What has happened to Catholic education?

In short, Catholic education has been the gold standard of education from the beginning. In founding the Church on his apostles, Christ proclaimed himself to be the Truth (John 14:6). The first generations of his disciples promoted literacy, eloquence, the preservation of knowledge and wisdom in the pursuit of the one Truth. They took up the important task of copying out the scriptures and other texts. Part of their worship included the proclamation of scripture, alongside the eucharistic sacrifice. Holy Mother Church has also promoted the arts and the study of nature and mathematics because she believes Genesis when it says, “the Lord God saw all that he had made, and it was good.” When God says, it is good, he means that it is worth knowing and loving to some appropriate degree.

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ifth child. God has been good to my family!

Amidst all that, I’ve taken a break from writing for Substack, but am excited to jump back into it.

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Fly-Over Theology

In C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man, he critiques an unnamed English grammar textbook, conceals the authors’ names as Gaius and Titius, and says:

The very power of Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.1

In part 1 last week, I mentioned a Moral Theology textbook, the author of which I am calling “Fr. Joe.” I articulated the history of Moral Theology, including a shift in the modern period toward what is called the manualist tradition. The manualist tradition doesn’t per se teach anything wrong from a doctrinal standpoint; my contention, however, is that it teaches moral theology wrongly.

The primary mistake that Fr. Joe makes in his Fly-Over Theology is that the structure and pedagogical approach teaches moral theology as a series of laws and rules. After seven chapters on human actions, Fly-Over Theology offers an in-depth treatment of the ten commandments and their implications. It covers the most important topics on at least a cursory level. The publisher offers a teacher’s edition, pre-made powerpoint slides, quizzes and tests, and even a student workbook.

For the teacher with little to no prep-time, a full load of other courses, and/or insufficient training in theology the whole package makes teaching moral theology a manageable endeavor. This wealth of resources, however, also treats moral formation as an information transfer. There are facts and principles to be learned, and that’s moral theology, according to Fr. Joe’s implicit pedagogy.

There are three primary defects in the manualist tradition of teaching moral theology. First, the student learns that moral evaluation consist primarily in judging specific actions, rather than the whole of one’s character, and in sin avoidance rather than the pursuit of happiness. Second, the student learns that a viciously evil person could have correct knowledge about moral theology, that the study of moral theology (as information transfer) has little to do with actually living a moral life. Third and finally, the emphasis on moral prohibitions is implicitly contrasted with human freedom, disintegrating moral and spiritual theology.

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Ethos and Ethics

In Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, there are three possible ways of persuading an audience: the reasonability of the argument (logos), guiding the emotions of the audience (pathos), or the credibility of the speaker himself (ethos). The Greek term ethos doesn’t refer specifically to the speaker’s credibility, but to his character. If a speaker can convince the audience that he has sufficient knowledge about the topic, wants what is best for the audience, and is of upright moral character, then he can convince an audience of anything. That term ethos is also where we get the English word “ethics.” Ethics doesn’t refer primarily to the goodness or badness of a specific action, but to good or bad moral character.

Fly-Over Theology is a text that focuses on specific actions much more than general character. The structure around moral acts and the ten commandments communicates to students that the primary subject of moral theology is specific acts. Of course, moral evaluation of specific acts is certainly important. Catholics should be taught how to examine their consciences for confession and avoid sins. Yet, we must also resist the temptation to make all of moral theology about sin-avoidance.

Notice the manner in which Jesus delivers his greatest moral sermon, the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). Before he speaks about specific sins, he paints a poetic picture of the moral life in the Beatitudes:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:3-12)

The Sermon on the Mount makes two key points about moral pedagogy. First and foremost, in the original Greek and in most English translations, the full sermon and each beatitude begins with “blessed.” Blessedness is the starting point. The term is translated from the Greek makarios, which denotes happiness, that a person is fortunate, or favored by God. Students should have a lively awareness that the reason to be moral and to study moral theology is for the sake of achieving happiness, and not because we are duty-bound to follow a list of rules.

Jesus’ focus in his moral teaching is the kind of person we should all strive to be. It is a question of ethos, or character. The goodness or evil of specific acts matter because it is the actions that make the person. Pope St. John Paul II taught the same fundamental truth. Quoting the early Church Father, St. Gregory of Nyssa, he says, “human life is always subject to change; it needs to be born ever anew... But here birth does not come about by a foreign intervention, as is the case with bodily beings...; it is the result of a free choice. Thus we are in a certain way our own parents, creating ourselves as we will, by our decisions.”2

The relevance of actions is that actions make habits and habits constitute our character. The focus is on virtue and vice, not on discrete sins. Morals and ethics are a question of character. Even when he mentions sins, he draws the focus not on specific external actions, but on the matter of the heart underneath those actions. He intensifies the moral law from a prohibition of adultery to an exhortation to purify our hearts of the desire for illicit sexual pleasure: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27-28). Jesus’ focus is not on the specific external action, but on the reformation of the passions, the emotions, and interior acts of the mind and heart. This is a question of character: what kind of person are you? What do you desire? What do you love?

The second pedagogical truth we learn from the preaching of our Lord is that moral teaching includes more than just the bad news or prohibitions to avoid. In this sermon, Christ does teach us about the evil of certain sins. He specifically mentions anger, adultery, divorce, swearing oaths, and more. He also offers three evangelical counsels. Morality does not stop at thou shalt not, but includes “give alms” (Matt 6:2), “pray” (Matt 6:5), and “fast” (Matt 6:16). Jesus gives positive goods for which we should strive. He commands us to be perfect (Matt 5:48) rather than merely focus on sin-avoidance.

Letter and Spirit

These two points of pedagogy from Jesus’ own preaching—that morals is about character development and that it is ordered toward perfection rather than sin-avoidance—are fundamental for the teacher that wants to imitate Christ’s own teaching. They also reveal something fundamental about the human person: the study of morals and ethics requires the proper focus. It is important for our character (a matter of habits and desires more than specific actions) to be good. It is also a fundamental predisposition for the study of morals. C.S. Lewis described it this way:

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.3

Fly-Over Theology presents a robust moral theory that seems to be learnable without actually living. It is an objective, quasi-scientific approach whereby the student commits to memory certain truths and principles for an exam. The whole is structured along a familiar list of prohibitions, the ten commandments, so that students can easily memorize moral truths (predominated by sins). It is important to repeat that Fr. Joe’s treatment is not wrong in the truths he presents. Here we have an example of how doctrinal orthodoxy is compatible with imprudent pedagogy.

Consider Jesus’ preaching as the counterexample. Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and outside of it do not focus primarily on commands that specific behaviors be avoided or analysis of moral actions. These things are present, but not primary. In Jesus’ teaching, there is some explicit instruction of what to avoid, but there are also stories, emphasis of the heart, character, and questioning.

Consider also the pedagogy of St. Thomas Aquinas as another counterexample. St. Thomas’ moral theology is structured thus:

• Anthropology (man’s last end, passions, habits, vice, sin, law, and grace)

• Virtues (faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, their sub-virtues, and contrary vices)

St. Thomas structures the bulk of his moral theology on virtue. Virtues are the positive character traits around which the moral life revolves. Aquinas has built his foundation upon happiness as the purpose of human life. Morality, according to Aquinas, is not about discrete actions to avoid, but about pursuing happiness as human persons by cultivating a virtuous life.

Freedom and Happiness

We have two competing visions of human life and the study of moral theology. On the one hand, the manualist tradition faithfully communicates the ten commandments, the principle of double effect, the three parts of a moral act, and much more. If you’re just looking for the right answer, you can find it in the manualist tradition and Fly-Over Theology.

On the other hand, Aristotle, Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, John Paul II, and our Lord himself articulate a vision of human life that is destined for the fulfillment of all desire in happiness. This sort of morality cannot be known except to the extent that it is lived. It isn’t mere theory, but the key to happiness. This morality focuses on the kind of person that we make ourselves into by our habits. Certain habits are conducive to the fulfillment of all desire, while others are incompatible with happiness.

The specificity of concrete action as morally good or evil does not change between these two visions. Either helps us to know right from wrong. The former, though, contrasts human freedom with the precepts of the moral law. No matter how much Fly-Over Theology might explicitly say—to quote Jesus—“he who sins is a slave to sin,” it teaches students that they must restrict their freedom in order to avoid the evils they want.

This difference of pedagogy boils down to teaching two different kinds of freedom. Freedom of indifference is the ability to choose between contraries. This sort of freedom (sometimes called “license” or “libertarianism”) is one we share with animals, and must be restricted in order to act morally. Freedom for excellence is the concept that man is only free to do good, evil is an offense against freedom. Mankind is the only corporeal creature that is capable of discerning good from evil, so this sort of freedom is not one we share with the beasts.

