Catholic education today

Special editorial by Michail Rassool

Addressing Catholic educators in Washington DC in April, Pope Benedict said education is integral to the mission of the Church to proclaim the Good News. He said every Catholic educational institution is a place to encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth.

At a diocesan convention on education in Rome last year, the pope spoke of the great “educational emergency”, an increasing difficulty encountered in transmitting the basic values of life and correct behaviour to new generations. That difficulty involves both schools and families, and any other body with educational aims.

Paring the reality of modern culture down to its bare bones, Pope Benedict said education tends to be reduced merely to “the transmission of specific abilities or capacities for doing”, while satisfying the desire for happiness of the new generations consists in showering them with consumer goods and transitory gratification.

“Thus, both parents and teachers are easily tempted to abdicate their educational duties and even no longer to understand what their role — or rather, the mission entrusted to them — is,” Pope Benedict said. “Yet, in this way we are not offering to young people, to the young generations, what it is our duty to pass on to them. Moreover, we owe them the true values which give life a foundation.”

The pontiff was referring to the way education is generally carried out, a role that nowadays is construed as a mainly secular activity. Presumably the foundation and ideals that Catholic educators profess to operate on and to hold inform the way they perform their role. This is seen as a vocation that lies at the heart of everything they do in terms of equipping their students with knowledge and skills.

Catholic teaching holds that the essential aim of education is the formation of a person to enable him or her to live to the full and to make his or her contribution to the common good.

Far from the dualistic conception of the world in which matters of faith and the things of the world are treated separately, education founded on faith is about educating the whole person. Here every aspect of one’s life is integrated and inseparable, whether one is acquiring knowledge and honing one’s intellect, developing one’s sporting prowess, becoming steeped in Church doctrine and teaching, enhancing one’s sense of service, and so on.

This duality, some may argue, is a factor in the decline of prestige experienced by Catholic schools over the last 40 years. For example, many Catholic parents of means now send their children to non-Catholic schools on grounds of those schools’ reputed science, business or sports programme, or for their university feeder status—qualities that enshrine the values of competitiveness and advancing in life with self-interest as the principal motive.

Some may well find that such issues serve only to make the whole sphere of education — particularly Catholic education — a vibrant one for discussion and debate.

But Catholic education isn’t just interesting for its polemical dimension, but mainly because of its ethos of education as an act of love for the individual, loving them so they may realise their best according to their own strengths, circumstances and means, and making schools the kind of environments in which this can be nurtured and realised.

It is in this spirit that our contributors to this supplement have written their articles.

For example, Catholic Institute of Education director Mark Potterton writes about how to tackle school violence and bullying. Daniel Brown, retired coordinator of the Salesian Institute of Cape Town’s Learn to Live programme, writes on giving the vulnerable child victim of circumstances a proper sense of self.

We also feature something on the challenges of school leadership and management some 40 years after the Second Vatican Council, and what it means for religious orders in particular, which mostly no longer play a direct role in education, to continue as owners of schools.

Because this supplement coincides with National Youth Day, June 16, we’ve conflated educational issues with those specifically of youth and the measures the Church is taking to engage this crucial sector which, after all, constitutes the future of the Church.

The Church teaches that all in the Church have a responsibility to help realise the material, intellectual and spiritual needs of students and young people who are being ministered to by Catholic institutions.

This offers the Catholic community, locally and elsewhere, an opportunity to support these institutions and other Church-based initiatives geared towards securing the Church of tomorrow.