An Intellectual Age?
There is a slide taking place toward a non-thinking populace. The most amazing thing is that this slide is persisting despite the huge resources that have been committed to education in recent years.
The trend toward mass education accelerated markedly in the second half of the twentieth century. The 1960’s in particular has been described by Paul Johnson as “the most explosive in the entire history of educational expansion”.[i] In Britain the Robbins Report of 1963 resulted in the doubling of university places within a decade. During the period 1950 to 1970 the number of teachers in the USA rose from 1 million to 2.3 million and spending per person rose by over 100 per cent. Between 1960 and 1975 the number of tertiary students in the US rose from 3.6 million to 9.4 million, the total annual cost rising to $45 billion.[ii] This pattern was reflected throughout the West, including Australia where an explosion of tertiary funding took place during the Whitlam years of the mid-1970’s. In 1996 the level of annual funding required for teacher’s salaries and on-costs in NSW alone was estimated at $3.2 billion.[iii]
The result of this injection of resources is not a civilisation of advanced thinkers but nations of people who are, in George Steiner’s words, “semi-literate”. Os Guiness writes that:
The ability to read is widespread, but the inability to read any but the shallowest texts is equally widespread … recent estimates put the literacy of more than half the population of the US at the level of 12 year olds.[iv]
Closer to home, reports keep reaching us about the levels of literacy in NSW schools and the show the situation to be little different. We have a populace that can read and write but applies these skills to little more than reading magazines and junk novels and writing shopping lists.
In contrast, during a period in which access to formal education was limited, one report indicates that:
Many common people in the 18th and 19th centuries had a knowledge of Shakespeare and the Bible that people today would view as the preserve of the literary scholar or theologian. … The prevailing taste for books of every kind [was such] that almost every man [was] a reader.[v]
This data is difficult to confirm. However it is consistent with the well-founded observation that a transition in emphasis from reason to feeling has taken place over the past 200 years. The result is that even the huge efforts to create an educated population have not stemmed the slide to a non-thinking culture. This is not as much a failure of educational process as it is the result of a shift in the overall attitude of people toward the mind. People do not see the point in thinking.
This is sobering but not less sobering than the tragedy that the church has followed suit in this process. When Kant’s idea that revelation could not bring forth truth was infiltrating the thinking of Western minds, the church was already well into its retreat from the realm of reason and toward a base of experience and practice. In the past two centuries the church has placed little emphasis on the mind and, because of this, it has not been equipped to meet the intellectual challenge of modern humanism. Our humiliation has not taken place because of the supremacy of secular truth but because Christians have failed to equip themselves. Scientific discoveries have not superceded the Bible. The church has been seduced, subtly but surely by changes in philosophy. The end-point we have reached, as Harry Blamires put it, is that “there is no longer a Christian mind”.[vi]
[i] Johnson, P. A History of the Modern World. Weidenfeld. 1991. P 641
[ii] Johnson, P. ibid. Pp 641-2.
[iii] The cost of the 1996 NSW Teacher’s Federation claim for a 12.5 per cent pay increase was estimated by the NSW Minister for Education, John Acquilina, in March 1996 to be $400 million. The figure of $3.2 billion here was derived by multiplying the $400 million out to 100 per cent.
[iv] Guiness, O. Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think And What To Do About It. Baker. 1994. P 72.
[v] Guiness, O. ibid.
[vi] Blamires, H. The Christian Mind. SPCK. 1963. P.3