Freedom of indifference leads to the abolition of man. Freedom of indifference makes us beasts. Freedom for excellence opens our nature up to the elevation of grace. It enables us to pursue our own happiness by becoming excellent, by becoming virtuous. No longer is law an offense against freedom, but now Thomas Aquinas’ definition of law makes more sense. Law is an ordinance of reason. The commandments don’t constrict my freedom, they enable it by providing guardrails on the road to happiness.

Pedagogy matters. Correctness of moral teaching is important, but insufficient. Having walked through the problems in how moral theology is often taught, many will wonder: what is the alternative? How can we teach moral theology in a way that draws the proper focus in our children’s minds? How can we teach moral theology in a way that actually enables and empowers our students to be both happy and free in their cultivation of virtue?

It is these questions that we’ll explore next week in part 3 of how to teach moral theology.

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The most important course I teach is moral theology. At the outset, it may seem obvious how moral theology fits into this picture. After all, how can we develop into morally good persons without understanding a little about morality? In actual human souls, it doesn’t always work this way. Most Catholics in mission work of education, evangelization, and apologetics know that the statement “I went to twelve years of Catholic school” is all-too-often followed by some error in understanding (or outright rejection of) Catholic teaching. Usually, that teaching is a moral teaching.

This sad situation demonstrates to me that the standard text-book approach to teaching moral theology is a neutered exercise. In fact, there is a popular morality textbook for high-school level Catholic theology that I consider a leading culprit. The problem is not that it teaches bad content. Rather, the flaw is in the structure underneath, upon which it is based. To paraphrase and adapt C.S. Lewis:

I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of theological text books. That is why I have chosen as a starting-point a standard book on morality intended for Catholic “high schools, home school groups, and self-study.” I do not think the author of this book (or the editor) intended any harm. At the same time I shall have nothing good to say of them. Here is a pretty predicament. I do not want to pillory two faithful priests who were doing the best they knew: but I cannot be silent about what I think the actual tendency of their work. I therefore propose to conceal their names. I shall refer to the author as Fr. Joe and to his book as Fly-Over Morals. But I promise you there is such a book and I have it on my shelves.1

Fly-Over Morals has no doctrinal errors of which I am aware. It has been approved by individuals and committees of far higher rank than me. It carries an imprimatur and nihil obstat. Bishops have approved it. It is aligned with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I pray you, dear reader, do not hear what I’m not saying. My claim is pedagogical, not doctrinal. Moreover, I’m sure Fly-Over Morals can be used to great profit by teachers better than me.

A History of Cardiological Atrophy

The structure of this textbook is firmly situated within the manualist tradition of moral theology. In order to lay out my critique—and my proposed remedy—it is necessary to present the history of moral theology. Following and adapting Fr. Servais Pinkaers, we divide up the history of Moral Theology into four major epochs.2

The Fathers

The Fathers of the Church (c. 150AD to 800AD) took Sacred Scripture as their first and constant source for morals. The Fathers of the Church emphasized the four senses of scripture, one of which is the moral sense. Morality flowed out of doctrine, and it was found in imitation of Christ and as integrated with a larger life-style of Christianity. The early Christians were known by their counter-cultural moral victories, from martyrdom to the care of widows and orphans. Paradigmatic biblical texts formed the basis for moral theology in this early period, including the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7) and the exhortative sections of the pauline epistles. They saw the moral life as the christian living out the truths of scripture.

With great care, the Fathers also integrated non-Christian wisdom wherever it cohered with the Gospel of Christ. Importing doctrines from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the stoics, this early period of Church history set the Christian standard of integrating all truths into one coherent vision. It doesn’t matter whether the source of truth was divine or human wisdom. Pope John Paul II later describes this dynamic poetically: “Faith and reason are like two wings upon which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth” (Fides et Ratio).

One such principle integrating Revelation and Philosophy was the Platonic and Aristotelian idea of freedom for excellence. This is the idea that human freedom is for choosing good, and not for choosing indiscriminately between contraries. Human freedom isn’t the lack of exterior constraint. It is our ability to pursue the proper ends of our nature. The Greek term for excellence (arete) is often translated as “virtue.” Virtue is not obedience to rules (though obedience is a virtue). It is the maximizing of human freedom, our capacity to choose the good; it is becoming excellent as humans.

This period’s spiritual currents offer characteristic moral teachings. The first three centuries demonstrate the central role of martyrdom in the Christian life. The rise of monasticism, the desert fathers, and Doctors of the Church like Jerome and Augustine brought emphasis to the superiority of virginity and continence over the married state. The fathers also emphasized the quest for wisdom, both in continuity with and in contradistinction from pagan philosophers. Christians differed from pagan philosophy in that they found wisdom in their quest for union with the Holy Spirit.

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The Scholastics

The scholastic period (c. 800AD to 1300AD) included a deepening and development of the wisdom of the Fathers. Sts. Francis and Dominic started their religious orders as mendicant rather than monastic. Among other things, this included an emphasis on preaching, which required much study and led to the Church inventing universities. From the Franciscans came St. Bonaventure, a Doctor of the Church; and from the Dominicans came St. Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor of the Church and patron of Catholic education.

Aquinas wrote magnificently on both doctrine and morals. He exemplifies the scholastic method—the development and adaptation, under the guidance of Christian principles, of the philosophy of Plato and of Aristotle. His primary work, as Magister in Sacra Pagina, was preaching and teaching on Scripture as a Master of the Sacred Page.

St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae serves even today as an especial masterwork systematizing Christian thought, subjecting it to the greatest of objections, and integrating it with the greatest of the natural human powers of reasoning. More than a third of the Summa is devoted to an intricate and comprehensive account of human happiness, acts, and ends, grace, virtues, vices, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. These were the major topics studied in moral theology for St. Thomas.

Maintaining the teachings of the Fathers and of Aristotle, Aquinas centered moral theology around how to attain eternal happiness in heaven with God by being excellent in all things in this life rather than mere rule-following or sin avoidance.

Modernity

A Franciscan friar named William of Ockham (you’ve probably heard of his razor) inaugurated the next epoch in moral theology: modernity (c. 1300AD to 1800s). Ockham popularized two ideas that seem rather insignificant to most people, but upon close inspection have far-reaching effects. The first is Nominalism. Nominalism undermines the idea that all humans share a common nature (human nature). It rather contends that we’re perfectly individual and particular. Connecting all humans under the umbrella of a shared nature quickly became an outdated idea; not because it was proven wrong, but because it went out of fashion. Whereas St. Thomas grounded morality in the nature that humans share in common, Ockham cast doubt that there really is such a thing that unites all the members of our species.

His second idea is Voluntarism. Voluntarism seeks to prioritize the will over the intellect. For St. Thomas, God commands man to do certain things and avoid others out of wisdom (i.e., God commands what he knows to be good for us). We do things because we first know them as good, and on that basis we choose them. Under voluntarism, a particular course of action is good because God commands it. The difference seems subtle, but this (eventually) makes morality all about power. We obey God because he is more powerful than us; not because our happiness lies in God as our final end. He could have just as easily commanded us to hate him rather than love him, and then hatred of God would be good.

With voluntarism, freedom of indifference came to be the primary understanding of freedom. Previous Christians had always had excellence as the object of human freedom. The free will takes on new meaning in modernity as a lack of exterior constraint. We can choose whatever we want… that’s true freedom. Naturally, this creates a tension in morality because law (whether divine or man-made) conflicts with this kind of freedom. For the scholastics and the fathers, on the other hand, good laws make man more free.

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This idea of freedom of indifference was taken up again in secular philosophers of the modern period, including Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and others. The focus of ethics for the modern period is finding the right balance of law and liberty. Like oil and water, they cannot truly mix. Duties and obligations to follow the rules, do good, etc. become a dominant theme in morality. Happiness as the rationale for excellent living is supplanted by obligation, duty, and avoiding punishment.

Modernity also brought the protestant revolution and the counter-reformation. Martin Luther and other early protestants called into question the salvific import of living a moral life, thereby undermining the gospel. Yet, within the Church great saints responded to this new disunity by reforming the Church from within her ranks. Notably, the Ecumenical Council of Trent responded to the protestant heresies, articulating and defining the Church’s teachings of very important questions (justification, the sacramental life, etc.).

After Trent, the intellectual formation of priests became a wider emphasis in the Church, and seminaries and scholars arose to meet that challenge. This (very good) counter-reformation movement had an unfortunate side-effect, though. Moral theologians developed manuals (think text-books) of moral theology that took St. Thomas Aquinas as their inspiration and exemplar, but repackaged his teachings into a new, mass-produced and narrow minded pedagogy.

The manuals tended to divide moral theology into two parts. Fundamental moral theology included teachings and definitions about laws, the nature of the human act, conscience, and sin. Special moral theology provided specific treatments of particular sins, often structured according to the ten commandments. These are all important topics, but the crucially missing or underemphasized aspects were (1) happiness as the basis for moral evaluation, (2) virtues, and (3) vices. Though the explicit teachings were correct, they were not framed in a way that connects the legalism of avoiding sin and doing good to the interior life of the human person and his ultimate destiny.

