Here’s a scene from The Lady Eve, a screwball comedy directed by the brilliant Preston Sturges. Henry Fonda plays a naïve heir to a brewery fortune. He doesn’t know or care anything about how his father made millions on “Pike’s Pale,” the pale ale for Yale. He’s an ophiologist; he likes snakes. So he’s sailing home on a cruise ship from a snaking expedition, and every young woman has her eyes on him – and his money. That includes Barbara Stanwyck and her father, Charles Coburn. They are cardsharps. She arranges for the three of them to sit at the same table. The subject comes round to poker.
“Watch this,” says Fonda, performing a card trick worthy of an eight year old boy.
“Why, Hopsie,” says the girl, “that’s just wonderful. How ever did you do it?”
“It’s easy,” he says, “you put the ace in the palm of your hand, like so.”
One day later, he’s out $20,000. But the movie does have a happy ending.
I’ve been thinking of that scene, and of the foolish vanity and naïveté of the pigeon. I’ve been prompted to it by the latest example of pigeonhood among American Catholic hierarchs. I don’t think that most bishops are heretical or treacherous. The problem with young Mr. Pike was not that he liked snakes – the natural kind, slithering along in the Amazon jungle. It was that he could not recognize the snakes that walk on two feet. He was a good boy, but dopey, and unpracticed in the ways of the world.
Most of our readers will have heard of the attempt to nationalize education, called the Common Core Curriculum. There are many bad things to say about it, and I’ve said a lot of them elsewhere already. The further I delve into it, the more inhumane it appears: reductively utilitarian, inimical to literature, utterly secular, divorced from history and western culture, dismissive of the imagination, and, in mathematics and grammar, incompetent.
It shrugs poetry and novels aside, in favor of what the promoters call, with an apt ugliness, “text,” as if “text” were an amorphous substance to be investigated by programmatic acids, rather than a novel or a poem into whose world we enter with gratitude and humility.
The National Catholic Education Association has come out in favor of it, because the NCEA is only the NEA, with a crucifix in a closet somewhere. The NCEA’s assumptions regarding education are the same as the NEA’s. Neither organization looks for guidance to the classics.
You will not read the philosophical Cardinal Newman on the NCEA’s website, or the lover of art John Ruskin, or even their Christ-haunted contemporary, the agnostic poet Matthew Arnold, all of whom wrote a great deal about a truly human education. Nor will you find any of our own contemporaries who have staunchly defended the search for the good, the true, and the beautiful. Self-promoting professional patois, yes; Stratford Caldecott, no.
Why should bishops heed the NCEA? There are alternatives. Take homeschoolers, for instance. Two million American children at this moment are being taught at home. Their parents, for the most part, have observed all the things habitually done in school. They have then gone and done just the opposite.
Their children trounce their counterparts on those infernal standardized tests, and succeed so well in college, that admissions departments go out of their way to seek them out. If they are Christian, they’re also much more likely to embody a robust and cheerful faith. They have not been assigned porno-garbage to read, by creepy teachers who want the children to be in the “know.”
Their eyes do not glaze with incomprehension when you mention the Prodigal Son. They also tend to be much happier than their schooled counterparts, and kinder to young children. I’ve observed hundreds of them over the last twenty years, and can pick them out of a crowd.
Then there are the upstarts, Catholic schools sprouting up like green grass everywhere in the blacktop of mass education – schools with a clear religious mission, where students receive a truly human education. I see the harpoon on the wall of a classroom at The Heights, set there by the worthy English teacher who makes sure that his boys ponder the eternal questions on board the Pequod, with the mad Captain Ahab.
These schools too cut against the grain. Other schools cut recess; they enshrine it. Other schools try to turn boys into girls, or drug them. They turn boys into men. Other schools teach students to ignore or scorn the wisdom of our forebears. That makes them into convenient pigeons for the propagandist.
These schools do the natural thing, and teach students piety and gratitude to their forebears – which arms them against the propagandist.
So, when the latest stultifying educational fad comes around, with a few businesses set to make billions from it, why do our bishops go along? Your excellencies – why are you such easy marks?
When has listening to secular “experts” ever done you any good? When they told you that a molester could be “cured” with a little therapy? That the boys would be all right? That liberalizing the divorce laws wouldn’t hurt? That you could cross your fingers and not pay for abortion pills?
Why must you always end up hanging your heads in embarrassment? Why don’t you, for once, go to Newman instead of The New York Times? Why don’t you seek counsel from faithful Catholic writers and teachers, including homeschoolers and the principals of schools founded outside of the control of diocesan bureaucrats?
Why must you always be played for pigeons? Why must you always be found ten miles behind the front lines – ambushed while you were having buttered scones and tea? Why never in the vanguard, the lookouts you are supposed to be?
Why always last to smell the wolves?
