Christopher Dawson on Education as Enculturation 

Christopher Dawson on Education as Enculturation 

Joseph T. Stuart, Professor of History and Fellow in Catholic Studies at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, USA. Dr. Stuart is the author of three books, including Christopher Dawson: A Cultural Mind in the Age of the Great War (2022). Joseph, his wife Barbara, and their four children live in Bismarck where they garden and collect books. 

English historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) constructed his historical narratives around cultures rather than states, civilizations, or churches. He advocated for educational renewal as a kind of enculturation, the formation of the whole person according to the richest traditions of a culture. As professor of Catholic Studies at Harvard, Dawson countered the fragmentation, utilitarianism, and secularization of modern education, proposing a wholistic study of Christian culture as a basis for curricular unity. Modern education in the West, Dawson wrote, had failed to develop an adequate method to study its own civilization, resulting in a struggle to understand other civilizations too. The classical education that had served the West well for centuries was in decline everywhere, and besides, it was more than the Greeks and Romans who had made Western civilization. 

Many Christian cultures shaped the unity of the West, and if students could glimpse the “culture-process,” he wrote in The Crisis of Western Education (1961), the study of the past would have immediate relevance to today. This culture-process was the way a religion (Christianity) reshaped the raw materials of non-Christian cultures as a living force in history, transforming them from within like a leavening agent in dough. This made Europe and the West from within. Studying Christian cultures as wholes, under an anthropological and historical mode, would help students navigate diversity in cultures and ground them in the universality of human nature, truth, and divine revelation. This would connect for them not only faith and reason but also faith and life – enculturation in its widest sense and the basis of continuity and development within any culture.