The modern turn—both within and outside the Church—is characterized by the shift to freedom of indifference. Rather than grounding morals in human happiness (whether Aristotle’s eudaimonia or Christ’s blessedness), modernity disintegrated the purpose of human life and morality. It was gradual, and many saints and doctors did not fall into this temptation, but the manualist tradition’s pedagogy and the explicit teachings of philosophers outside the Church promoted this forgetfulness of the heart of Catholic moral teaching: happiness and virtue. Morality has become obsessed with sin-avoidance.

Post-Modernity

In secular society, Nietzsche inaugurated post-modernity (c. 1800s to today) and emphasized the will to power. He saw fatal flaws in modern philosophers and rejected them as vestiges of that weak and pathetic outgrowth of Judaism: Christianity. Nietzsche taught that there is no basis for morality except power competition. Moral reasoning is nothing other than the weak trying to control the strong by way of moral guilt. The prioritization of will over intellect has far reaching effects.

The scientific revolution (overlapping between modern and post-modern eras) had significant influence as well. It was predicated on the rejection of Aristotle and the mastering of nature. Rather than knowing nature as good in itself, science seeks to subdue nature to the wishes of men. Nature bends before the power of man. Modern science quickly becomes the only way to understand the world, which excludes moral reasoning as mere opinion or preference. While science is objectively true, morality is subjective to each culture or each individual. 21st Century Americans should see this as quite familiar.

Nothing I can say will prevent some people from hearing me launch an attack on science. Nonetheless, I reject the charge and agree with Lewis that the triumphs of modern science may have been too rapid and purchased at too high a price: reconsideration, and something like repentance, may be required.

Within the Church, however, there has been a resurgence of authentic Catholic teachings. Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879) inaugurated a new era of Thomistic thought. Famously, he stated that “those who hold to” St. Thomas Aquinas “are never found swerving from the path of truth.” The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) also promoted a ressourcement—a return to the sources of theology, especially Scripture and the Fathers. The Vatican II constitution, Dei Verbum, proclaimed the return to scripture as “the soul of sacred theology” including moral theology.

Catholic primary and secondary education, however, went the way of modern secular education. Catholic schools competing with public institutions in the 20th century lost their way. They lost the connection between the mission of Catholic education and the pedagogy of how to educate. As the mission fell by the wayside, so too did the distinction between Catholic and secular education. In the last five decades, enrollment has plummeted. Many Catholic schools have never had a priestly or religious vocation (or sparse vocations). And it is a truism that twelve years of private Catholic school doesn’t correlate with faithful devotion or even knowledgable faith in today’s world.

In short, modernity has slowly eroded the heart of Catholic theology, especially in the area of morals. We have a sort of cardiological atrophy, what Lewis called, men without chests. While we aren’t exactly trousered apes, we treat our children like computers to be programmed. Just download the list of laws and rules into their CPU, that’s moral theology. Lewis is, again, instructive:

Yet, in our own age we are currently experiencing a renewal of Catholic education in and through classical liberal arts curriculum and pedagogy. After modern science came to deconstruct education, schools and colleges are retreating back to the tradition of education developed within and because of the Church. They’re reading Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Dante and more. While there are many wonderful resources out there for classical educators who want to hand on a truly Catholic formation, our moral theology text books (like Fly-Over Theology) are stuck in modernity and suffer from its mistakes.

In the next articles of this series, I’ll share:

• The defects of the modern manualist tradition of moral theology

• The Classical Liberal Arts principles that inform authentic Catholic education

• How I structure my moral theology class according to the principles of Catholic education.

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When classical academies and Catholic schools proclaim with much confidence that their program of formation builds virtue, what exactly do they mean? Which virtues? There are intellectual virtues like science, but the virtue of which Aristotle speaks is distinct from what we typically mean by science today. There are moral virtues, too, like temperance, but schools typically focus on academics and it is not obvious that learning about temperance makes a person temperate. Perhaps in the case of Catholic schools, they mean that their religion classes promote the theological virtue of faith; what of the other classes? How are virtues formed in the humanities, mathematics, or science?

In Plato’s Meno, Socrates hosts a similar discussion of virtue—what it is and whether it can be taught— but concludes in a state of aporia: the controlling questions have not been satisfactorily answered. Socrates has revealed a previously hidden ignorance within his interlocutors’ interior life. He has even convinced Meno of the value of unveiling such ignorance. Classical education takes the Socratic discussion as its foundational pedagogy for one of two purposes. Students might take the place of Meno’s attendant and learn a discipline like geometry or literary analysis by answering a series of questions from the teacher. Alternatively, they may take the place of Meno himself and end a class period in a state of aporia, which their teacher hopes results in humble wonder and not skepticism.

The relationship between Catholic education and classical education can be elusive. On the one hand, the reality to which many refer as classical education—liberal arts, Socratic discussions, integrated humanities, and the telos of virtuous students—developed within and because of the Catholic Church, especially in medieval Europe. On the other hand, there are major advocates for Catholic liberal education who intentionally avoid calling it “classical,” even when the distinction is not quite clear. In other contexts, the distinction between liberal education and the classics of ancient Greece and Rome is an important one that is too often obscured.

What is distinctly not classical in the latter sense—but more medieval—is the integration of the Christian gospel into this educational vision. The incarnation and paschal mystery bring with them profound ramifications for what it is to train up young people and “transmit manhood to men,” as C.S. Lewis put it. The Catholic faith has integrated classical wisdom into its vision for human nature, but has also elevated merely human wisdom by a hypostatic union with divine mysteries. Succinctly, the incarnation of the logos changes everything. Like Socrates, the Word made flesh had true wisdom that confounded his contemporaries, resulting in his own death. Like Socrates, Christ’s questions make him a great teacher.

While Catholic teachers might ask Socratic questions and inspire wonder with humble aporia, they might also use what we might call a Christic approach to asking questions in the seminar classroom; questions modeled after the example of the greatest teacher. The Easter episode of John’s Gospel contains an often overlooked question from our Lord. St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary is illustrative of Jesus’ pedagogy.

In John 20, Mary Magdalene’s visit to the Holy Sepulcher begins in an unexpected sorrow. The empty tomb is not an immediate cause for joy, but a cause for weeping. Thomas’s commentary on this episode returns again and again to Mary’s admirable love for our Lord: “Because of Mary’s exceeding love she could not delay telling… the disciples.” She “was more ardent and more devoted to Christ…” It was “the desire of love” that caused Mary to weep “abundant tears of devotion.” Even the fact that “she stooped and looked” into the tomb is because in the absence of the beloved Lord, she wanted at least to hold the memory of him in her heart. As the risen Jesus approaches, Mary turns to face him. St. Thomas imagines her physical turn as a sort of conversion: “if anyone desires to see Christ, they must turn round to him.”

Despite Mary’s impressive love, she does not recognize him. So, Jesus begins his pedagogical inquiry: “Woman, why do you weep? Whom do you seek?” Jesus asks questions to which he knows the answer with the purpose of producing something within the disciple. In this case, Mary is already weeping; already suffering the painful loss of her beloved. “Christ asked her whom she was looking for in order to increase this desire, for when she spoke of the one she was seeking, her love burned more intensely and so she would continue to seek him.” The fulfillment of her desire came when Jesus called her by name; immediately she recognized him and exclaimed, “Rabboni!” which St. John explains means teacher.

Jesus’ questioning here is not wholly dissimilar from Socrates’ characteristic interrogation, but the subtle differences are important. Socrates examines the knowledge of his interlocutors with a multitude of questions in extended dialectic. He truly does not know what Meno, Gorgias, or Thrasymachus will say. He suspects that their confidence in areas of virtue, rhetoric, or justice is misplaced, and merely points out ignorance of which they were previously unaware. There is an affective dimension, since wonder is a passionate response, but the line between knowledge and passion is clear.

In contrast, Jesus’ question is keyed to the integration of Mary’s interior life with the personal reality that is Truth himself. “Whom do you seek” is implicit praise for Mary’s sorrow; as if to say, “it is right to sorrow over my absence because that sorrow motivates the search for me.” As a rhetorical question, the goal is to produce (in this case, intensify) the answer within the student. Mary does not need to answer exteriorly, because the deepened desire in her heart is itself the right answer. Jesus’ question has contributed to the ordering of Mary’s passions that she might ever more closely conform to the reality of Jesus’ lovability. He is infinitely lovable, and so she should continue to desire him deeper and deeper still. Mary recognizes Jesus for what he is to her in this moment: Rabboni—even more, a teacher of virtue.

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Jesus’ question becomes the answer to Plato’s Meno. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates and his companions have not explicitly articulated either a precise definition of virtue or whether it can be taught. Jesus’ questioning of Mary Magdalene has effected virtue within her. Sorrow at the absence of Christ motivating the search for him is itself a species of charity. For charity, as Aquinas teaches, is friendship with God, an orientation of the will toward him as final end. Jesus has assisted Mary in cultivating this important virtue by asking specific questions; he sees her interior life, diagnoses her specific need in that moment, and becomes in that moment her Rabboni, teaching her virtue.

