Crisis of Western Education

The Crisis of Western Education by Christopher Dawson, 246 pages

According to the esteemed cultural historian Christopher Dawson, Western education in the middle of the twentieth century was in the throes of a crisis of a type that has occurred before - in late Scholasticism, in Alexandria in late antiquity, and in Constantinople near the end of the first millennium, amongst other times and climes.  The difficulty lies in a shift in the academy towards a focus on techniques rather than the handing down of a humanistic tradition, a concentration on the manipulation of things rather than an understanding of things, of cleverness rather than wisdom.  The danger he perceives is the supremacy of the technocrat who (in the words of John Murray) "knows everything... about the organization of all the instruments and techniques of power that are available in the contemporary world - and who, at the same time, understands nothing about the nature of man or about the nature of true civilization."  The cure he prescribes is the introduction of courses of study engaging with the Western tradition, unified as the study of Christendom.