Humanism in Education

Extract

Some months before the outbreak of the war, an American Jesuit published an educational study of considerable importance, which has been almost entirely neglected in England. It is time that this work was more widely known, for it is a book for Catholics today and especially for all who teach in Catholic schools. It is the product of first-class Catholic historical scholarship, and is a fine example of a proper use of history. The author ends the book with an induction, from the wealth of historical facts which he presents, as to what are the essential factors in any education provided by the Society of Jesus and describes how these factors can be applied to schools today, particularly in the United States.

This work is remarkable for its dissimilarity to the productions of most secular scholarship and to most secular sociology today. In the first place it leads on, from a specialized and detailed historical research concerned with the foundations of the first Jesuit Colleges and the influences and historical processes leading to the Ratio Studiorum of 1599, to a broad outline of Jesuit practice up to the present day, instead of confining itself to a particular department of knowledge or history supposedly self-sufficient. In the second place the educational policy which is suggested by the final chapter is based on detailed practical experience, and long-founded tradition and depends on a Christian philosophy of life, specifically scholastic philosophy: thus it advises for present-day problems without allowing the solution to be dictated by and produced within the very causes of the problems themselves.