Can fallen man imitate Jesus in this sort of questioning? Perhaps the obvious answer is in the negative. Certainly I cannot see into the hearts of my students in the way that Jesus can. On the other hand, as a Catholic educator I purport to seek the cultivation of virtue in my manner of educating. It is virtue that makes a man free, so Catholic liberal education liberates students by assisting them in the conformity of their passions to reason. C.S. Lewis summarized education in The Abolition of Man by including Augustine’s conception of ordered love (ordo amoris), Plato’s command to train “the little human animal” to have “the right responses,” and Aristotle’s aim of “making the pupil like and dislike what he ought.”

An essential foundation for teachers to ask Christic questions is a high quality of the spiritual life. Catholic school leaders must do all they can to empower and enable their teachers to develop a rich spiritual life. Teachers must be the branches to Jesus’ vine. Nemo dat quod non habet should be carved into every classroom podium and every teacher’s desk. Faculty culture must be animated by the Catholic identity of the school and should reciprocally intensify the school’s Catholic identity. Catholic schools should be making saints, but that means we hire saints and host holy professional development. Of course, the knowledge and love of God required for perfect holiness is a tall order; but the point is that without Christ we can do nothing.

Further, teachers can only be Christ to their students if they see Christ in their students. Pupils are “the least of these” that merit elevated dignity in our eyes, special affection, and loving attention. Teachers must have high expectations, hold their students accountable, play, laugh, and sing with their students, and cultivate a true friendship with them. This friendship should be the friendship of virtue of which Aristotle speaks in his Nicomachean Ethics. Such a friendship does not necessitate blurring the lines of school hierarchy, but it does mean acting in loco parentis with full transparency for the primary educators.

Only then can teachers ask questions that integrate the passions with the intellect. If we can ask Socratic questions to lead students to truth, then we can take one further step to ask Christic questions that lead them to love the Truth. These can be in the form of stated questions. I told my students in a lecture recently that moral theology is all about living an answer to the question, who or what do you love? Christic questions can also be part of a seminar discussion, how should the reader feel toward these characters? or does a Catholic have an obligation to patriotism? What kind of patriotism and why? Before they are even answered, these questions contribute to the reordering of the passions.

Man fails in the pursuit of wisdom when he is unaware of his lack of knowledge. Socratic questioning seeks aporia and results in wonder, the beginning of wisdom. Yet, man not only lacks knowledge, he also lacks the proper passionate responses; he lacks the union of intellect and affections that comes with the moral virtues. He lacks charity. The Word was made flesh to justify human nature, to train and infuse us with the virtues, and by his stripes to make us whole. The great Rabbi taught as one with authority, led by example, and modeled good teaching in his lectures, story-telling, and Christic questioning. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “it is Christ alone who teaches—anyone else teaches to the extent that he is Christ’s spokesman, enabling Christ to teach with his lips.” Those who teach in Catholic schools are not even supposed to teach, they are supposed to allow Christ to move in and through them.

The Catholic educational tradition places great emphasis on that to which we give our attention. Teachers must give their attention to their students. They must check frequently for understanding. Teachers have to see their students clearly enough to note their struggles and successes. Foundational to learning is the manner in which the student gives their attention to the teacher and to the truths learned. No learning can happen unless the teacher and student collaborate to direct the student’s attention to the subject of study.

Cultivating attention is itself a real goal of teaching and study. Indeed, part of what our students get out of their academic formation is the intentional direction of their powers of attention. Our subjects, texts, and authors matter, of course, but if a child cultivates the right habits of attention, most of the work of education is already done.

Stratford Caldecott, in his magisterial treatise on the Trivium, justifies this sort of focus on the powers of attention this way: “…prayer consists of attention, and all worldly study is really a stretching of the soul towards prayer… Attention is desire; it is the desire for light, for truth, for understanding, for possession.” Forming our students’ habits of attention is crucial for making saints and disciples of Christ. It is quite literally cultivating the human capacity for prayer, for raising the mind to God.

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This essential task of the teacher—cultivating student attention—is fundamental to the mission and work of a school that desires to offer Catholic education. It is also the two-fold duty of parents, the primary educators, to protect their children’s powers of attention from pernicious influences (whether human, worldly, technological, or demonic) and to propose for their attention realities that are true, good, and beautiful.

The implication of these truths, says Caldecott, is that “every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament.” Human nature is a body-soul composite. We aren’t ghosts in meat-machines. Nor are we mere bodily animals. The union of our body and soul is so profound that their separation is the most violent thing humans can conceive of: death. It is the reason that the Catholic Church teaches that God will raise our bodies at the end of time—even in heaven we’re not complete without the union of body and soul.

Sacraments are outward signs instituted by Christ to give grace. Properly, there are seven true sacraments (Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penance, Anointing of the Sick, Matrimony, and Orders). In a wider sense, the Bible is itself a sacrament. Jesus is present in the word of God. In this sense, the Church herself is a sign of her divine head. Catholic education is highly sacramental: we propose signs to students all the time. Such signs include words, formulas, historical and literary realities, and more to convey immaterial truths. Just as the sacraments effect grace in those who receive them, these signs are intended to effect various interior changes in our students..

The ultimate change that we can hope for is a healthy maturation into a fully formed disciple of Christ; one who knows and loves God. One who prays well and loves neighbor. One who contributes to the growth of the Church and the salvation of souls. This all starts with cultivating the attention of our children. Such is the first and foundational step to forming saints.

For Catholic teachers, class preparation is more than content and pedagogy—it's an act of sanctification.

Preparation for class has many and various goals, among the most obvious are content knowledge (the teacher must know the truths they purport to teach) and pedagogical technique (the teacher must know how to most effectively impart these truths to students). There are other goals in preparation, too.

Good preparation can build in the teacher confidence in her ability to deliver her lessons, leading children to all that is true, good, and beautiful. Good preparation can also provide encouragement in difficult seasons (up here in North Idaho, we need some of that toward the end of our long winters). Ultimately, the teacher’s act of preparing is an act of love for her students.

The most neglected purpose of teacher preparation, however, is the sanctification of the teacher. Regardless of what classes he has to teach, his preparation should flow out of a healthy prayer life, in which he offers prayers specifically for the individual students that he teaches, building in his heart a holy love for his students. Equally as important, the teacher’s prayer should overflow into the conformity of the teacher’s heart to the heart of Christ, the greatest teacher.

Explicit Teaching

That Jesus is a teacher is true in two important ways. First, Jesus taught explicitly by his words and implicitly by his deeds. Matthew 5:2 tells us that Jesus “opened his mouth and taught” his greatest lecture, the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 7:29 makes even clearer that he taught “as one who had authority.” Jesus taught with wisdom in a way that “astonished” his listeners (Matthew 13:54).

Our Lord also taught by his deeds and the way he lived his life. Famously, we are his disciples (i.e., students) if we take up our crosses and follow him (Luke 14:27). The Catechism says that “when Jesus prays he is already teaching us how to pray” (CCC 2607). Even Jesus’ miracles—the Catechism teaches us—were implicit teachings about the sacraments as “powers that come forth” from the body of Christ (CCC 1116, see also Luke 5:17, 6:19, 8:46).

Like us, Jesus didn’t teach anything he made up (John 7:16), but rather handed on what he had received. Such is the nature of Catholic education: to hand on what we have received.

So Jesus teaches exteriorly in ways that we can imitate. We can teach directly and explicitly (e.g., Matthew 5-7). We can teach by narrative storytelling (Luke 15). We can teach by questioning (e.g., Matthew 21:24, 22:41, Mark 2:8-9). We can also teach by both demonstration and example, as Jesus fasted, prayed, wept, washed his disciples’ feet, took up his own cross, and forgave his enemies. We can also teach by testing and allowing our students to fail (Luke 22:39-62).

From the Inside Out

The second important way that Jesus is a teacher is in his uniquely divine ability to move the hearts of his students by grace. For merely human teachers, our powers to move the hearts and minds of our students are limited by our inability to move them from the inside out. We depend on the docility and teachability of our students. We can do much, but this is a serious limitation.

By the hypostatic union, however, the man Jesus Christ is also the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. As God, Jesus sends the Holy Spirit into the hearts of his disciples to better conform them to the truth and to teach them how to love from within their own hearts. He does this with special miracles, by the sacraments, and by grace. the Lord even teaches us to pray by the Holy Spirit’s presence in our hearts (Romans 8:26).

In each of these activities—all legitimate ways of teaching that should be deployed prudentially in the right moment—we can conform our own teaching to the greatest teacher if our teaching activities arise out of a life of prayer and preparation. It is for this reason that the spiritual life of a Catholic teacher is of the utmost importance, not only for his own soul, but for the souls of his students.

