Why must the children of light always be ten revolutions
and a hundred years behind the children of darkness? If we cannot
always defeat our enemies on the battlefield, can’t we at least learn to
recognize their tactics so that we won’t be fooled the next time?
Never mind that. Can’t we learn to recognize, from the bullets
whistling past our ears and our comrades lying beside us shot through
the heart, that they are our enemies?
Several days ago I was at a tent meeting with some of the oddest of
the children of light. These Christians preach Christ, and Him
crucified. Indeed, they preach so doggedly about Christ’s atonement for
our sins and our complete helplessness to save ourselves, that they
never get around to talking our new life in Christ. Every day is Good
Friday, and what happened on Easter merely confirms the power of
Christ’s blood and so redirects our attention to the Cross.
None of this is wrong, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far. I
have a soft spot in my heart for underdogs, especially when they preach
about the Lord to a people stultified by bad schools, television, and
the unutterable banality of vice. I wish my friends well, though I
suspect they believe I’m not “saved,” because I haven’t been struck
blind on the road to Damascus. My conversion was slower and more
embarrassing, but that’s another story.
After the meeting I enjoyed refreshments with the members of the
group, including several young people, three lads and a lass, between
seventeen and twenty four years old. We got to talking about school.
I’m an American, but we spend our summers in Canada, in Cape Breton.
And since I always ask my freshmen at Providence College what they’ve
studied in high schools public and parochial, and, more to the point, what they have not studied, what they haven’t ever heard of, I asked the same questions to these pleasant Canadians.
“I’m going to name a few English writers,” I said. “All I want to
know is whether you recognize the names. You don’t have to tell me
anything about them.” These people were bright enough, as you could
tell from their presence at the meeting and their conversation.
Milton. No recognition. Wordsworth. No recognition. Tennyson.
One of the boys said, “Albert?” That was a hint that he had once heard
the name. “Close,” I said. “Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the great Victorian
poet. Can you tell me anything about him?” No, nothing. “What on
earth do you do in school for twelve years?” I asked. That’s a question
I’ve asked a thousand times, in both countries. They laughed. They
were not going to defend their schools, not even as Canadians to an
American. They knew they were indefensible.
They did tell me that they read Shakespeare, one play a year,
detached from the history of England, from the tradition of English
literature, and, most disappointing, from Shakespeare’s Christian
faith. Shakespeare is the most theological of English dramatists. It’s
not simply that he alludes to scripture all the time. It’s that entire
plays are structured around theological questions—and are
incomprehensible without the foundation of the Christian story.
Here the young lady became the lead interlocutor. She was the oldest
and had read the most. She wouldn’t allow that Shakespeare was a
profoundly Christian author; not because her interpretation of
Shakespeare differed from mine, but because, in comparison with the
gospel, the Christian writer meant nothing, even if he was the greatest
dramatist who ever lived. She understood that many people flourished by
being taught at home, but she was glad she went to high school, not for
what she learned there, which she admitted was not a lot, but because
it gave her the opportunity to witness to Jesus.
I couldn’t let matters rest. “But that’s not what school is for,” I said. “Look at what you might have learned, in
a sane world. You might have learned about Bach, that giant of a
composer, who dedicated every work he composed to the name of Jesus
Christ!” She shrugged and said she enjoyed Bach, but she wouldn’t go so
far as to call him a Christian. She was moved not one inch by the
wealth of Christian history, art, music, drama, and poetry that she had
been denied the chance to study. She said she reads Jane Austen for
pleasure, but the humanities in themselves mean nothing to her.
It struck me that there’s a strange similarity between these
Christians and the secularists who dominate our schools and who have
eviscerated our curricula, replacing the great poets of our heritage
with ephemeral scribblers upon “current events.” That’s the one thing
that cannot be taught with any perspective. But it requires no special
study (ignorance is a boon if you’re reading Maureen Dowd). It exposes
no deficiencies in the teachers. The young people at the meeting didn’t
care about Wordsworth or Tennyson, because they had Jesus. The
secularists are worse. They don’t care about Wordsworth or Tennyson,
because they have Tony Kushner or some other purveyor of twaddle.
