How much better, I say, is it for the active and thoughtful intellect, where such is to be found, to eschew the College and the University altogether, than to submit to a drudgery so ignoble, a mockery so contumelious! How much more profitable for the independent mind, after the mere rudiments of education, to range through a library at random, taking down books as they meet him, and pursuing the trains of thought which his mother wit suggests! How much healthier to wander into the fields, and there with the exiled Prince to find "tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks!"

From The Idea of a University by John Henry Newman

Rituals and Progress

The child is instinctively ritualistic. It is wrong to think that rituals are ornaments added to life; they are the acts by which life is transmitted. Informality is an embellishment to natural form; it has to be learned, when formality is simply given. The child in his primitive rituals may bow down before false gods, but he will not think it odd to bow down. He has to be stopped from it by an adult. He may think the dark in the closet is evil and the reflection on the wall is an intelligent spirit; but he will not think that there is no evil, or that angels are impossible. He has to be given that misinformation by an adult. Ritual gives the young an automatic posture; they do not feel a need to invent experience, for they are too busy beholding it. The loss of ritual consciousness is an adult complex, by that I do not mean it is mature, only that it is not youthful. One sign of the loss of the ritual sense is the increased need to manipulate the rites of life to make them "more meaningful." Youth is happily free of that, and rightly feels patronized when liturgies and protocols are toned down to an adult's idea of youthful taste. Ancient rituals are the youngest things in the world, for they are as elastic as tradition itself. Human though can imagine progress, but can only attain it through a sacred tradition. Without this pious intuition, progress becomes progressivism, a motion never quite in motion, a movement anywhere except somewhere. Having reject the life of tradition, the progressivist loses the vitality of his goal and ends up nowhere.

At the moment, progressivism has become entrenched in the universities which have become the establishment for the anti-establismentarians of the 1960s. The progressivism assumes a variety of names in this time capsule:"structuralism", "deconstructionism", "radical feminism". And it still operates against the purpose of the university by making it home to a totalitarian defensiveness and a fortress of reaction at war with the working world.

From "Piety and Learning" in Beyond Modernity: Reflections of a Post-Modern Catholic by Fr. George Rutler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987)

The Emptiness of Education

Over and above the world of sounds and visible things, over and above the world even of science and philosophy, there is that still greater environment of life, truth, love, and beauty which is God, Who alone can satisfy the infinite aspirations of man. One of the sad and regrettable things in education is that there are some people in this world who are dead not only to the world of poetry, music, philosophy, but dead to the life and love of God, and that class we may call the "Deity-blind." This group is alive to the environment of what might be called a progressive world; its words are correct, its sense of propriety shows itself in the embellishment of homes and the choice of amusements; it is wordly; it is rich; it is sophisticated; it is successful; it is at ease; it is honored; it has eyes, but they are blind - blind to the beautiful environment of God and the Incarnate life of Christ.

The very existence of this class, even in educated circles and university life, should give us pause and make us ask questions as to whether or not we are educated, in the right and true sense of the term. It is the growing mass of Deity-blind in our American life that prompts me to submit these questions:

Are the schools and universities throughout the country that ignore God really educating the young men and women entrusted to their care? Would we say that a man was a learned mathematician if he did not know the first principles of Euclid? Would we say that a man was a skilled litterateur if he did not know the meaning of words? Would we say that a man was a profound physicist if he did not know the first principles of light, sound, and heat? Can we say that a man is truly educated who is ignorant of the first principles of life and truth and love - which is God? I submit that a little child who tonight is kneeling at the knee of a foreign missionary sister, and learning for the first time that God made the sun, the moon, and stars that shine down upon her, and that some day she will render an account to Him as her loving Lord - that child, I say, is a more profound philosopher, a wiser scholar, a mind more entitled to university degrees, than all of our gowned professors scattered through the length and breadth of this land who know not that beyond time is the Timeless, that beyond space is the Spaceless, the infinite Lord and Master of the universe ... to be continued

From "Education and the Deity-Blind" in Old Errors and New Labels by Fulton J Sheen