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What exactly is American education? What is there that pulls it all together, its underlying principles, those which are followed with few exceptions by American schools at every level. No. One is that education is a state function. That every school, whether it be privately owned or operated by a church or owned and operated by a government entity is at bottom an agent of the state. Another is that it must be a democratic education. Democratic in the sense that John Dewey used the term more than a hundred years ago, which is to fit each person where he.she belongs in that society. That society is conceived as totally secular. Secular is some ways like France is secular. But I think we must remember that Dewey, like Marx, starts with Hegel, but then goes his own way, rejecting idealism for something like Pierce’s “Pragamaticism” but which he finally calls instrumentalism. The purpose of the school is to serve as an instrument of the state.

Now sixty years ago, it was a common topic among Catholic educators to worry about the influence of Dewey in public education. The protestant influence in the schools had ebbed away and been replaced by a thinking that was not Marxist but admiring of its sociology. That is one reason why Catholics as well as Protestants were alarmed when the Supreme Court outlawed prayer in the public schools. An accommodation had been reached, where the school district was overwhelming Protestant, say as in Alabama, then the “tone” would be Protestant. In Massachusetts, another school district might as well have been a parochial school. Where there was a mixture, then the tone was something like liberal protestant/liberal Jewish. Since the decision secularism, owing so much to Dewey’s philosophy, and already found in many districts, has became dominant in the great majority of districts.

This was much furthered by the federal education act of 1965 which was a kind of final solution to the question of government aid for Catholic schools that had been a factor since the Catholic insurge around 1850. It was also furthered by the rage of ecumenicalism after Vatican II. I submit that from that point on, what had distinguished Catholic education from others went away very quickly. Just about as quickly as the teaching nuns. Land O’ the Lakes was a sure sign of this development. Bill Buckley described what had happened at Yale in the book that brought him to prominence. Catholic educators who ling had lamented that OTHERs thought of Catholic colleges as no better than upgraded parochial schools, now decided to go down that same path. What should,in their opinion, to distinguish them from other universities? Well, as little as possible. Likewise the Catholic schools that were not shut down by the dioceses after they lost their cheap labor. They would become like the private schools, or “better”public schools. Well, pretty much all this has happened. There is not a nickle;’s worth of difference between Georgetown and Harvard. Ditto the Jesuit Higb school in my area and the toney high school in High Park.