Word: dusen
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Much credit is due to TIME for the excellent May 14 review of Henry P. Van Dusen's book God in Education. Such a book is more than welcome today when too many self-styled educators either sneer at religion or contemptuously dismiss it as a bundle of myths...
Queen of the Sciences. The only way to cure "civilization's sickness," says Van Dusen, is to restore to education the coherence it once knew. That means "the organic unity of truth, each several part being what it is by virtue of its place within the Whole . . . But, if truth is an organic whole, how does it come to be so?" ... To answer that, "we are being driven hard up against the question...
Does the U.S.'s traditional principle of separation of church and state stand in the way? Van Dusen's answer: no. "At the present hour, this cherished American principle is being refurbished and redefined to ends for which it was never intended. The Constitutional guarantees of 'freedom of religion' have lately been reinterpreted by no less august a body than the United States Supreme Court with meanings which were never foreseen by, and which, it may safely be suggested, would have outraged, the framers of the Constitution...
Determining Principle. But what primarily concerns Van Dusen is a return in U.S. education to religion as the determining principle in the educational process as a whole...
...Says Van Dusen: "Let us be clear what is required. Not an uncritical return to ancient days and old ways. Not the slavish reproduction in this modern time of many familiar features of earlier philosophy and social organization. Not the rejection or loss of a single sound achievement of recent centuries...