All over the ‘developed’ world, children left their homes this morning and went to school. All over the undeveloped world, parents were wishing their children could do so.

All over the developed world, millions of children are accepting school as an unavoidable bore, or actively hating it. Some weep, some play truant, some produce psychosomatic symptoms to avoid going to school. Most just put up with it and long for the holidays. A lucky few enjoy school, at least until the age when the shadow of public examinations falls over their lives. Yet all over the undeveloped world, angry or wistful teenagers see schooling as the means to a good life—a means withheld from most of them.

The greater part of the world’s children long for what those who have it dislike. And even those who loathe it grow up to assume it has an absolute value, and should be imposed on every human child. No wonder the whole notion of schooling as a method of education is coming under fire. But too often the question of schooling or not schooling is treated in isolation from its social and economic setting. What follows is an attempt to consider a few of the problems involved, and possible solutions, for there have been changes recently, in the way people think about the schooling situation. For one thing, an uncomfortable realization is spreading that the schooling systems of the prosperous nations are not working too well. Violence in schools is frequently in the news, and organized as well as spontaneous protest by school children is not uncommon.

The novel has always told us about the world, not by offering verifiable case-histories, or presenting statistical analyses of behaviour, but by showing us the typical in the individual, the general in the specific. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina might be narrowly and unsympathetically described as an account of adultery among a small restricted segment of upper-class Russian society about a hundred years ago. As crude description this is not incorrect; yet it conveys nothing whatever of the actual quality of the book. Although remote from us in time and setting, Anna Karenina is still a great and moving account of the human condition, is still valid for us here and now. Anna is both a particular woman in a particular society and a representative figure whose tragedy one can immediately apprehend and respond to. By living through her situation one understands one’s own more fully. This extension of human sympathy gives a particular importance to literary experience; in some fine words of C. S. Lewis, ‘it heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality’. It also offends the tidy-minded by emphasizing the essential messiness and complexity of the human condition. It not only shows us, but lets us feel with all our senses, the dilemmas and tensions of a nature that is both fallen and created by God, which is in Pope’s words:

Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole Judge of truth, in endless error hurled;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Can the university—even a radically reformed university—really carry the burden of providing our society with ‘memory and mature purpose’, as Dr Leavis keeps hoping? Remembering some of his more recent essays while staying in fairly remote parts of Scotland this summer, I began once again to reflect on how much the schools fail to do and yet could so easily undertake (as a handful of rare teachers have always done)—if only we could unlearn the attitude to language that has prevailed from the beginning of public education a century or so ago. Gaelic steadily declines in the Hebrides, the vital remnant of the Scottish Gaidhealtachd, and the Buchan dialect in the north-east of Scotland is losing its vigour. In both cases the schools are where the native speech dies. If this is a matter of conscious political decision at all, it is only because we submit to the priorities of the commercial system and allow our conception of language and life to be dictated to us by that. Seeing a language die out doesn’t bother the man who regards language as simply a means for exchanging ideas: for him another language can easily be substituted. But if language is, as Dr Leavis says, what creates ‘the human world of values and significances and spiritual graces’, then it is surely clear that ‘exchanging ideas’ is much less than an adequate description of the place of language in human life. Hard Times, which came out in 1854, surely is the moral fable for our time Dr Leavis has so long insisted it is: bland and dulcified as it now is, Mr Gradgrind’s Utilitarianism still shuts out what Sleary’s Horseriding represents. ‘Louisa, never wonder’, Mr Gradgrind said to his daughter. But wonder is the most essential response to reality and a language surely begins as a people’s way of wording their sense of the place in which they dwell. Any given language is the tradition— the living and developing tradition—springing from the original sense a people had of its place on the earth. All significance must derive from the significance a place must have had for a people, whether it meant security and home or seemed eery and alien, or whatever.

One very obvious feature of the current theological scene is a divorce between—in Pascal’s celebrated distinction—the God of the Philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That is to say, the people most interested in religion, mostly members of the ‘counter-culture’, are generally hostile to the intellectual exploration of religion and religious language. Their religion centres on ‘love and consolation’, to use Pascal’s phrase, not upon rational argument or analysis. Another way of putting this is to say that the God of Religion is naturally spoken of in metaphorical language, while the God of the Philosophers can only be spoken of in analogical language. I am concerned to argue that, despite the anti-intellectualism of the ‘counter-culture’, it is still necessary to have a philosophical foundation for religion, and that this involves accepting the validity of analogical language, even if the most significant religious language we have today is to be found in the metaphorical speech of singers, poets and story-tellers. It is important, therefore, to establish the right relationship between analogical and metaphorical language. The following analysis of a sonnet by Hopkins is offered as a brief preface to a discussion of the two-dimensional structure of any language that purports to discuss God.