Which brings me to the Common Core Curriculum that is being pedaled
(not peddled; the governmental foot is on the accelerator) to our
schools. Apparently plenty of Catholic schools are on board, too. That
is baffling. Every big “reform” of the public schools for the last
sixty years has been disastrous—the expunging of any trace of religion
from the classroom; the replacement of small schools with hulking
institutions; the consolidation of school boards to attenuate local
control and personal oversight; the abandonment of geography; the shift
from history to current events; the New Math; the basal reader; comic
books to amuse the poorer students in high school; the war on boys; the
expansion of health class to “sex education” (what the heck is so
complicated?); the corruption of the latter; teaching to standardized
tests; the absurdly biased textbooks; the abandonment of any systematic
study of grammar; teaching foreign languages “conversationally,” which
means, in effect, illiterately; the abandonment of math-based sciences
such as physics and chemistry, in favor of biology, reduced to ecology,
reduced to cuddles; what on earth would make us think that anything this system produces can do us any good? Homeschoolers
enjoy their signal and mortifying success largely because they see
everything that is done in school and then go and do precisely the
opposite.
So why should Catholic schools line up for a curriculum that stiffs
literature and the arts? Why accept a curriculum whose utilitarian
presuppositions are inimical to everything that a Catholic is supposed
to believe about human flourishing? Why, to recall the article
published here a few days ago, rush to adopt the Big History program
promoted by atheist Bill Gates—a program that certainly is Big but is
sorely lacking in History, that is permeated with determinist
assumptions regarding human life, and that wholly ignores or reviles the single most significant event in human history (the one event my young evangelizers know about and cherish), and that wholly ignores or reviles the single most culturally dynamic institution in human history, the
Church? Why should John Dewey or Bill Gates write our curricula? That
would be like having Alfred Kinsey write our sex education lessons.
Ah, but I forget—we have those, don’t we? Or it would be like having
Carl Rogers run a “spiritual” retreat for nuns—ah yes, we did that too,
didn’t we? It would be like hiring the disciples of the secularist
architects Gropius and Von der Rohe to design worship-machines for us,
boxes that consign the Stations of the Cross to scratches of graffiti a
hundred feet away, and that awake no sense of mystery, and recall no
rich heritage of symbols and gestures—but wait, we built those boxes,
and when we didn’t build them, we transmogrified perfectly lovely
churches into their image and likeness; and we breathed upon them, and
they became mausoleums.
But why should there even be a national curriculum? Have we
lost our minds? Have we forgotten who and what we are? A man and woman
marry and have children, and the responsibility to educate those
children rests upon them, because children aren’t bottle caps to be
stamped with the same label, one after another. The principle of
incarnation forbids it. One home cannot be a copy of another, because
the spiritual, intellectual, artisanal, and physical strengths of one
couple and their kin are not the same as those of another. No two
siblings are alike. The very idea of a national curriculum, to be pedaled upon the children of three hundred millions, should be repugnant to a freedom-loving people, and anathema to people of faith.
Here I throw my hands up in despair, because the leaders of my
church, after a hundred years of the attenuation of genuine community
life, consumed by Big This and That, still cannot understand that
there’s as much difference between a community and a faceless aggregate
as there is between a free man and a numbered inmate in a prison. They
cannot understand that even if the National Curriculum were
acceptable—even if, this time, the man who sold us rat poison for
corn meal is going to give us healthy food—that there should be no
such, that the very existence of a National Curriculum fundamentally
alters the relationship of the citizen, the school, the town, the state,
and even the family to the national government? Why is that so hard to
grasp?
Then there’s the Catholic Health Association, giving its lordly fiat potestas—let there be might—to
the national government, to control every feature of our health care
system. What has made the bishops so slow to understand that, even if a
nifty legal filter could pick out the specks of rat poison in the meal
for Catholic schools and hospitals, that doesn’t do a damned thing for
individual Catholics, or for other Christian objectors, or simply for
people of good faith who don’t want to pony up for somebody else’s pills
or diaphragms or snuffed babies? Why have they not seen that a
nationalized medical system also fundamentally alters the relationship
between the government and the citizen? Why can’t they divine the
difference between inequalities that result by circumstance, and
rationing as a matter of principle? They’ve climbed into the lifeboat,
then they object if the skipper mistreats them—when the thing to do was
to reject the lifeboat and its principles, and to use our own resources
and our Christian mandate to assist people in need.
The wise Laocoon hurled his lance at the wooden horse and cried, “I
fear the Greeks, even when they are bringing gifts!” Why, why must the
children of light say, “Look here, Mammon’s going to build us a new
school and a new hospital, and they’re free!”
As wise as pigeons—or as innocent as snakes.
