Tossing Them Out

Dale Ahlquist writes:

We could start this process, the process of bringing common sense back to education, by tossing out Darwin, Marx, and Freud, and all their minions, or studying them solely for the purpose of finding out what the enemy is up to.

Each of them took not so much a half-truth as a hundredth part of a truth, and then offered it not merely as something, but as everything. Having never done anything except split hairs, [each of them] hangs the whole world on a single hair [whether it be biology, economics, or psychology]. . . . It is yet another mark of this sort of agnostic that he is ready to assert his absolute knowledge of everything to the verge of a contradiction in terms. Just as he will always try to write a history of prehistoric man, so he will always struggle to be conscious of his own unconsciousness. . . . Just as it is the latest fad to prove that everything is sexual, so it was the last fad to prove that everything was economic. The Marxist notion, called the materialist theory of history, had the same sort of stupid self-confidence in its very insufficient materialism. As the one fad conceives everything about the bird to be connected with mating, so the other conceived everything connected with it to consist of catching worms. . . . These fads fade very fast, and it may seem hardly worth while to prick bubbles that will burst of themselves. Nevertheless, there is one consideration that makes it worth while. It is a character of all these manias that they cannot really convince the mind, but they do cloud it. Above all, they do darken it. All these tremendous and rather temporary discoveries have had the singular fascination that they were not merely degrading, but were also depressing. Each in turn leaves no trace on the true and serious conclusions of the world. But each in turn may leave very deep and disastrous wounds and dislocations in the mentality of the individual man.

…instead of finding forgiveness for our sins, sins that we committed through our own fault, we get the most amazing psycho-babble, wrapped in the mantle of science, which explains that our sins are not sins, and whatever it was we did, it wasn’t our fault. It was our parent’s fault, or our teacher’s fault, or simply nature’s fault. The evil perpetuated by this sort of counseling is twofold: we become less responsible for our sinful actions even while we long for a forgiveness that never comes. It is the marriage of Freud and Darwin, of one pseudo-science to another.

Marx, and Freud, each of whom rejected Christianity, gave us theories that have been used to promote some of history’s most unnatural and degrading attacks against human dignity. If we want to rescue education—and our society—we can start by kicking these three bad boys out of school, and letting God back in. We need to take away the State’s power and give it back to the parents. And we need to get rid of the fads and fashions in education and start teaching the permanent things. As Chesterton says, “Teach, to the young, men’s enduring truths, and let the learned amuse themselves with their passing errors.”  [Common Sense 101]