What! Are we to admit that the right and the duty of educating children sprung from society, and was originated by it? The bare thought is folly. From the first creation of the family, God willed that the infant should come into the world in feebleness and impotence; that, physically, intellectually, and morally, it should have need of a long and toilsome education before becoming a complete man. On whom was it, then, that he imposed a natural obligation of undertaking and accomplishing its education? Certainly not on society, which did not then exist. It was on the family itself, on the father especially, who is its responsible head. The power of engendering human beings includes of necessity the duty of not leaving such a work incomplete—the duty, consequently, of guiding the infant up to full manhood.
The family thus, by virtue of a law of nature, possesses the power of instructing and educating the understanding and will of the child born of it; and this power the family does not lose by being associated with others in social life. For, we repeat, the state is not instituted to absorb into its collective life all pre-existing rights. The act of union merely consecrates those rights by placing them under the protection of public authority. But when this authority, instead of protecting the rights of the family, proceeds to take possession of them, it commits an usurpation, it breaks the social pact, by making itself guilty of the very crime which it ought to prevent.
Nothing less than the utter and ruinous confusion of ideas introduced by the philosophy of the last century, and by its absurd theories about the Social Contract, could have caused principles so clear and so indisputable to be lost sight of, and all the usurpations of the liberty and rights of families and individuals by the civil power to be legitimized. But, be the errors of the time what they may, it is not fitting that we Catholics should be either their accomplices or their dupes. Enlightened by faith, our reason must hold fast those principles on which human society is based, and were we to be their only defenders, it would be to our honor to have maintained them against all the negations of the spirit of system. To judge, then, only by reason, the state has not those rights over the education of youth which a certain school ascribes to it.
We asserted, moreover, that the opinion of this school is also false in a supernatural point of view, because it separates what ought to be united, because it makes the inference the principle, and despises the one in order to attach itself exclusively to the other. And here we touch the pith of the question.
It is alleged, a public education good or bad, has very serious consequences for society. Its security or its ruin may depend on it, and, anyhow, nothing more vitally affects its peace, strength, and prosperity. The power, therefore, with which the government of a community is invested cannot be a matter of indifference in education. It ought, then, to superintend and direct it, and to place itself at its head, as it naturally does of every social function. We shall presently see how much this reasoning is worth. It includes three things—a principle, a fact, and an inference. The principle is as follows: Whatever is for society an element of strength and progress, and can cause its prosperity and decay, is within the competence of the civil authority and ought to be subject to it. The fact is affirmed in the premises of the argument, to wit, that public education, according as it is good or bad, is naturally of serious consequence to the state. Whence the inference, that it ought to be subject to the civil authority—that is, to the government.
The principle we dispute; the fact is explained and vindicated in another way, and the inference is inconsequential.
First, it is not true that whatever affects the prosperity of the state ought of necessity to belong to the jurisdiction of the civil power, and to be subject to its direction and control. Are not commerce and manufacture elements of national prosperity? Is it necessary, on that account, that the government should assume the direction of them, and that nothing should be done in those two departments of social activity except by it. No. In these the office of power is limited to causing right and justice to be respected in industrial and commercial transactions, to intervene in contentions to decide what is just, to secure the observance of positive laws enacted by it for the purpose of applying to every particular case the general principles of the natural and of the divine law. The rest is an affair of individual enterprise among citizens. Thus, in the question which engages us, that the education of youth ought to contribute much towards the prosperity of a state is not sufficient reason to induce us to resign the whole of it into the hands of the civil power. We must further inquire if there is not some one in the community authorized, by the law of nature or by divine right, to assume its direction and control. If this be so, it will not do to invest the state with a right which belongs to another.
In the second place, the happiness and prosperity of a state are certainly the result of a good education of its youth; of a complete education, that is, well conducted; such, in a word, as gives to the young man all the qualities of perfect manhood. Now, this education is, of necessity, Christian education, in which the state can do nothing—the church, and the church alone, as we have endeavored to show, everything.
What, once more, is education? We have already defined it: the work of fitting a man to fulfil his destiny; to place the faculties of man in a condition of sufficing for themselves, and of pursuing, with the help of God, the end which is allotted to them. Such, clearly, is the work of education; such the end it must of necessity propose to itself. Suppose that in educating a child this consideration of his final destiny should be neglected, that he was brought up with an eye solely to a proximate and terrestrial end, beyond which he could do nothing. Could such an education be called complete? Could it be called sufficient? Would it deserve even the name of education? Undoubtedly not. That child would not have been educated. He would never become a man, vir, in the full sense of that term, because the vision of his intelligence would never reach beyond the narrow horizon of this world; because his powers of well-doing would necessarily be extremely limited; because, at last, he would miss the end which every man is bound to attain, and would be compelled to remain for ever nothing but an immortal abortion.
Such is the necessity of recognizing man’s final end in education. That must be its aim, that only, under pain of compromising all the rest. Is there any need of mentioning the guarantees afforded by generations thus educated, for the peace and happiness of communities? Has not true and sincere piety, in the words of the apostle,[174] promise of this life as well as of that of eternity? Is it in any other way than in practising the virtues which make man a social being that we can hope to achieve immortality? Thus to labor to render ourselves worthy of the destiny which awaits us is, also, to prepare ourselves to become good citizens of the earthly city, is to give to society the best possible security of being useful as well as loyal to it. The greatest men of whom humanity is proud, were they not at the same time the most virtuous?