Cedars,
I realize that the 1970s US television sitcom "All in the Family" had a trans-Atlantic background, but did I just watch a casting call video for a re-make?
Actually, I liked Carroll O'Connor in that role. He reminded me of a couple of my high school teachers with roots and accents in the Queens. Mr. Morris has something of that but not have the same delivery. The new Archie? "Archie's New Place"?
About points Mr. Morris was trying to make. For sure he didn't like the idea of a youngster enrolling in a higher institute of learning and studying Philosophy I or II. I suppose "I" leads to the other.
Like others posting, I confess I never took a philosophy course in college. But I suspect that many university graduates that Mr. Morris might encounter from day to day, students who went on to study law did. And that's probably where Mr. Morris's lament is based:
"How can you go out and get a decent, case-winning lawyer without having to bear the indignity of dealing with someone who might have had an exposure to philosophy (& ETHICS)? Why can't I find people to staff the legal department who have been trained to do and to think exactly as I say?..." A variation on Diogenes.
Hard enough already; but a pity to think that things could get so de-railed that some kids manage to get nearly all the way through Harvard with the elders standing helplessly by... Tragic.
Like I said, some of my high school teachers, who were also in a non-ordained religious order ('brothers"), used to grouse about us high school students going off to SECULAR colleges and possibly learning hostile viewpoints. But they were at least consoled that there were our religion's non-secular alternatives all over the country. Maybe half of my classmates did actually go to places like Fordham, St. John's, Dayton, Xavier, Notre Dame, etc. Had Morris been a different kind of executive, like the one's that apparently abounded in that "satanic" organization for centuries, then maybe things could have been better all around.
Shoot, it isn't just the RCs. Take a look out what's going on in Utah. And there are certainly other types of parochial schools and private universities around: Lutheran, Presbyterian... people you can knock on the doors and tell them about the Truth from theocratic sources.
You reap what you sow.
Aside from colleges, one of that crop of teaching brothers founded the high school a year or two before I went to it. He and people on staff founded several before they were done. Why doesn't Mr. Morris do that with the resources at his disposal? Oh, I know... Too busy spreading the Truth - and his place in it.
Personally, I think college age a little late for shutting the barn door on becoming "an evolutionist". Circumstances being what they were, I was pretty willing to defend that idea by seventh grade just thanks to the public library. In high school, our freshman year biology was taught by a brother of a teaching order and the text was prepared by writers of similar background, probably priests at one of those institutions fore-mentioned. Between studying Mendel's genetics and classifications of orders and species, it was hard for someone not to draw conclusions other than what alarmed Mr. Morris.
Later on, our freshman year homeroom teacher (religion and English) went off to work at a mission school in Uganda for several decades starting during Idi Amin's reign. Our high school valedictorian went on to a career in biology, teaching and doing research at university level. He then retired on proceeds from turning out editions of his biology texts. A few years ago he told me he s regularly sends to the Ugandan mission a crate or two of his books for our old teacher's classes.
I'd rather that than pamphlets for their laundry room.