Prayerful preparation for teaching conforms the teacher to Christ, empowering his teaching with the power of Jesus’ teaching. It also unites us to him who can do what we cannot: enlighten the minds and enflame the hearts of our students from the inside.

The Key to Thriving Catholic Schools

Catholic school faculty professional development must include:

1. How to develop a healthy prayer life of intimacy with our Lord

2. How to use class preparation as prayer and how to use prayer for class preparation

What Catholic school teacher wouldn’t thrive if they were formed to turn their class preparation into prayer? What if every Catholic school teacher learned how to turn their prayer life into effective teaching? After all, aren’t we supposed to decrease that he may increase (John 3:30)? It’s not always obvious precisely how to do this, though.

With the right guidance, every Catholic teacher can leverage the Catholic tradition of prayer to grow in holiness, conform their hearts to the heart of Christ the teacher, and cooperate with grace to effect the mission of their Catholic school.

My training in Evangelization and Biblical Theology, experience in Catholic education leadership, and heart for the mission of the Church in today’s world makes me uniquely suited to join your school’s faculty professional development and help your teachers to teach from the heart of the Church and form disciples, apostles, and saints.

Two weeks ago, I shared a brief critique of John Dewey, an educational philosopher who had enormous negative impact on American education and who is a major founder of modern, progressive education. Catholic educators, though, must not focus on that which we must avoid. Rather, our eyes should be fixed upon true Catholic education, its sources, its goal, and its fruit.

Christ at the Center

The first consideration is what humanity has lost, and how we are restored. When God created man, he did so with special graces that brought man’s different powers and inclinations into harmony with one another. Man had special infused knowledge of “all things” according to St. Thomas Aquinas.2 The first man had all the virtues, and was immortal.3 After he sinned, Adam’s intellect was darkened4, his lower appetites became disordered5, and he became subject to death (the dis-integration of body and soul).6

When the Word was made flesh for man’s redemption, Christ came to re-integrate human nature. First, he did so by the perfect integration of the hypostatic union, “and the Word was made flesh…” (John 1:14). Then, as Isaiah the prophet foretold, through his paschal mystery Christ “made us whole” by his Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension into heaven.7 A distinctively Catholic curriculum ought to reflect the ideal and the goal: the God-man, himself.

Wonder and Overcoming Fragmentation

The beginning of integration for our students is wonder. Wonder—marveling at what is—is the beginning of all knowledge.8 In the classical liberal arts, we wonder at the beauty and ordered simplicity of truth in its most distilled forms: for grammar, the sentence; in logic, the syllogism; and the eloquence achievable by rhetoric. We marvel at the beauty of coherent mathematical figures, of musical harmonies, and of the heavenly bodies themselves.

In the physical sciences we marvel at nature itself through close observation, excursions into the real world, and learning about the grand discoveries and advances made by man in these fields.

In history, we marvel at the achievements of humanity, at the virtues and excellences of the great men who came before us, and at the atrocities committed by lesser men. We develop a “historical consciousness” that results in a sympathetic and patriotic view of our forebears.9

In Literature, we marvel at the imaginative worlds created by the great authors of western civilization and the flawed but great personalities put on display in those worlds. Literature has a special way of reintegrating whole persons, as it contributes to the subjection of the passions to the intellect by way of the imagination.

We also marvel at the extraordinary argumentation and linguistic eloquence that great authors have achieved in the realms of poetry, ethics, politics, and theology. We peer with affection and amazement especially at “the marvelous condescension of eternal wisdom” as God reveals himself in Divine Revelation.10 That “eternal wisdom” is the heart of Christ himself.

In order to concretely initiate our students into this wonder-filled, integrated lens by which to view the universe and their place within it, stargazing was a key aspect of John Senior’s program of formation. By standing in silence to gaze at the glory of the cosmos, the great chain of being, the majesty of God’s creation, and man’s place within it is made intuitively clear. As a holistic introduction to wonder—not through a classroom lecture or abstract conceptualization, but rather an incarnate experience—stargazing compels students to lift their souls heavenward, while connecting their earthbound lives to the entire range of divine, cosmic order.

This wonder is the beginning, but no good student or teacher ever leaves this stage. Intellectual maturity proceeds through constant wonder as the motivating principle to connect the disciplines to one another. These connections form integrity in the mind of the student. They grant him a coherent vision of the cosmos, God, and man’s place in between.11

Integration of the Student in Body, Soul, Community

An integrated curriculum seeks to form the whole person. The student learns to create in the fine arts, principally by imitation and contemplation of the great artists in the western and Catholic tradition. He incarnates with his own person the characters and events born out in the great dramas of, for example, William Shakespeare. He offers his body to almighty God in songs of praise to the creator and redeemer.

He trains his body with an eye toward physical excellence, especially in physical education.12 Rigorous physical training teaches students the habit of making one’s body submit to his intellect. Because of the kind of being a human person is, they have emotions and appetites that need to be focused and directed according to reason and the good of their community. Physical formation serves to promote this ordering and gives students the foundational dispositions required for resisting sin, building virtue, and taking Christ into the world through acts of charity and service.

Competitive sports harness the passions of young people and give them a stage upon which to express—with holy confidence and virtue—the gifts that God has given them.13 Using their bodies for higher callings such as teamwork, servant leadership, and striving against opposition for a unified cause, they can live out St. Irenaeus of Lyon’s famous proverb, “the glory of God is man fully alive.”14 Competitive sports, especially through the mentorship of faithful coaching, build within the students a right ordering of themselves with relation to their own bodies, to others (coaches, referees, teammates, and competition), to the world (the field, the court, the ball), and to God (the cause of their victory, and their consolation in honorable loss).

Wonder and an integrated curriculum means also offering students the opportunity for leisure in community. The soul of leisure lies in celebration.15 This is expressed most perfectly in worship, making prayer and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass an essential activity that forms both individuals and the community. It is also expressed in less formal celebrations, like chaste dancing.

Such a comprehensive course of study—and action—forms the whole person. Many schools claim to form the whole child without putting much thought into what that means. My academy forms the whole person by inspiring wonder and integrating every part of the student into a beautiful, coherent harmony. Drawing on the sacrifice of Christ, the student can become “whole.”

This is the goal of Catholic education, it places students in contact with the risen Lord, and offers them a place in his ecclesial body. This is the manifesto for all Catholic education. We aren’t just avoiding political indoctrination or preparing for the practical concern of life. We are making disciples of Christ.

As with all things, virtue is in the mean, and not all homework is created equal. Some homework truly is a waste of time. I think its pretty easy for all of us—students, parents, teachers, administrators—to agree that there is homework (“busywork”) that does not contribute to a student’s formation sufficiently to justify its encroachment upon their evening after school. Yet, we sometimes find disagreement between teachers, parents, and students about what constitutes worthwhile homework.

Outside of independent study time, there are two different types of fruitful homework:

• preparation for new knowledge or skills in an upcoming class

• repeating skills and rehearsing truths learned in the classroom

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Preparation

Pre-reading is of course necessary for seminar-discussion classes. If students are to encounter the true, good, and beautiful in great texts like Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, or Dante’s Purgatorio, they must have already read the text. The teacher in a good seminar will limit their contributions to providing fruitful and guiding questions for students to ponder out loud in group discussion.

Ideally, students have done an initial pre-read of the text for homework. Contrary to popular belief, this initial homework reading does not need to result in perfect comprehension. It should be the student’s first encounter with the text and ideas. This is especially true with regard to complex or poetic texts. Fuller understanding is the point of our coming discussion.

Take for example, Canto 17 of Dante’s Purgatorio, a text I taught in the classroom recently. Reading a full canto is easily completed for homework the night before without any pressure on students to totally understand everything they’ve read. In discussion the following day, the class can begin by re-reading aloud a selection. Here are 36 lines from the end of the canto:

The teacher might begin the conversation with a question that calls to the students’ minds some review: Where are we in purgatory, what have we seen and what do we expect to see in purgatory as we ascend the mountain? Students respond by reviewing the first 16 cantos:

After entering into the gates of purgatory, we have seen sinners punished and purified of the vices of pride, envy, and wrath. We are currently exploring the punishment and purification of sloth or acedia.

We might ask further questions such as how were those vices punished? How can we apply Dante to our own souls in finding freedom from these vices? This review at the outset is important. Notice the kinds of review we’ve done:

1. First, we re-read a select passage that was part of the homework assignment.

2. Second, we reviewed content from previous classes and homework assignments.

As students orally offer this review, they’re rehearsing the ideas in their own minds. If the teacher cold-calls these review questions, then all attentive students are doing the review actively. In either case, even hearing the questions and answers provides an opportunity for review for those that are less engaged.

From this review, we can begin to ask more questions about the text at hand, offering students an opportunity to deep-read the text together in discussion. Some questions about this passage that my students have spent whole class periods discussing:

• What do we learn about the structure of Mt. Purgatory from Virgil’s explanation here in these lines?

