In 2008 Pope Benedict penned a letter to the city of Rome addressing the ‘urgent task of education’ in the face of what he spoke of as an ‘educational emergency’¹. His language was echoed by Pope Francis who in 2019 sounded the alarm at what he referred to as an ‘educational crisis’ which led him to call for a Global Compact on Education, redirecting the efforts of many Catholic educational institutions as well as many others towards an education the goal of which was the integral development of human persons and societies.²

While it may be easy to dismiss statements which describe the current situation as a crisis or an emergency as little more than hyperbolic rhetoric aimed a motivating some kind of (re)action, it pays to attend to the nature of their concerns. On face value, these two popes seemed concerned with very different crises: Pope Francis’ immediate concerns were provoked primarily by the growing disparity between the rich and the poor and the alarming lack of solidarity, particularly focussing on the impact of various geopolitical events and developments which precluded vast numbers of young people from an adequate education. The concern of his predecessor seemed more personal and existential, with his attention focussing more immediately on the human need for truth, ‘especially a truth that can guide life’.³

While superficially these concerns might seem to be unrelated a closer examination of the respective teaching of these two popes reveals that their concerns converge on the difficulties that are present in the task of handing on to the next generation a vision of life and of reality that will equip young people to live a life fitting to their dignity as creatures of God, called to participate in the Divine communion for all eternity, and to experience the hundredfold here and now (see Mk 10:30). 

In invoking the language of crisis, both popes, Benedict XVI and Francis, were not at all too far from the mind of the British cultural historian, Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), whose 1961 book The Crisis of Western Education precedes their concerns and articulates a clear minded and erudite analysis of the nature of the crisis of education, while setting forth a truly humane and capacious vision of how it can be addressed.⁴

Dawson’s unique perspective on the matter of education is formed by his vocation as a historian of culture whose profound thinking about the nature of culture was developing at a time of great cultural upheaval in Europe and indeed the world, immediately following the Great War, right through to the point where he ceased to publish in the late 1960s.

Dawson’s writings on education, and in particular The Crisis, trace the development of the tradition of education across Europe, from ancient Greek city states, through to the modern era. In tracing this history, Dawson not only demonstrates his truly impressive facility with the extensive twists and turns of European cultural history and a great deal of primary and secondary source material, but a keen insight into the problems facing the world of his day, and which continue to plague us. Indeed, Dawson’s insights are perhaps even more pertinent now than when he first put pen to paper.
Dawson’s treatise on education puts him in the same tradition of great Catholic and Christian thinkers who turned their attention to the problem of education in the twentieth century. But whereas thinkers such as Maritain and A. G. Sertillanges sought to reassert philosophy (in its neo-scholastic form) as the organising principle of education, Dawson argued that it was to be culture, the study of culture, which would best serve the task of education.

His focus, while decidedly European, is not “Eurocentric” as it is commonly understood in pejorative terms. Dawson’s particular interest is not so much exclusively European as it is Christian. His interests, and this plays out in his argument, are cultural, and his focus on Europe, and particularly Western Europe emerged from the historical fact of the unique manner in which the Christian reality has formed European culture in such a way as to be capacious enough to accept not only the best of Greek philosophy and Roman Law, but the warrior spirit of the Germanic tribes (for a more thoroughgoing treatment of how this unfolded over the course of history, see Dawson’s book The Making Of Europe: An Introduction To The History Of European Unity).⁵

The Crisis of Western Education, which was first published in 1961 is not simply a book composed a reactionary conservative bemoaning the state of the world and pining after the halcyon days of times gone by. Dawson’s unique perspective as a historian of culture gave him the capacity to see what was at stake in contemporary educational projects. For Dawson, as he describes in the opening page, ‘Culture is inseparable from education, since education in the widest sense of the word is what the anthropologists term ‘enculturation,’ i.e., the process by which culture is handed on by the society and acquired by the individual’⁶ (p. 3).

If this, then, is the goal of education, then it is clear why he proposes the study of culture, rather than of philosophy or metaphysics to be the central core or unifying principle in his educational vision. This is of course not to negate the importance of philosophy and specifically metaphysics, but to recognise that for us ontology is always mediated by history. As he points out elsewhere, it is religion that is the dynamic element in culture.

As Dawson progresses throughout the work, he traces the various episodes in the history of education in the West which bring the reader to his present moment, which was the mid-twentieth century. From here he proposes the study of culture, and specifically that of Christian culture, to be the bedrock of a university education as a means of addressing three ‘great problems’ of education in his day, and I would argue our own. The three great problems he identifies as follows:

first, how to maintain the tradition of liberal education against the growing pressure of scientific specialization and utilitarian vocationalism; secondly, how to retain the unity of Western culture against the dissolvent forces of nationalism and racialism; and thirdly, how to preserve the tradition of Christian culture in the age of secularism.⁷

Any astute reader however will note that Dawson’s observations, if relevant to his own time, are all the more apposite to us now in the early twenty-first century where the almost complete capture of Large Language Models across all sectors of society—including and specifically within education—has been apocalyptic (that is, revelatory), and where the rise of populist movements seem to perpetuate across western Europe, North American, and Australia with replete is disturbing ethno-nationalist tendencies.

Dawson’s critique of what he elsewhere refers to as ‘the modern dilemma’⁸ is decidedly apropos to our present context. He writes:

We must face the fact that the vast expansion of man’s external powers by science and technology which are the creation of human reason have done nothing to strengthen the power of reason in the moral order which is its proper domain. For the moral order and the technological order have become out of gear with one another, and as the technological order has advanced and become stronger, the moral order has grown weaker.⁹

In a paradoxical mode that should not be unfamiliar to any Christian, the way forward out of the present predicament involves a certain looking back, not in a purely nostalgic sense, but in a way which brings into the present all that has gone before. If education is the handing on of a culture, a way of life—that is of living—that has ‘been built up laboriously by the work of successive generations’,¹⁰ it is both an act of memory and an act of hope on the part of the society and of the individual teacher. It is also a gift to the student, a gift that communicates a life, and a vision of life that is open to reality, and that sees it as fundamentally good, and worth living.

Dawon’s The Crisis of Western Education offers a challenge to the present fragmentation that is felt in the modern academy. His recognition of and manner of facing the crisis of his time is one which is reflective of the approach advocated by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who spoke of a crisis as an opportunity:

A crisis forces us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgments. A crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments, that is, with prejudices. Such an attitude not only sharpens the crisis but makes us forfeit the experience of reality and the opportunity for reflection it provides.¹¹

In the face of the present crisis, Dawson’s voice deserves careful attention.