Student Assembly
Today’s Mass Education Pushes Children Away from Virtue into Mere Hygiene
by Anthony Esolen
Have you ever waited in line to tour the gigantic, boxlike “machines for living” built by Le Corbusier? Have you purchased tickets to sleep a night in a fifteen-story apartment complex? Have you surveyed a sprawling paper mill or bottling plant and said, “If only my house looked like one of those”? Neither have I. We are human beings, after all.
Yet this insight, that homes actually presuppose human beings to live in them, with human bodies, and a human nature, has had no effect on our public schools. I assert that the way we build schools, where we place them, what we choose to teach (and what we choose not to teach), how we treat the sexes, how we schedule the school day, the manners we expect from students, and indeed the whole crazy machinery of officers and administrators determining the system, are the result of nothing less than our having forgotten what human beings are.
Two Incompatible Visions
I should like to illustrate by recalling my experience in grade school. It was not pleasant. I was taciturn and lonely. I was also years ahead of my classmates, so I spent a lot of time in the classroom daydreaming or doodling. But for all that, the school was fit for a human being. How?
First, it was a Catholic school. The battle over prayer in the public schools has never been over whether a few innocuous pieties might be uttered at the beginning of a school day. It has been over two incompatible visions of mankind. The one affirms that man is made for a transcendent end. It sets our gaze at a horizon we are somehow meant for, but which we cannot attain on our own. Architecturally, it is as if we dwelt in the neighborhood of a steeple and a bell tower, whose tolling would remind us that what we do below is to be oriented toward the things above.
The other vision denies that end. It affirms that what matters is only what is here and now, or what we can eventually produce in a future here-and-now. It generally scorns the past, and replaces wisdom with technical efficiency. Its Eden is not one of holiness, but of managed hedonism, secured by technological advancement and sound political directives.
Suppose that the poets and the theologians and almost all the great philosophers of every culture are right, and the technocrats are wrong. Then the public school, with its culture oriented towards nothing transcendent, is an offense to human dignity. It is like a house without windows, or a world without a sky. That explains why their buildings have come to resemble factories.
About Something Sacred
But that was not so at my school. When we arrived in the morning, we were instructed to enter the nearby church and to sit with our classmates, boys on the right, girls on the left. Our teachers, most of them nuns, would be there before us. We would hear the remainder of Mass, and that is how we began the day. On every first Friday of the month, we ended our studies early, to go to the church for the rosary—we were praying, we were told, for the conversion of Russia—and the rite of Benediction. During Lent, we attended the Stations of the Cross, followed by confession.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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