We are mortified to learn that some students have not learned of the horrors of Auschwitz or the Nazi regime; still other children now question whether it was right for the world to criticize Nazi beliefs.
To show the effects of relativism upon education, (and putting aside the whole question of the morality of war), one recent poll indicated that a disturbingly high percentage of American students called into question the Allies’ declaration of war against Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II. Some of the students asked: “Who were we to tell the Nazis they were wrong?” This might be summed up in the common mantra: “We all have our own truths. What’s true for you may not be true for me.” If this philosophy is true, then why should we prefer democracy over totalitarianism?
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, days before his election as Pope Benedict XVI, declared that we live in an era of a “tyranny of relativism.” Such a “dictatorship of relativism does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
There is a risk of equating democracy with moral relativism. Without any fixed morality for social and political existence, truth becomes a relative term and the dignity of the human person and the right to life and liberty becomes subject to political power or dominant philosophical thought. Again, if there is no truth to the innate dignity of human beings, then the concept of human dignity has collapsed.
In our own times, relativism has infected education. Monsignor Luigi Giussani, the late founder of the Communion and Liberation Movement writes in his book, The Risk of Education: Never before has society – understood as a general mental climate and life-style – had so many tyrannical tools to invade our consciousness. Today, more than ever, society is the sovereign educator or perhaps more correctly, mis-educator. In this climate, the educational crisis appears first as a lack of awareness in which teachers themselves become unknowing promoters of society’s flaws. It also appears in a lifeless approach to teaching, in which teachers lack the energy to wage war against a pervasive negativity…1
According to the Jesuit theologian Josef Jungmann, education is an introduction to reality. The word “reality” is to the word “education” like destination is to a journey. The whole meaning of the human journey lies in its destination, and the destination is present not only in the actual moment that the journey ends, but along each step of the way… Clearly, then, the value of an education is measured by how closely and obediently it follows reality.2
As a child matures, his character begins to develop. And character development entails a growing awareness of self and of the total meaning of the reality that surrounds him. This will develop into his worldview. A child derives his worldview in large measure from his parents or from his teachers.
Parents, the givers of life, bring their children into a certain worldview, a stream of thought and civilization. Their authority is inescapable and is given together with a responsibility even if they refuse to accept it. In the life of the [child] they represent the permanent coherence of his origin, a steady dependence on a total sense of reality. Clearly, the school also has a position of authority
insofar as it claims to develop and carry on the education received at home.3
An educational approach that begins with the supposition that things do not have meaning will leave a child to wander aimlessly, like a man with a quiver full of arrows, but no target for which to aim.
Such aimlessness or purposelessness induces uncertainty and fear, and “the result will be indifference or alienation, a lack of commitment to reality.”4 This might explain why many teenagers and adults react with the post-modernist sneer of sarcasm, skepticism, cynicism, or disdain for tradition and commitment, and exhibit “a bitter detachment from all serious offers of commitment.”5 Nonetheless, “An existential commitment is a necessary condition for a genuine experience of truth, and therefore for the conviction to exist. We cannot understand reality unless we are in it.”6
Yet many people have grown up implicitly taught that the universe has no meaning. And if the universe has no meaning, then neither do they have meaning. And if there is no purpose to existence, then why bother with anything? Therefore, pursuing a life of pleasure may well become the end of all things.
Such lack of character building has led to our current socio-political situation of rigid rhetoric, polarizing polemics, and divisive diatribe. But the deep-seated human desire and need for commitment is such that:
[People] will be attracted to clear-cut proposals…. In recent years, the phenomenon of [young] people who embrace political extremism has shown us the depth of this need. It has also shown that political ideology, which claims to explain all of reality, in fact seriously constricts this need.7 As it is, political ideologies often attempt to reduce the whole of reality into partial worldviews and “the need to confront reality is forced into a narrow ideology that cannot contain it. The gulf separating the depth of reality and political ideologies is well supported by the anxiety many politically active young people feel when they repeatedly question their own experiences….”8
Secular teaching today does not really help the student to form a unified explanatory hypothesis [a unified worldview]. The excessive analytical quality of the curricula leaves the student at the mercy of a myriad of data and contradictory solutions which lead them to feel disconcerted and saddened by uncertainty. This situation is not improved by new guidelines that aim to counteract the situation by correcting the most visible phenomena such as teaching by rote or the fragmentary nature of the curricula.9
The standards-based, standards-alignment approaches to education or teaching-to-the-test techniques are also insufficient means to the end of education. None of these approaches teach the young how to think because they neither give them a framework, or a “tradition,” if you will, in which to think out of, nor a philosophy of thought in which to think with. Technology is another tool for learning, but unfortunately is regarded by some as the most important science in and of itself to the neglect of language, history, math, science, and especially the arts and humanities. Technology for technology’s sake.
