There's gold in them there hills. John C. Murray noted that Origen and Clement of Alexandrea had already said what he proposed to say. Christianity was fundamentally a Word . . . Christopher Dawson was more persistent than any other in all history in saying and repeating what Christian education has in fact done for Western civilization. His idea of what education basically is, in and out of schools and among primitives and others, was simple and realistic.
Education teaches children to do things, to plant and cook, to read and write.
But besides these things, education has always meant the initiation of the young into the social and spiritual inheritance of the community . . . And this can be done since no one can well be opposed in principle to this study as an objective historical phenomenon. It is a question of Western man getting introduced to himself. Pieper says that to raise a truly philosophical question, for example about man or even about this scrap of paper, one is finally confronted with the problem of God and the world. In response to the disturbing ructions in French universities in 1968, and to what he considered their long-standing intellectual and moral negativism, Jacques Maritain wrote some pages outlining his view of a Christian university.