How can James Schall suggest that a university is “not really equipped” to provide the education that we seem not to have gotten? What does he mean by describing contemporary education as “a system that is designed, consciously or unconsciously [emphasis added], to prevent us from confronting in our own lives the ultimate questions of existence and essence”? — F.R. Duplantier
According to the Holy Father, among the major challenges to the Church of the 21st century, and one which presents “a particularly insidious obstacle in the task of educating,” is the massive presence of relativism in society and in the halls of the Academy. The central problem of our system of higher education is not its failure to provide strong intellectual and marketable skills, which it can do well enough, but its premise that reality does not exist independently of the human mind and cannot be known with any certainty. In this way, even if not intentionally [emphasis added], far too many colleges and universities stifle the students’ natural desire to know, and to know the truth. This entices them to avoid the humanities and liberal arts and take refuge in the professional and practical arts alone, with their expected financial rewards. — Archbishop Michael Miller
Fr. Schall and Archbishop Miller are too kind. The subversion of the university was clearly conscious and intentional. The saboteurs cannot be persuaded to restore it. Nothing is to be gained from a debate with the devil.