Such fragmentation reveals an emptiness and the student is like a child who finds a large clock in a room. Smart and curious, he picks up the clock and slowly takes it apart. In the end, he has fifty or one hundred pieces before him. He was really clever, but now he feels lost and begins to cry, for the clock is all there, but it’s no longer there: he lacks the unifying idea that would allow him to put it all together.”10
There is a conception today that the ideal school is an agnostic11 or “values neutral” school uninterested in proposing a unified worldview to the student. Yet skepticism and cynicism robs the heart of its gift of enthusiasm, the soul of passion, and the mind of intellectual curiosity; the student then has no firm footing and his education is built on sand. Students believe that they are made to study an assortment of things but they are not helped to understand what these things mean. Sadly, many students today not only do not want to study or go to school, but they don’t know why they are required to study or go to school.
Sometimes, when the absurdity and impossibility of such an [educational] system becomes obvious, the solution is to expose the student to the widest possible range of conflicting authorities in the belief he will spontaneously and maturely select what is best. I believe this is the “dis-educational” method par excellence. It eliminates coherence from education, making authority – and therefore nature – useless, with the result that the student’s very development is literally de-natured…. The result is irrationality and anarchy.12
A fundamental aim of education must be to assist the young in drawing connections between the tradition that he has received and the life he has experienced. Lacking this ability new experiences will lead him to adopt one of the following three attitudes: indifference, where he will feel abstracted from everything that does not directly touch him; traditionalism, where…people hide behind rigid beliefs to avoid being threatened in their faith from the outside world; or hostility, because an abstract God is certainly an enemy [to personal freedom], someone who at the very least is a waste of time.13
Unless the young are taught about the past and tradition, they will have on which to base their emerging worldview, and neither will they have the necessary intellectual tools be able to choose one worldview over another. They will either invent ones or remain forever cynical.14
One must also be willing to question and examine his worldview. In the classical sense this is called criticism. And unless one is able to critique his worldview, then whatever one is taught “will either be irrationally rejected or irrationally kept, but will never mature.”15
Unfortunately criticism is viewed as…negative. Students sometimes fear to critique their faith for fear they will be rejected by the teacher or peers…but faith that is not questioned is not faith, but blind adherence. 16
Unfortunately, at present, if one questions the motives of his government, he may be accused of lacking patriotism or treason. This is true for the Peace of the Program in 2084. Under the rule of pax romana, the world was “governed by the distance among individuals and by the law of violence in varying degrees.”17
To educate means to develop the child’s self-consciousness, the feeling he has of being responsible in the face of something greater than he is. In turn, to be responsible means to be answerable to something. Not, however, as contemporary culture believes, to be answerable [only] to ourselves…for this leads to ambiguity and even alienation. What I am trying to say is that the educator must be able to promote the unfolding of an ideal, of something which is ultimate and greater than us, so that whatever we do is not done for our self: this is the abolition of selfishness.18
Education must urge the young to take on personal responsibility and independence. However, the independence cannot be an unbridled rugged individualism. Each individual must serve the common good of the human family.
What can a family do against a society that dominates its children through television? …What can the family do to counteract the barrage of advertising? How can it stem the influence of what we hear on all sides, the trite repetition of the same arguments, some of whose tragic aspects are the lack of respect for the unborn child, and the casualness of sex, marriage, and divorce? By itself, the family is powerless! An intelligent family will come out of its complacent, comfortable position and create relationships, a social fabric, in opposition to the dominant social fabric.19
It is through a mature, free association with other individuals who share the same fundamental concerns that we can resist the dominant influences. We can do all of this provided that we understand – and maybe we are compelled to such a step out of love for our children – that this concerns not only them but us as well. Having children to educate is one of the greatest occasions God has given us for reawakening our faith.20
T.S. Eliot, the great poet, wrote that, “Where there is no temple, there shall be no homes…” meaning that where there is no religious sense, there are no homes, only “shelters and institutions”.21 A community is a deep union born from a life shared together, which arises from the recognition of a common structure. In our organizational fixation, we tend to confuse associations with communities…. A community is a sharing of life in its very essence…an inner dimension at the source of our thoughts and actions.22
The so-called neutral school, because it is not interested in proposing a unified worldview, is also unable to generate real communities and thus deprives the student of a structure that is crucial to his personal quest.23 The communal dimension is part of any true educational undertaking.24 One must have companions on the journey of life. Indeed, education is a community effort and one of the tasks of community.25The family…is the first and most influential educating community.26
Ultimately, education must take place within the context of family and community. For Christians, especially Catholics, this requires each believer to become an active member of the Church, the Body of Christ. The church is the continuing presence of Christ in the world. In the words of the ancients, as the soul is to a body, so is the Church to the world.27
Democracy is threatened when so much economic and political power is controlled by an oligarchy.28 With technology and mass production, large corporations continue to put smaller firms out of business and citizens are reduced to subjects. The subjects then lose their personal individuality to the impersonality of a mass of consumers.
