Word: dusen
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...knowledge and skills of Modern Civilization have outrun the moral and spiritual resources for their direction and control, in this land of plenty, glutted with wealth, we lack the essential ethical currency for its use, and so we are threatened with cultural bankruptcy." The challenger was Henry P. Van Dusen, president of the faculty of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary. Last week, in a tightly reasoned "tract for the times"-God in Education (Scribner; $2)-Van Dusen sounded a call for a fundamental reversal in the whole philosophy of U.S. education...
...What Van Dusen wants is a great return to religion in U.S. schools, from the primary grades to the universities-and not merely as a course in itself, but also as the guiding principle of the whole educational process. "Our world cries pitiably for the fruits of Christian Faith," says Van Dusen. "What is required-what alone might prove adequate-is revolution, conversion, an about-face, in both the assumptions and the goals of our living; and, likewise, of the training of our youth . . . Every aspect of the philosophy and structure and spirit of education cries for radical remaking...
...Modern Fallacy. Theologian Van Dusen bases his case on a fundamental disagreement with French Philosopher Rene Descartes (Cogito; ergo sum), the symbol of modern skepticism, who believed that each man must start alone and anew to find the truth. Descartes' assumption that each individual must find truth in his own way is one of the great modern fallacies, Van Dusen argues. On the contrary, the correct assumption is "that youth of 17 to 20 years of age is not competent to decide the essentials of his own education...
...Descartes' most disastrous bequest, says Van Dusen, was his distinction between thought and matter-a dualism which became in Kant the divorce between reality as revealed by faith, and reality as revealed through the senses. The result today is the frightening schism "between facts and values, between the realm of science and the realm of art and religion; more recently between the secular and the spiritual." (Ironically, says Van Dusen, both Descartes and Kant had been illumined by a firm faith in God as the ultimate truth. "The history of human thought knows no more pathetic paradox than...
Lavish Cafeteria. Against a "nearer background," Van Dusen follows the subsequent course of education in the U.S. Originally, he points out, "the church was the parent and sponsor of education. And religion was the keystone of the educational arch." But as the nation and its knowledge expanded, so did education. Courses and colleges multiplied, and education more and more became afflicted with the curse of specialization ("so stunting to large-mindedness, so fatal to comprehension of the whole truth, that is, the real truth"). And with specialization came secularization...