• What is the role of love in human decision-making? What kind(s) of love are at stake here?

• Is it true that sins and vices come from love? How can this be?

• Based on this account of love, how can we be intentional about building virtue?

From this discussion, students learn much about how human actions are motivated, how our affections can be disordered or disproportionate, and how we can purify our hearts in our walk with Christ. Discussing these 300 words from Dante in under an hour offers my students a window into the human soul and the moral life that would otherwise require years of life-experience to understand. Later, they’ll incorporate these ideas into a hand-written essay to reinforce and apply them.

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Practice & Rehearsal

Not every class session focuses on seminar discussion. Very often, there are specific truths that must be committed to memory, or skills and procedures that must be known. For this, students get homework assignments that help to train their memories to retain specific knowledge.

Contemporary cognitive science has achieved a great deal in researching how we can make long-term changes to our memory (clearly an important part of learning). The Catholic intellectual tradition also has much to contribute to this topic.

Our vision of education is one that results in students developing virtue; we aren’t limited to developing professional and practical competencies. The foundational moral virtue requisite for attaining the others is prudence. St. Thomas Aquinas articulates several “parts” of prudence. Just as wall, roof, and window are parts of a house, so too is memory a part of prudence (he calls it a quasi-integral part).

In order to build and exercise the virtue of prudence, so argues St. Thomas, we need to contextualize the present with the past. For this, we need a long and full memory. Part of education is filling the memory with the culture and heritage of the Catholic intellectual tradition so that our students can use the wisdom of the past in their own decision making. Indeed, as far as academics are concerned, this is one of the primary ways that education forms the soul.

St. Thomas offers several ways to develop the soul’s power of memory:

1. Imagine. Associate the truth to be memorized with some striking image. Concepts alone fade from memory quickly, but associating them with zany images helps with retention.

2. Organize. That which we want to remember we should “carefully consider and set in order” so that we may “pass easily from one memory to another.” Mnemonics often do this, especially acronyms. Teachers should give their students mental models and structures within which to place new truths in their proper order. Truths organized are that much closer to being memorized.

3. Repeat. St. Thomas says that when we’re anxious about some truth, then we will remember it better because we’ll return to it often. Frequent study, rehearsal, and practice must be the cornerstone of our attempts to commit something to memory. Understanding is wholly insufficient, we must review, rehearse, and practice.

4. Reflect. While step 3 helps information move from working memory (understanding) to long-term memory, reflection often pulls truths from long-term memory in order to solidify its place there.

Dr. Kevin Vost has several wonderful books in which he uses these steps to help Catholics memorize important aspects of the faith.1 While all of these steps can be done with homework exercises, it is the repetition step that holds the most natural relationship with homework. Using homework to repeat and reinforce what was understood in the classroom is both essential and fruitful for learning.

Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 3.0 helps us understand some of the cognitive science behind memory (and it integrates well with St. Thomas’ comments). I’ve adapted some of that information here:

On the left is the cognitive structure of learning. As we give something our attention, it enters into working memory, by which we understand and explore new information. If we rehearse that information a few times (think repetition from St. Thomas), it is loosely transferred to long-term memory. In order to truly solidify information in our long-term memory, we must retrieve it every so often (think reflection from St. Thomas).

On the right is a forgetting curve. On the top-right of that graph is the moment of understanding new information (e.g., in class). Memory experiments seem to indicate that spacing out our repetition and reflection over time (one hour, one day, two days, etc.) helps students learn. If we think of memorization and learning as “interrupting” the process of forgetting, we can teach and learn more effectively. Interrupting forgetting is more effective than constant attention for learning (which is why I try so hard to discourage my students from cramming before an exam, or spending study time simply re-reading).

Homework is essential as interrupting the process of forgetting. It is essential as repetition and rehearsal of truths that we want our students to learn.

Busywork & Balance

We’ve seen the wonderful fruit that can come from homework in preparing students for the truth or reinforcing truths they’ve learned. The question remains: how do we identify busywork?

Here are some diagnostic questions that we can use to identify whether our homework is truly worthwhile or if it needs to be improved (or perhaps just not assigned).

• What are the essential truths that I want students to learn?

• How does the homework assignment either prepare them to learn this truth or repeat and reinforce the truth?

• Does the assignment suitably interrupt forgetting from previous material?

• Does the assignment use time efficiently? For example, rereading is less efficient than working flashcards or completing Cornel-style notes (built around reviewing in-class material).

• Does the homework teach the student how to study and what is important to learn?

In all these considerations, teachers must remember that when assigning homework, they must form their students to be well-rounded. It is important for each teacher to recall that theirs isn’t the only course students take and have homework assigned. Further, we want them to have time for their families, athletics, and other extracurriculars. At my high school, my teachers and I shoot for approximately 15 minutes of homework per night per course. For the typical student, that works out to about 90 minutes of homework a night. We find this to be an appropriate balance.

Modern, progressive education seeks to provide children with opportunities for “social emotional learning” (SEL). Educators and policy-writers have a notion that the emotional development of students is integral to the task of education. Whether that fundamental assumption is right or wrong, they do so with a radically politicized post-modern vision of the human person, resulting in abuses like what we see in California public education policy.

Many in the center of the aisle and on the political right are rightfully disgusted by the evil of facilitating “gender transitions” without parental knowledge or consent. Their reaction is to argue that schools should just focus on how to fix failing math and reading instruction rather than ask teachers to role play as psychotherapists. While centrists and the right point out an important deficit in intellectual formation, they fail to engage the far left on whether emotional development should be part of our educational vision.

The national conversation around education and the emotions is stunted before it even began. The important question underneath “trans-ing the kids” versus “reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic” is whether there truly is an emotional component to education and what it ought to look like.

The Catholic and classical tradition of education contains essential wisdom for proper development of the human condition. This week, I offer for your consideration the manner in which Catholicism integrates the emotions and education, and then a comparison of this tradition with a very modern account of how to do the same.

Emotions in Catholic Education

Here at CoCrucified, I often make the claim that every suggestion about education is simultaneously a statement about what the human person is. In short, education is applied anthropology. Yet, education is also meant to form students’ decision-making in the future. Therefore, education is also applied ethics. For the Catholic, we define moral theology as “the branch of theology that studies human acts so as to direct them to a loving vision of God seen as our true, complete happiness and our final end. This vision is attained by means of grace, the virtues, and the gifts and in light of revelation and reason.”1 Catholic education is the process whereby we direct our students’ thoughts and actions to a loving vision of God seen as their true, complete happiness and their final end. So Catholic education begins in Anthropology and ends in Moral Theology.

Emotions & Passions

Beginning with anthropology, Catholics believe that the human person is an integrated whole, both body and soul. Our bodily nature include the powers of sensation, perception, and feeling. This is where our emotions come from. Classically, they are called passions, because they are passive. Our emotions are reactive movements of our embodied souls.

When we apprehend something as good, we react with love and desire. If we attain that apprehended good, we feel pleasure or joy. If a good is difficult to attain, but possible, we hope to overcome difficulties in attaining it. If it is difficult, but not possible, we despair at never attaining it. Likewise, when we apprehend something as evil, we experience hate and aversion. We avoid it. When we cannot avoid it, we experience sadness or pain upon having the evil inflicted upon us. For difficult-to-avoid-evils, if we truly can avoid it, we rely on daring to motivate us to overcome the difficulties. If those difficulties are too great, we fear the inevitable evil. When we experience some evil and desire vengeance, this inclination to attack the evil is called anger.

Because they are passive reactions, we often think that these emotions remain out of our control. We believe that someone else is responsible for our anger or sadness. Indeed, common human experience is that we do not choose to be sad or angry, but rather that these feelings happen to us. Certainly, there is important truth to that: our passions are reactions which we do not deliberately control in the same way that we control our actions.

Starting in Ancient Greece, though, man has had the realization that our passions aren’t completely beyond our control. The Catholic Church teaches us that these passions are amoral in themselves, but that the Lord calls us to govern the passions by reason. That word, govern, is important. If the human person were likened to a political community, the intellect is meant to be the king, and the passions governed. The reason makes the laws, the passions obey. Yet, the passions aren’t like actions which are almost synonymous with deliberate decisions. They are passive reactions.

Controlling the Passions

The Catechism offers us an answer to these difficult questions:

Passions are morally good when they contribute to a good action, evil in the opposite case. The upright will orders the movements of the senses it appropriates to the good and to beatitude; an evil will succumbs to disordered passions and exacerbates them. Emotions and feelings can be taken up into the virtues or perverted by the vices (CCC 1768).

Actions are the things we do deliberately. Passions happen to us. Characteristics (i.e., virtues and vices) are determined and built up by our actions, and they incline our passions. That last part is what is important to us today. My intellect rules over and directs my passions, not by deliberating about how I should feel in any given moment, but by predisposing the proper passionate response.