The violent interruption has subsided and Western imperialism has collapsed against the tenacious pliability of cultures that do not defend themselves by opposing, but by returning to their own perpetual shape, slowly but inevitably, absorbing any marks that have been left and cannot be forgotten.

Christians, too, are having to readjust themselves now that colonialism is officially dead. They are shaking off feelings of disillusion and embarrassment with their own role in this drama, and are finding a new courage and enthusiasm in a willingness to serve rather than to rule, to develop and display a sympathetic understanding of other ways of thinking.

But the basic question still remains: Why did they go out to invade these other minds in the first place? What really inspired the white man to leave his proper abode and to travel out to the four corners of the earth ? What gave to his soul that restless urge to preach his belief to all the nations? Was it only a burning love which no man can enjoy without sharing it with others, a fullness of grace that knows no rest so long as there are others who have no share in it?

One of the Christian notions that has been offered a new lease of life as a result of the twentieth-century renewal of ecclesiology has been that of vocation. It no longer ought to be possible to write an article entitled ‘vocation’ in a Catholic encyclopedia and go on to deal exclusively with the call to the priesthood or the religious life. Even when an author has the intention of dealing with these topics, he should nowadays feel obliged to begin with remarks to the effect that all Christians—and, indeed, all men—share in the same vocation to the kingdom of God. It is the sacrament of baptism that is the seal of a vocation before ever there is a question of an ordination or a religious profession. Just as the notion of the ‘Church’, once confiscated by the clergy, has had to be handed back to the baptized, who all begin and mostly remain as lay people, so has the notion of ‘vocation’. A vocation from God is something which every Christian must learn to detect and act upon, whether or not he remains a layman all his life. One hopes that children in Catholic schools run by religious orders are no longer led to believe that there are just two major possibilities in their lives: either that of having a vocation or, if they do not have this, of getting married. (Not that I am going to spend time in this article in setting up marriage as an alternative vocation; rather the reverse, as we shall see.)

It seems to be axiomatic, in most discussions about Vietnam, that the only important questions about that country’s future are ones relating to the Americans. To what extent are Vietnamese capable of efficiently taking over American policies and operations (i.e. just how good a substitute for an American is a Vietnamese) ? How worthy of American support is the Vietnamese Government? Will it survive American departure long enough to save American faces?, etc. During a seven-week stay in Vietnam last summer, I was lucky enough to avoid getting stuck in that foreign way of life in which Vietnam is seen simply as a function of American policy, and to meet some people and groups whose work and ideals vigorously make nonsense of the habit of defining everything Vietnamese in terms of American plans and expectations.

Not, that is to say, orphanages with teams busily arranging adoptions as a salve to Western consciences, in implicit denial that Vietnamese children have any Vietnamese future. Not relief organizations where the question is only what proportion of these supplies is being sold for private profit. Not the world on which a Vietnamese academic, met in circumstances of free and friendly discussion, commented bitterly, ‘We drink American drinks, drive on American petrol, fire American bullets and have our governments changed by American coups’. I saw that world too: you can’t miss it. But, luckily for me, I saw some very different things as well.

I met, for instance, some members of a team of people, the keyword in whose programme is ‘New Life’ (not to be confused with the once- notorious ‘New Life Hamlets’ of one of the pacification programmes).

It seems strange, at the time the Oedipus complex was being unravelled, that the case history of Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 350-434) and his mother Monnica should not have been more generally used as basic illustrative material. Perhaps it was too firmly embedded, in the lay mind, in the bracket of salvation-history to be eligible for general use. Fortunately, however, the portrait of this provincial Roman-African mother has been preserved simply because it was safely insulated within the pages of a ‘devotional’ book—the Confessions of Augustine, a writing that itself has barely begun to disgorge its total psychological treasures. To excise and examine the history of Monnica will tell us a lot about Augustine, which in its turn could tell us a lot about Augustine-style Western Christianity—a grass-roots examination that is becoming a popular lay pastime.

The biography of Monnica presents a complex study. At times Augustine almost persuades us into believing that she is actually the theme of the Confessions:

But even when he presents her ‘straight’ he depicts a complicated love-hate relationship, however much he attempts to polish up the love aspect. Added to which is the immense difficulty presented by Augustine’s own dichotomous style of writing and thinking whereby he presents Monnica to us through a series of quite contradictory lenses.