Reclaiming the Classics

Recovering the Nobility of True Education for All

October 24, 2024

Margarita Mooney Clayton

Princeton Theological Seminary and the Scala Foundation

Written in 1942, just as the United States was about to enter World War II, the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain warned his American audience that John Dewey’s pragmatist view of education overlooks its true ends and means: human freedom exercised in accordance with our God-given nature. In Maritain’s Education at the Crossroads, he recognizes explicitly the contributions made to education by Dewey, especially his attention to the social context of education. Like Dewey, Maritain also rejects an educational rigidity where young students are lined up in classrooms, lectured for hours, and then told to reproduce this material on an exam. But Maritain is clear that Dewey’s approach to education brackets out the question of truth in the educational act. Thought, for Dewey, becomes nothing more than a kind of instrumental activity moving toward action within a society. But for Maritain the true end of education is “to guide man in the evolving dynamism through which he shapes himself as a human person.”

Maritain, who converted from atheism to Roman Catholicism while studying philosophy in Paris, held to a theistic view of the human person according to our inner nature’s final end communion with God, who created and sustains us. According to Maritain, whose conversion to Catholicism led him to study the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, our rationality points to a transcendent reality beyond direct sensual perception but revealed through our intuitions and desires for love and truth.

Maritain specifically responds to Dewey in this book, commending what is good in innovative educational methods but warning that the first mistake is disregarding the ends of education and focusing on the means. The crux of Maritain’s disagreement with Dewey and Freire concerns the nature of the human person. For Dewey, the human intellect is essentially a tool for action in the world — whether problem-solving action or fighting for revolutionary liberation. Maritain does not disregard the practical ends of education. But he argues that we best achieve these ends by remembering that we are persons, body, and soul — beings with an interior life.

Jacques Maritain described the human person—as “an animal endowed with reason, whose supreme dignity is in the intellect; and man as a free individual in personal relation with God, whose supreme righteousness consists in voluntarily obeying the law of God; and man as a sinful and wounded creature called to the divine life and to the freedom of grace, whose supreme perfection consists of love.”

For Maritain, “Man is a person, who holds himself in his hand by his intelligence and his will. He does not merely exist as a physical being. There is in him a richer and nobler existence; he has spirited superexistence through knowledge and love.” Maritain discusses many other ends of education—solving problems, making good citizens, forming the will, and intellectualism [hyperspecialization in one area]—as always being secondary ends of education. The primary end of education for Maritain must always be to form the inner world of a human being, the conscience of the person, that can perceive and respond to a transcendent reality that is the source of all that exists.

Maritain’s view of education rests on a notion of truth held to by Greek philosophers and the Judeo-Christian tradition: that there is a transcendent, non-material reality with which we can interact. An educated person knows not only how to act and solve problems in this world but also how to be open and receptive to transcendent reality.

The highest good of the person, according to Maritain, is not one’s historical role in bringing about revolutionary action; the person’s highest good is communion with God, a communion that starts from the moment of our existence as physical beings and continues after our mortal life on earth is over. That conviction about the nature of the human person as body and soul is the basis for his concern not to reduce our spiritual nature or intellect entirely into action, as pragmatist and consciousness-raising visions of education do.

Part of what educators must do, Maritain contends, is preserve the traditions representing millennia of wisdom about who we are as human beings. Those traditions are necessary to prevent education from becoming merely a tool for intervention in the here and now—the tools of education be easily manipulated for evil purposes, as happened under educational systems in China, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and communist Cuba, just to name a few.

After discussing the ends of education, Maritain turns to the inner dynamism of the student and teach-student interactions. The teacher brings her subjectivity, her whole self, into the classroom and must seek to constantly activate the inner dynamism of the student, which is the proper means and end of education.Maritain writes of teachers as having a vocation similar to ministers, helping children know their nature, activating their inner vitality, and fostering the dispositions of the love of truth, goodness, and justice. Like medicine, teaching an art subservient to nature. Teachers are not mere instruments but guide the student with knowledge, offering frameworks to make logical connections between ideas. Teachers also have moral authority, guiding students in character to form correct moral judgments.

Maritain always measures the end of education by the student’s growth. Hence, his philosophical anthropology and his understanding of being human as a unity of body and soul led him to always emphasize the students’ own capacities to intuit, sense, and know. Right judgment and right action result from integrating our various capacities of knowing. He stresses attention to the inner depths of the personality and spiritual dynamism of the student, arguing that a good education awakens the inner resources and creativity of the student.

Unlike Dewey, who focused on the social role of schools, Maritain argues that the family, church, and educational institutions need to cooperate to avoid the traps of technocratic education and live out his integral vision of educating the whole person, mind, body, and soul. The saints and martyrs, he argues, also educate our humanity.

Although Dewey is mainly silent on the content of the curriculum, Maritain further builds on John Henry Newman’s insights about the nature of knowledge and the structure of the curriculum at both the K-12 level and the university. A good curriculum for Maritain must begin with imagination, beauty, and sense-perceptions, which are vital in children. Adolescents grow in their capacity to reason and grasp logical frameworks that can provide unity to knowledge. Science for Maritain is not just a set of skills or techniques but an inquiry into reality. Like Newman, Maritain proposes a curriculum grounded in the liberal arts tradition, including math, natural sciences, poetry, and fine arts. Philosophy helps students see patterns in the world. Theology provides a unifying framework. Maritain’s educational curriculum begins not with theology or philosophy but with imagination, creative intuition, and practical intellect, then develops into philosophy and theology as appropriate to a child’s development.

Maritain’s ideas are now being rediscovered because his warning that Dewey’s pragmatism would lead to technocratic means of education rings true to many parents, teachers, and students. Attention to the inner dynamism of the student and our final end of communion with God must be the foundation of any educational program because it sows the seeds of human happiness and prudential action in the world.

Note: Margarita Mooney Clayton is the author of The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts and The Wounds of Beauty: Seven Dialogues on Art and Education. This blog draws on her writing from those books, and from her presentation at the 2023 Adeodatus Conference.