As the Catechism teaches, this is what virtues do. The natural virtues “are firm attitudes, stable dispositions, habitual perfections of intellect and will.” They incline us to act well, so that our moral actions are good. But they also “order our passions” and “make possible ease, self-mastery, and joy in leading a morally good life” (CCC 1804)

Therefore, an education that seeks to build virtue will integrate the emotions into an holistic vision of the human person. It will have a sort of “SEL” built into it.

On the one hand, the progressive leftists seem to be correct that training the emotions is an important part of education. On the other hand, they have missed the essential role that virtue and vice play in managing emotions. Despite this fatal flaw, we cannot dismiss modern progressive education’s social-emotional learning endeavors and ask teachers to merely focus on “reading, writing, and arithmetic” instead.

Classically, and in the Catholic tradition, the moderation of the appetites and passions is essential to the project of Catholic education. In fact, any Catholic or classical educator who claims to form students in virtue should be able to account for how the emotions play into that formation.

Making the Theory Real

This is a lot of wonderful theory, but what does it look like in real life? Here are four essential points made tangible:

1. The passions serve as a diagnostic tool for virtue and vice. If we react negatively to good things, then we know we have a vice. If we react positively to evil things, we have a vice. For example, consider a man whose desire for money justifies withholding charitable giving to the Church or to the poor. Perhaps he gives, but it hurts. That pain or sorrow at performing a good action reveals the vice of avarice in his soul. The passion of sorrow here provides a diagnosis of vice.

2. Virtues are built by habit. Cultivating a virtue requires performing actions in conformity with that virtue on a repeated basis to build the habit. For our avaricious man, he must expose himself to the pain of parting with his money for good causes as frequently as he can. If he forces himself to do this, eventually he will find that it becomes easier and easier. With enough diligence, it will become a second nature.

3. Virtues order the passions. With his new habit of giving to the poor and to the Church, our greedy miser has slowly built up in his soul the virtue of generosity. Generosity, in turn, disposes his passions to take joy in giving his money away to good causes. Now, he may even feel a certain kind of sorrow when he falls to temptation. Passing by the beggar on the road will fill the man with guilt, the passion of sorrow at one’s own moral evil. Here, the passion reveals a virtue and inclines the man to perform the right action instead of negligence.

4. The passions incline us to action. The passions include our desires. Anyone who is serious about the moral life wants to want to do good. Anyone whose virtues incline their desires actually wants to do the good. The generous man desires to help the beggar. He desires to support the Church. His passions are not a temptation, but a protection against temptation.

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Out of Date?

What we have above is a synopsis of Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and what the whole of western civilization believed from the fourth century B.C through medieval times, until just the last few centuries. Has modern science debunked this tradition? I hear that a lot. On the other hand, I also see with some frequency that modern psychology unknowingly verifies the classical philosophical tradition.

Consider Dr. Kathryn Hecht, a clinical psychologist trained at the University of Minnesota's joint Ph.D. program in developmental and clinical psychology at the Institute of Child Development. While I don’t know her religious beliefs, secular psychology is not famous for being populated by highly religious people. Dr. Hecht gave a TED Talk recently on her impressive work with children that have severe anxiety and OCD.

I’m happy to recommend this TED Talk. It is a marvelous example of how secular psychology has unknowingly rediscovered the virtue-ethics tradition. Several important points stick out to me.

1. Dr. Hecht is not validating emotions as if the passions had moral goodness in and of themselves. Such validation too easily descends into a navel-gazing sort of exercise that presumes that all emotions are right. On the contrary, emotions are valid and good insofar as they cohere with reality. Is my fear rational? Is my desire truly good?

2. Her process (the A+B=C equation) shifts our attitude toward negative emotions. Most of us want to either repress those emotions or let them rule over us. Subjecting them to reason by way of habit is much more healthy.

3. She sees the importance of emotions in attaining the characteristics that we want, whether that be courage (her main focus), prudence, justice, or temperance.

We could also look at this talk with a critical eye because she gets important points of anthropology wrong (e.g., that all these questions are reducible to brain chemistry). But that seems far less fruitful to me than the important points she gets right. Dr. Hecht is advocating (knowingly or otherwise) for a Catholic virtue-ethics approach to child formation.

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Ascending to the Contemplation of the Truth

Pope St. John Paul II famously declared that “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”2 Modern psychology, when it gets things right, is going to validate long abandoned notions about the human person grounded in the Christian faith. Of course, we can bypass the errors necessarily part of modern science by studying our classical philosophy and Catholic theology. The attentive reader will not see an insult to modern science here, because error is built into the enterprise. Modern science is always correcting and updating.

As it pertains to education and child rearing, exposure therapy—that is, habituating ourselves to reasonable actions so that we eventually feel the way we ought to feel—saves our children from the destructive effects of disordered passions. Like most dichotomies, we cannot simply bend over for modern SEL efforts that deform our children’s souls and mutilate their bodies. Nor can we simply leave emotions at the door and train the intellect in isolation. Pope Benedict XVI lamented to American educators in 2008, “While we have sought diligently to engage the intellect of our young, perhaps we have neglected the will.”3

Teaching the whole child means integrating his intellect with his emotions. It means forming the intellect to know the truth and the will to choose the good, so that the passions love the beautiful. Education is applied moral theology. As the classical tradition eternally reminds us, this is what it means to be truly educated. C.S. Lewis, a modern voice tethered to the classical Christian tradition, taught us about the true relationship between education and the passions in the 1940s (notice how he uses language of the passions to explain education):

St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’4

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The tradition of Catholic education is diverse and is of immense consequence for all education in the west, Catholic or otherwise. The origins of formal education are inseparable from monasticism in the early Church and her act of civilizing Europe. In addition to preserving and handing on Sacred Scripture, these monks also preserved and developed the Greek and Roman tradition of liberal arts and philosophy. Out of these monasteries and local Cathedral schools, the Church founded the University system, inventing higher education to form her clerics for preaching Theology to medieval Europe. The Counter-Reformation and the high middle ages saw Jesuits innovating school models and starting to standardize. Many other teaching orders and great saints sprung up in the succeeding centuries, leading to a well-deserved reputation of reliable excellence in Catholic schools (especially in the U.S.). This reputation of excellence, though, brought with it a tendency of schools to favor a results-driven college-preparatory model in the 20th century. Along-side revolutionary change in secular education, the outsized focus on temporal benefits carried with it the temptation of mission drift: Catholic schools sacrificing their Catholic identity for worldly approval.

In the 20th and 21st Centuries, we’ve seen a revival of Catholic education by a return to the classical liberal arts model at the roots of the Church’s tradition. This renewal derives inspiration from many sources, but John Henry Cardinal Newman stands out among the rest. Newman codified the Church’s understanding of her own educational tradition and priorities. His articulation of the Church’s initial development and constant practice of forming her members has endured and formed much of the backbone of what Americans are calling “classical liberal arts” education. Many proponents of classical education, especially those brothers and sisters who have yet to cross the Tiber, remain unaware of Newman’s importance in this educational movement. Nonetheless, his influence can hardly be overstated. We have St. John Henry Newman to thank for codifying core principles for which classical and Catholic educators strive in an exciting and on-going renewal.

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Integration

A defining characteristic of classical and Catholic education alike is the integration of disciplines. Integrating disciplines requires that faculty be familiar with their colleagues’ courses and that no course or class is ever siloed off from the others as if it were self-sufficient. In classical education, there is a conspicuous hesitation to specialize (or at least, to over-specialize). Even at the college level, some classical liberal arts colleges offer just one single major, with no opportunity to specialize at the undergraduate level. This integration strikes many as odd and impractical, but John Henry Newman provides an apologia for this approach: truth is one. He puts it this way: “all the sciences come to us as one, that they all relate to one and the same integral subject-matter.” That subject matter is reality itself. Each discipline needs “the support and guarantee of its sister sciences, and giving in turn while it takes.”1 Mathematics, Literature, History, and Theology each offer the student a window through which to view the truth, even if from different angles. They also help and support one another. John Henry Newman’s own conversion to Rome is famous for integrating history and theology. His robust historical study of the Early Church Fathers led him to believe that “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”2

This same idea inspired John Senior to found the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. The result of integrating and humanizing curriculum and instruction—even in a secular educational environment—was an incredible flood of conversions to Catholicism, religious vocations, priests, and bishops. It took less than a decade for three college professors to help usher in a revival of education for both Church and nation. Yet, for all the good and excellence that IHP exemplified, something about the secular environment of the public university seems to have doomed it to destruction.3

At my classical high school, we believe whole heartedly in the integration of disciplines. Perhaps the most obvious example is that we treat history, literature, and philosophy as one field of study completed in the same period. Students study the history of western civilization and culture together with the literature, poetry, and philosophical thought of the respective period. These are Humanities courses in the most literal sense of the term. The students study humanity in all the most crucial ways that we express our human nature. Approaching the truth from this integrated vantage point is meant to have a humanizing effect on both student and teacher. The study of the humanities makes us more human; it conforms us to what humanity is supposed to be.

