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outdo colleagues, to climb employment ladders. Ambition is a trigger of corporate life and at the
same time an acid that dissolves communities. By spreading contentment on the cheap, spirituality
was a danger to the new economy’s natural growth principle. So in a sense it was rational
self-interest, not conspiracy, that drove enlightened men to agree in their sporting places, drawing
rooms, and clubs that religious activity would have to be dampened down.
What they couldn’t see is that through substitution of schooling for Bible religion, they were
sawing through two of the four main social supports of Western civilization. Think of your dining
room table; it was like breaking two of its legs off, replacing one with a tall stack of dishes and
one with a large dog. The top of the table would look the same covered in cloth but it wouldn’t
be a good bet to get you through dinner. A century earlier, Hamilton and Jefferson had speculated
whether it might be possible to replace religion with a civil substitute. The heady ideas of the
French Revolution were on everybody’s lips. A civil substitute built on expanding the humble
grassroots institution of schooling might well free leaders from the divided loyalty religion
imposes. Could an ethical system based on law produce the same quality of human society as a
moral system based on divine inspiration? Jefferson was skeptical. Despite his fears, the
experiment was soon to be tried.
Foundations Of The Western Outlook
We will never fully understand American schools until we think long and hard about religion.
Whether you are Buddhist, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, Baptist, Confucian, Catholic, Protestant,
agnostic, or atheist, this is a hunt for important threads in the tapestry overlooked by secular
academic exegesis. More specifically, our quest is for insights of Protestant Christian dissent
which have been buried for at least a century, insights which I hope will cause you to look at
schools in a different way.
To find out what School seeks to replace, we have to uncover the four pillars which hold up
Western society. Two come from the Nordic rim of Europe: the first, a unique belief in the
sovereign rights of the individual; the second, what we have come to call scientific vision.
Everywhere else but in the West, individual and family were submerged in one or another
collective system. Only here were the chips bet on liberty of individual conscience.
The ambition to know everything appears in history in the stories of the Old Norse god Odin, god
of Mind and god of Family Destruction, too. No other mythology than the Norse puts pride of
intellect together with a license to pry so at the center of things. Science presumes absolute
license. Nothing can be forbidden. Science and individualism are the two secular foundations of
Western outlook.
Our other two supports for social meaning are religious and moral. Both originate in the south of
Europe. From this graft of North and South comes the most important intellectual synthesis so far
seen on this planet, Western civilization. One of these Mediterranean legs is a specific moral code
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