We are told so often that it’s inevitable.  Perhaps that’s why we so seldom stop to try to observe whether it’s happening or not.  Even if we did though, what would we use as a measure or standard to gauge its occurrence or lack thereof?  The past?  That’s almost uniformly denigrated nowadays.  The “Dark Ages” used to be only those few centuries between the slow collapse of the Roman world and the founding of Christendom in Europe... until it was expanded forward to include all things medieval and more recently backward to cast a shadow over the classical world.  More recent attitudes would make you think that the light only began to dawn with the Beatles – “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (LSD) – of the 1960s.  The “Catholic” version of this timeline is something along the lines of “Sing a New Church into Being,” a musical reference to the “new Church” of Vatican II; we too, evidently, finally got on the progress wagon.  The ride since then, though, has been a bit rough.

      “But there’s been so much technological progress,” someone might say.  Yes, true enough, especially in the last century, when we learned how to annihilate a whole city with a single bomb, a century marked, if anything, more by blood than progress.   Certainly, some of the technological advances we are so proud of, especially in the area of medicine, have indeed been put to good use, something for which we should be thankful.  Still, I am wary.  For the growing technocracy in which we now live, move and have our being is not, it seems to me, anything what I would call completely “human friendly.”  Progress is indeed good, but the question is, Is the so-called “progress” of today humane?  Is it an advance of civilization?  Is it indeed even civil?

      A small example (with rather large implications)....  I am again sitting on the front porch of an old farmhouse, now on the outskirts of a mid-sized town.  The six children of the family who live here are playing uproariously in the front yard.  As I occasionally retrieve a wayward ball or frisbee and toss it back into the field of play, I ask my host, “Are there any other kids in this neighborhood?”  “Yep,” he responds with more attention to his cigar than to me.  Pause.  “Well, where are they?”  “Who?” he asks, slightly more attentive now.  “The children, the other children of this neighborhood.”  “Oh, they’re all inside somewhere watching television.” 

      “Somewhere,” yes, but where?  Where are they really as they stare at the tube, absorbed into “somewhere else”?  Well, they are not outside in the front yard playing with others, learning the rudiments of baseball or football, or the fairness required to play hide-and-seek properly, or getting the exercise that not only their bodies need, but also their brains. 

      The sun begins to go down, and the kids clamber up onto the porch, ready for supper.  The eldest, my goddaughter, greets me in Latin and goes inside to the piano to play Bach’s “Air on the G String.”  The next oldest, a boy of nine, begins to relate to me the technique of archery and the violin (they are connected in his mind, and he plays at both), the known habitats of the Timber Rattler, and how God created the world.  “It’s all so amazing,” he sighs as he pulls off his dirty boots, just in time for the next oldest daughter to announce dinner, the need for all of us to wash our hands, and for me to say the blessing.  These children are home-schooled, three of them in different stages of preparing for Sacraments, go to Mass every Sunday and often during the week, can read, write and speak way, way above the average, and they just love delving into the history of the “Dark Ages.”  Sad, though, that they don’t have a television....  They do think the computer is marvelous, but they know it is not as smart as Aristotle or Einstein, nor as wise as Solomon.

      For, you see, they have not been under the tutelage of John Dewey, the “father of American public school ‘education’,” who believed that education should sever children from the shackles of the past, even from the opinions of their parents, so that students would be able “to think on their own.”  Dewey himself was so liberated from the past, he had a hard time getting historical facts right, as in his reference to Christopher Columbus as the one who finally discovered that the earth is not flat but round.  (Actually, Columbus knew, long before he shipped out of Spain, the earth is not flat, but he did speculate that it was not quite round either, more on the lines of egg-shaped, with a kind of bulge around the middle, pretty much like what we see in photographs of our planetary home from outer space.)  And Columbus was not really on the cutting edge, since the roundness of the earth was known millennia before Christopher sailed the ocean blue.  About the only ancient thinker who thought the earth might be flat was Epicurus, who, like Dewey, was a materialist and empiricist.

      “To think on their own”.... and take their servile place in the technocracy.  Why not, rather, to think?  For if ever there was a communal activity, it is thinking.  That’s why the Church founded those communities of thought called universities, communities not only of the present, but custodians too of the thinking of the past, as well as the preserver of accumulated knowledge for the future.  To be taught, as almost all young Americans now are, that one should “learn” to think on his own, is really just a shortcut to someone else, Deweyites, doing his “thinking” for him.  “Thinking on their own” really means, eventually, towing the accepted line, for the isolated “thinker” – with no tradition, few examples, and little material – is a sitting duck for manipulation.  Besides, a truly thinking populace is ungovernable.  No wonder the Dewey “elites” are getting nervous about home education and the return of private schools of classical education; and no wonder they are turning to their old friend the government to put a clampdown on all this initiative for real thinking:  it will reveal, horrors, that “no child left behind” is “working” because hardly any are moving forward.  You know, real progress....