THE FRIENDS OF EDUCATION.
To pass from the discussion of arguments to the question of motives is a most common yet most unjustifiable manœuvre of popular debate. This is usually done when the field of calm and logical reasoning has become tolerably clear. The flank movement is attempted as a final struggle against defeat otherwise inevitable. If the motive thus impugned be really indefensible; if it be, at the same time, glaring or manifest, a positive advantage is sometimes gained by a vigorous diversion from the real object of contention. But if such a motive has to be alleged—or, still worse, invented—the demonstration against it, however violent, is but a reluctant and ungracious acknowledgment of defeat and a flight from the real point at issue. The most recent instance of this sort is taking place before the American public, and has been afforded by those who endeavor to represent Catholics as opposed to free and liberal education, thereby attainting the motives of the position which Catholics have been forced to assume with regard to what are falsely called “common” schools.
This attitude of our opponents, however, we regard not without complacency. Our object is not war, but peace and good-will among citizens. We hail the present violent misrepresentation as a sign that the enemy is close to the “last ditch,” and that the discussion approaches its conclusion. When this final effort to distort the Catholic object and to asperse the Catholic character has exhausted itself and been held up to the inspection of the American people, we shall have seen the end of the “school question.” We insist upon an improvement in our educational system which is necessary to perfect its character and to satisfy the requirements of the times. The present system does not meet the wishes of a very large portion of the community, is unfair to others besides Catholics, and is out of harmony with the spirit of free institutions. A system is wanted which shall at least be equal to that of monarchical countries, fair to all citizens alike, and which will relieve Catholics from the double burden of educating their own children, besides paying for a system of education of which they cannot conscientiously avail themselves.
The correctness of the Catholic position is so manifest, and is so rapidly gaining the recognition of all thoughtful classes, that those who are unwilling to allow Catholics equal rights as citizens are forced, in order to hide the truth, not only to maintain that the present system is absolutely perfect and incapable of any improvement, but to accuse Catholics of harboring ideas of which they are not only innocent, but which it would be wholly impossible for them to entertain—such as that they are afraid of the light; that they attack the present system because they are inimical to all education; and that their object is, if possible, to do away with it altogether. Accusations similar to these are daily repeated, garnished with rhetoric, and sent forth to alarm our fellow-citizens and to encourage them to turn a deaf ear to whatever Catholics may say. The weak point of this movement against us is that the people will notice that it does not deal at all with the validity of Catholic claims, and that it shirks the only question at issue. They will be led to suspect that it is emphatically a “dodge”; and the mere suspicion of this will awaken curiosity as to what Catholics really have to say—a curiosity fatal to the success of the flank attack.
In the language of those who advance the charge with which we propose to deal, education means either primary instruction in the elements of knowledge, or else higher academic culture, such as is to be furnished by colleges and universities. If, therefore, Catholics are hostile to education, in this sense of the word, they must be opposed either to the general spread of such information as is aimed at in elementary and normal schools, or to the existence and growth of the higher institutions of science and art.
We are perfectly aware that there is another meaning given to the word education, to which reference is made, simply in order to avoid obscurity.
Philosophers of the class to which Mr. Huxley belongs understand by education a certain specific course of moral and intellectual training, the aim of which is to ensure its pupils against ever being affected by “theological tendencies.” Such impressions are to be made upon childhood, and matured in more advanced stages, as will rid men of that natural but awkward habit of reasoning from cause to effect; which will free them from all hope of any life but the present, and any fear of future responsibility, in order that they may be impelled to devote themselves solely to the analysis and classification of material phenomena, since this is the only purpose of man’s existence—such a course of spiritual defloration as was practised upon the tender and noble genius of the late John Stuart Mill, the results of which, as manifested by the revelation of his biography, afford, in the words of an ingenuous, critic, “a most unpleasant spectacle.” A process of this kind is not education; it is a heartrending and lamentable destruction of that which is noblest and most essential in man, and as a definition has not yet obtained a place in the English language.
If any of our readers would care to know our own ultimate definition of education, we should describe it as the complete and harmonious development of all the powers of man in reference to his true end. But for present purposes it is sufficient to adopt the ordinary sense of the word, as meaning the diffusion of knowledge by scholastic exercises in academies and colleges.
If it appears singular to enlightened Protestants to hear a demand for circumscription and discouragement of Catholics, and, if possible, the suppression of religious education, from that faction whose motto is “Liberty and Light,” we trust that it will seem none the less paradoxical to hear the charge of favoring ignorance urged with most vehemence against us by those whose boast, up to within a few years, has been “a ministry without education, and a way to heaven without grammar.”