According to Christopher Dawson, Western education is in crisis because our culture lacks a common understanding of nature or of man and any transcendent aim for person or society. “The world religions,” he said, “are the great spiritual highways that have led mankind through history from remote antiquity to modern times.” The state needs a spiritual bond: mere law or force will not suffice. Christianity used to provide the integrating principle, but since the secularisation of western culture three contemporary surrogate religions —democratic, fascist, and communist—have tried to replace it. Although each transcends the individual, none succeeds in transcending either the secular or the temporal. The secularisation dates not from the Renaissance or Reformation - during which Christian humanism saved western culture from disintegration under the forces of religious conflict - but from the eighteenth-century enlightenment. Francis Bacon, Dawson wrote, was ‘the first man to preach the new gospel of the new philosophy of active science with authority and to assert the necessity of a complete reorganisation of studies on this new foundation’. His “Great Instauration” became the dominant intellectual force in Western culture. Particularly in America, Dawson noted, this faith in science supplanted theological orthodoxy and merged unconsciously with faith in democracy. Culminating in John Dewey’s ‘secular idealism’, this was more religious than political, said Dawson: ‘community’, ‘democracy’, ‘progress’ and even ‘youth’ take on ‘a kind of numinous power character which gives them an emotional or evocative power and puts them above rational criticism’. The ‘all-pervading influence of the secular standards and values…affects the whole educational system and makes the idea of an integrated religious culture seem antiquated and absurd to the politicians and publicists and the technical experts who are the makers of public opinion’. In the state monopoly of education, ‘great forces are at work which have changed the lives and thoughts of men more effectively than the arbitrary power of dictators or the violence of political revolutions’. Dawson warned that, ‘once the State has accepted full responsibility for the education of the whole youth of the nation, it is obliged to extend its control further and further into new fields: to the physical welfare of its pupils – to their feeding and medical care – to their amusements and the use of their spare time – and finally to their moral welfare and their psychological guidance.’ So strong, however, was the organic unity of Western culture, rooted in Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, that even extreme forms of modern nationalism, Dawson argued, ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPjmGiB2Kes

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