangelical schools are keeping the kind of education that gave us the Western intellectual heritage alive. At evangelical schools like my own Patrick Henry College and New St. Andrews, and at Catholic schools like Thomas Aquinas and Christendom College, students are reading Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and other seminal texts. They are taught the arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. They learn to think deeply, to write persuasively, to be creative. In terms of the history of education, these students are being given an education liberalis—that is, the education designed to form free citizens—as opposed to an education servilis, the specialized job training that was given to slaves.

Both Catholic education and Protestant education are grounded historically in the liberal arts. The liberal arts tradition is secular, not Christian as such, but its openness to truth, goodness, and beauty was found to be profoundly compatible with Christian revelation. The liberal arts were broad enough to contain many different emphases. This tradition made up the curriculum of the Medieval university—which stressed the art of logic, thus leading to scholastic philosophy—and of the Renaissance university, which stressed rhetoric. This latter was the model for the Reformation-era universities and lower schools, as implemented by Melanchthon, and would bear fruit in eloquent preaching and the close study of classical texts, including the Bible. Higher education by means of the liberal arts was put into practice by Anglicans at Oxford and Cambridge, and by American Puritans at Harvard and Princeton.

The liberal arts curriculum as informed by Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, provided the intellectual foundation for Western civilization in all of its intellectual variety, shaping jurists, artists, statesmen, scientists, and citizens in every vocation.

The true change came in the late 19th century, with the introduction of the Prussian university model, a creation of the scientific Enlightenment and the authoritarian state. Its highest aim was progress, not tradition. Its only allowable methodology was scientific. It rejected the broad learning of the liberal arts in favor of technical specialization. The Prussian university model broke faculties into departments, forced students to choose “majors,” and made research—not teaching—the purpose of the university.

Universities built on the Prussian model, by their very institutional structure, are going to cut against the grain of both the liberal arts and Christianity. Designed as factories for the manufacture of new knowledge, they will tend to minimize old knowledge. Designed to be specialized and compartmentalized, they will find it difficult to make connections, either between disciplines or with the moral and spiritual dimensions of life.