Education, Humanistic education, Christian Education, Church and State, Religious Education 

All but the wilfully blind can see that a malaise has settled upon the West, ant that, indeed, the illness is critical. The crisis of the West has its origin in two historical developments: the secularization of Western culture, and the revolt of the rest of the world against the dominance of the West.

For several centuries our civilization has been drifting away from the religious traditions on which it rests, and Western man has increasingly devoted his energies to the organization and exploitation of the world by economic and scientific techniques. For the last sixty years the non-Western world has increasingly resisted this exploitation, until today the resistance has grown into a revolt which threatens the very existence of Western society.

It is against this background that Christopher Dawson has written The Crisis of Western Education. With that mastery of fact and brilliance of insight which have won him international recognition, Mr. Dawson shows that education is called upon to play a salvific role yet cannot, because it is at once the product and reservoir of the forces which have produced the crisis of the West.

Mr. Dawson's revolutionary suggestion is that it is the study of Christian culture (not to be confused with the study of the Christian Faith) which alone can enable Western education to solve its own problems and hence to safeguard Western culture by, first, maintaining the tradition of liberal education against the growing pressure of specialization and vocationalism and, secondly, by preserving the unity of Western culture against the dissolvent forces of nationalism and radicalism.

In proposing the study of Christian culture as a means of integration and unity, necessary for the survival of Western education and culture alike, Christopher Dawson has made an interesting and challenging suggestion. It will be welcomed (and argued) not only by educators, but by everyone concerned with the response of the West to the dangers which threaten it from within and without.

In September 1958 Christopher Dawson became the first Charles Chauncey Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University, where he is presenting a general view of Catholicism to students in the Harvard Divinity School. Born in Wales, he was educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford, and entered the Catholic Church in 1914. He was for twelve years a lecturer at University College, Exeter, and later at Liverpool and Edinburgh Universities. Among his previous books are The Making of Europe, Medieval Essays, The Dynamics of World History, and the two series of Gifford Lectures, Religion and Culture and Religion and the Rise of Western Culture.

Taken from the inside flaps.