Many people today simply seek entertainment and when not being entertained they have no feeling of self-worth or dignity. For many people, their meaning for existence seems to depend upon pleasure, drugs, or television or the entertainment industry itself.29
Perhaps the ultimate era of totalitarianism is already upon us. Imagine a ruling oligarchy that not only has control of the political process but is also in charge of all the major corporations, industry, financial institutions, energy companies, oil companies, mass media communications, entertainment, and the arts. What then becomes of the individual in our mass-marketed culture? Humans have been reduced to consumers. The corporations produce the need for consumer goods and then produce them for the consumer to consume. Adolph Hitler wrote that all effective propaganda must be confined to a few formulas (or slogans) and those must be constantly repeated to imprint the idea in the mind of the masses. The method is simple: create a need and fulfill the desire or pacify the fear.
Endnotes
1 Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2001) 73-74
2 Ibid., pp. 50-51.
3 Ibid., pp. 65-66.
4 Ibid., pp. 55-56
5 Ibid., p. 56.
6 Ibid., pp. 68-69.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., p. 57.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., pp. 58-59.
11 Here I use the term “agnostic” in its classical sense; from the Greek a (not) and gignoskein (to know). T.H. Huxley coined the word agnosticism to express his position of suspended belief. He believed that beyond knowable facts, satisfactory evidence concerning the nature of the universe was not available; he used the term agnosticism to apply to any proposition for which the evidence was insufficient for belief. Nowadays agnosticism principally refers to suspension of belief with respect to God. Guissani implies that there is a school of thought that does not believe there is a meaning to existence and in the final analysis, no ultimate meaning to education or the process of learning.
12 Guissani, pp. 66-67.
13 Ibid., p. 72.
14 Here one might emphasize the importance of learning from history and its mistakes so as to not repeat them. One is also concerned to hear that some students have not learned of the horrors of Auschwitz or the Nazi regime; still other children have been taught that the Shoah never happened. To show the effects of relativism upon education, (and putting aside the whole question of the morality of war), one recent poll indicated that a disturbingly high percentage of American students called into question the Allies’ declaration of war against Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II. One student replied: “Who were we to tell the Nazis they were wrong?” A prevailing attitude today is that one idea is just as good as another. It might be summed up in a common mantra: “We all have our own truths. What’s true for you may not be true for me.” If this philosophy is true, then why should we prefer Democracy over Totalitarianism? This is but one example of the tyranny of relativism.
15 Giussani, p. 9.
16 Ibid., p. 10.
17 Ibid., p. 27
18 Ibid., p. 129.
19 Ibid., pp. 130-31.
20 Ibid., p. 131.
21 Ibid., p. 127.
22 Ibid., p. 74.
23 Ibid., p. 75.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., p. 9.
26 Ibid., p. 75.
27 Here I would be remiss not to recommend The Religious Sense, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, and Why the Church? books by Luigi Giussani.
28 Oligarchy – government by the few or a government in which a small group exercises control, especially for corrupt or selfish purposes. The word can also refer to the group exercising the control. In 2084 the Media is an oligarchy controlling the masses with Technocracy, a bastardization of the democratic
process.
29 While it may seem that certain prescription drugs are over prescribed, in no way do I suggest that those with legitimate health problems – physical or psychological – should be denied medication. The drugs of 2084 are more along the lines of methamphetamines, recreational use of marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, or others. However, in recent years certain drugs have also been introduced that increase the libido or sexual function; with these there is a risk that the biological act of intercourse may become an end in itself. If so, the act reserved for marriage may be reduced to simply an instrument for pleasure, the persons involved rendered mere sexual objects, and the only concern being placed on physical performance. Instead of the couple giving themselves over freely, gifting each other with their total persons, the sexual act becomes
individualistic, self-focused, and only a matter of what one individual is getting from the other.
30 Gaudium et Spes, section 76.
31 Ibid.
32 Notable & Quotable”, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 9, 1978. Cardinal Wojtyla was elected Pope in 1978 and chose the name John Paul II.
33 Catechism of the Catholic Church, (CCC), paragraph 2273
34 Matt. 19.26
35 1 Pt. 4:4.
36 Hebrews 11:36-38.
37 Rev.12:4.
38 Genesis 4:1-16.
39 Isaiah 5:2.
40 Psalm 11:3.
41 Isaiah 2:4.
42 Psalm 27:14.
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