By Robert Royal
There is a strange ferment underway in American education. This week saw two promising Catholic initiatives: a meeting at Christendom College on K-12 education that produced the Front Royal Principles, and a high-level consultation in Washington, D.C., organized by the Cardinal Newman Society, seeking renewal from kindergarten through Catholic higher education. But in recent months, similar efforts at educational renewal have appeared in secular universities: one from Yale—yes, Ivy-League Yale—addressing the “lack of trust” in higher education, and another convened jointly by Vanderbilt and Washington universities on the crisis in the humanities. Among the various aims of these studies, the common concern is that much of modern education, Catholic or not, is not working and needs to be different—and better.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education—an unconstitutional agency (education is not among the “enumerated powers” assigned by the Constitution to the federal government)—is shrinking and transferring various activities to other agencies. The department’s enormous bureaucracy and budget ($250 billion a year) could not help but do some good over the decades, of course. But since it went woke, it has also overstepped the constitutional boundaries meant to prevent precisely such abuses: politicizing learning and intruding into everything from an obsession with racism in U.S. history to the promotion of LGBT activism.
The report from Yale, written by a committee of professors, provides a kind of master key to everything else. Today, many people lament the politicization and bias in university education. What is less common is a real effort to understand—and do something about—a problem that one almost has to choose deliberately to ignore. The report was driven by the need to “restore trust” at a time when high tuition and questionable university policies have led many to question the value of education, even at prestigious institutions like Yale. And given the “demographic cliff”—the smaller number of young people now reaching college age—institutions of higher learning need all the help they can get just to survive.
Yale’s president highlighted several striking findings, beginning with the fact that “trust must be earned.” She pointed to the need for a rigorous admissions process: even the best universities increasingly find students unable to read and think at an elementary level. On campus, students often do not find openness in classroom discussions: “echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.” The result is self-censorship. And grade inflation has further distorted undergraduate studies. The committee rightly recommended renewed attention to the liberal arts, the “foundational wisdom… that will serve [students] throughout their lives.”
But, as the study by Vanderbilt University and the University of Washington found, the liberal arts are currently in crisis, largely due to a “deterioration of academic standards.” It was written by professors from several distinguished institutions who were careful to note that their colleagues still do much good work. But it acknowledges that there is some truth to the widespread complaint that standards have been:
distorted within these disciplines both to privilege work on topics deemed relevant to social justice, and… designed to ensure that only politically acceptable work is published, taught, and valued. The result of this distortion… is an academic ecosystem in which much of what passes for scholarship in the humanistic disciplines is, in fact, a mixture of tendentious and biased research, weak agitation and academic propaganda, and jargon-laden nonsense.
Both studies propose reasonable remedies—too reasonable given the depth of the crisis, whose source—and remedy—lie elsewhere.
If there is a solution, it may have to come from the institution that created the university with its emphasis on the proper study of the liberal arts: the Catholic Church. The Bishop of Lincoln, Most Rev. James D. Conley, himself an alumnus of the legendary Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas (shuttered after producing too many converts to Catholicism), writes in the Introduction to the Front Royal Principles: “You cannot teach human beings without a deep understanding of their nature and purpose.”
And he adds:
Every educational enterprise is ultimately rooted in a particular vision of the human person, an anthropology, and much contemporary educational thought and pedagogy has been shaped by pragmatic, utilitarian, and secular influences. Catholic education, however, must remain distinct and drink deeply from its intellectual tradition, from the Church’s rich understanding of the human person, truth, virtue, and man’s eternal destiny.
This gives rise to the seven “Front Royal Principles,” oriented both to content and practicality: 1) the supernatural end of education; 2) the nature and dignity of the human person; 3) what children deserve, the rights of parents, and the duties of the State; 4) the ecclesial responsibility of bishops and priests; 5) the formation and responsibilities of teachers and leaders; 6) the integrity and order of the curriculum; and 7) the transmission of a living Catholic culture.
Authentic Catholic education is “a restauratio, healing the wounds of sin to reorder the soul in an ascent from dispersion toward unity.”
Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, cited the great saint to similar purpose in his remarks at the CNS Leaders Summit: “the aim of the Church in education,” he said [Newman], is “to reunite the things which in the beginning were joined together by God and have been separated by man.”
Reilly told the assembled educational leaders: “You are restoring the integrity of the soul… As the United States today celebrates its 250th anniversary of freedom, we see our nation falling into radical secularism and even hatred of our Catholic faith… The integrity of Catholics, indeed the integrity of our nation and of human society, depends on citizenship in the Kingdom of God as well as our American citizenship. This has a higher law and a supreme lawgiver, who in his mercy and grace leads us to the true city of God that the pilgrims thought they might establish here.”
If the United States is to survive another 250 years—and prepare more souls for Heaven—we have a steep task of re-education ahead, both Catholic and secular.
About the Author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West, and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.