Centrality and Import of Theology for all educational disciplines

The most typical posture of teacher, student, parent, and administrator—especially in the context of American industriousness—is to prioritize those courses which have the most empirical evidence behind them. These seem objective and so we tend to think of them as the most reliable. This often leads to an attitude that the physical sciences and mathematics are the most important and reliable disciplines.

Cardinal Newman provides a more Catholic vision in the hierarchy of academic disciplines. Anyone familiar with Pope St. John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae will not be surprised to find that Newman, like John Paul, considers Theology to be the highest and most indispensable discipline. Newman builds upon the crucial integration of disciplines, saying, “in order to have possession of truth at all, we must have the whole truth; and no one science, no two sciences, no one family of sciences, nay, not even all secular science, is the whole truth.”4 That whole truth necessarily includes the truths we attain by divine revelation and the teachings of the Church. No legitimate window into truth “can safely be omitted.”5 For Newman then, secular education, omitting theological formation, is an incoherent idea.

Newman offers this vision in even stronger terms, “In a word, Religious Truth is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge.” We might consider the image of a jigsaw puzzle. While theology provides an important piece without which the larger image can never be complete, theology also provides the full image that reveals the proper place of each individual piece. It is the reference by which we see the connections between the disciplines. He attests that Catholics “think the omission of any kind of knowledge whatever, human or divine, to be, as far as it goes, not knowledge, but ignorance.” According to Newman, the intentional secularization of education is a self-defeating endeavor. It invalidates the project of education as a whole, and each discipline suffers from disconnection from theology.

My profound and undying gratitude rests in my faculty, each of whom integrate theology into their disciplines and view their subjects as subordinate to theology. We might have a clear notion of how theology can provide benefit to the humanities (especially Moral Theology), but what of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences? We have faculty members who are masters of this integration and subordination. My science and math teachers spend considerable time discussing theology as the chief justification for studying math or science at all, and they tailor those reasons to their specific mathematical or scientific discipline. It is only by seeing creation as good, and therefore beautiful, that mathematics and the natural sciences can have any significance beyond practical application. If creation is both good and intelligible, then math and science are a worthwhile discipline for our study. If creation is both good and intelligible, it only is so because a good and intelligent being holds creation in existence.

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Virtue as the purpose of education

Classical educators are famous for their repeated insistence on focusing education toward the cultivation of virtue. Sometimes we fall into the pit of hypocrisy or failing to measure up to our goal of cultivating virtue in our students, but the intention remains one constant among classical educators. Here, too, we gratefully inherit from Newman, who shared this insight with—and thought in concert with the tradition of—Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Sacred Scripture.

Newman describes the founding of an educational institution by noting that none of the disciplines provide in themselves the purpose of educating a soul. Rather, he places the goal of education in the student’s “exercise and growth in certain habits, moral or intellectual.”6 He uses this language to evoke the language of virtue ethics, which posit that a person is not good simply because they perform good actions. A person is good insofar as they cultivate good characteristics, insofar as they build good character. This is done by habitually performing good actions. Rather than the good action itself, it is the habit of performing good actions which renders a man good, or excellent. These habits give a man the ability to exercise his humanity with excellence and, for that reason, make him more free and therefore more human (hence: liberal arts education).

I and many of my faculty take the advice of Joshua Gibbs of The Classical Teaching Institute in starting each daily class period with a “class catechism,” a series of questions and answers that form the interior and intellectual life of the students. Students end up memorizing the answers because of the ceremony and repetition of the recitation. One of the questions that spans across courses is “What does it mean to be human?” Students answer in unison:

“The theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity. The moral virtues are prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. The intellectual virtues are art, prudence, understanding, science, and wisdom.”

This answer slowly over time assimilates into the soul of each student, but that means more than the mere fact that they memorize the specifically worded response to the question. The answer doesn’t obviously address the question, and so it strikes us as odd. Catechisms form student souls to move toward understanding that to act contrary to virtue is in some way to be less human. Vice is dehumanizing to the vicious, and virtue is humanizing to the virtuous. C.S.Lewis famously observed the transition in education in the 20th Century; the old education, he said, was “men transmitting manhood to men.”7

The same is true of our athletic programs. Each coach, under the guidance of a wise athletic director and a holy mission, sees their activity as primarily about forming saints. When coaches form students to achieve excellence in Football, Volleyball, or Basketball, they are intentional about instilling dispositions that transfer naturally from merely athletic competition to holistic sanctity. They do this consciously aware of St. Paul’s famous athletic metaphors for the Christian faith.8 In truth, athletics aren’t important because they are fun, let off steam, or gain a nice reputation and accolades for the school. Athletics are important because they train future saints in virtues by giving teens an avenue to practice pursuing a noble good (victory) in the face of adversity (the other team, the weather), or by giving teens the opportunity for gratitude in the face of terrible hardship (a loss), and humility in success. Win or lose, at the end of each home game my student athletes join together to sing Non nobis domine (“not to us O Lord, but only to your name be the glory”).

Importance of forming the imagination

Education, then, seeks the interior integration of students and teachers by way of an integrated course of study, holding Theology as the queen of the sciences, for the purpose of cultivating theological, moral, and intellectual virtues in the souls of students. If the newest doctor of the Church is correct on these points, then he would naturally arrive at the conclusion that schools should place a heavy emphasis on the formation of the imagination, perhaps a heavier or equal weight as is placed on the formation of the intellect. Indeed, this is the conclusion of most classical educators today.

Newman argued that the best way to form behavior (e.g., for virtuous acts) is not merely rational or cognitive. Newman argues that “[intellectual] assent does not lead to action; but the images in which it lives, representing as they do the concrete, have the power of the concrete upon the affections and passions, and by means of these indirectly become operative.”9 The formation of the imagination consists in filling it with vivid images that order the passions toward goodness and beauty, and away from falsehood and evil. Newman echoes Plato’s claim that being educated isn’t reducible to rule-following or passing a test, but in the interior ordering of the passions toward the good, such that we think truly, do good, and love beauty. This truth inspired Stratford Caldecott’s statement that “the best way to communicate morality is not through endless dry lists of what should and should not be done, but once again through the imagination—through stories, drama, and living examples.”10

Moral Theology at my academy is distinctive within the world of Catholic education. We don’t use a mass produced secondary text that distills the important principles for students. Rather, we offer students the original texts from Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas and other doctors of the Church, as well as the Catechism and Scripture. Yet, the use of primary sources is also not the primary distinction. Significantly, we slowly read Dante Aleghieri’s Purgatorio in concert with Scripture and the Magisterium of the Church. Our students enter into an imaginative world where the vices, virtues, and the paths between are vividly dramatized. We enter into Dante’s imaginative world so that our study can have a real effect in making students and teachers good, so that more than just the intellect is affected. Dante may or may not be an authoritative source for precision in who ends up where in the afterlife, but that question misses the point. We traverse Mt. Purgatory with Dante and Virgil, allowing the imaginative journey to purge us for entry into paradiso. The greatest student compliment I have ever received in my professional career was from a student who took this Moral Theology course and said, “this has helped me to see that sin is ugly.” That affective dimension is the goal. It is where saints are made.

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Liberal Education as Distinct from Practical Training

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of classical education is that it is decidedly not college and career preparatory. Of course, the goods of university education and professional life need not be neglected, but many secondary schools treat university admissions as the highest possible good. Others prioritize the trades, getting into the workforce to make money. In short, the value of education is primarily measured in the number of dollars a graduate may be able to earn. Our 38th Doctor of the Church would reject this position emphatically.

Newman responds to the pragmatist in each of us, saying,

But education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connexion with religion and virtue. …and since cultivation of mind is surely worth seeking for its own sake, we are thus brought once more to the conclusion, which the word “Liberal” and the word “Philosophy” have already suggested, that there is a Knowledge, which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labour.11

Private schools and universities are expensive. Yet, Cardinal Newman argues that the returns on investment are distinct from anything that can be measured in monetary terms. There is a kind of wisdom that is worth the price-tag of tuition regardless of the professional doors it may open. Such wisdom is the interior ordering of the student. It is being educated, in the highest sense of that term, which is desirable as an ample return on investment.

Every teacher has fielded questions like “is this going to be on the test?” or “how many points is this assignment worth?” or “when am I going to use this in real life?” Many teachers don’t like these questions because they have some awareness of the transcendent value of their discipline, and indeed that’s why they teach it. Newman had this understanding for the whole of education. He is a shining beacon of the kind of attitude that the Catholic Church has taken for the education of her members.

The beautiful thing about classical, Catholic education, though, is that our Lord was right when he taught, “but seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Matthew 6:33). Educators who are intentional about forming students in wisdom and virtue according to the pedagogy prescribed by Cardinal Newman often find that temporal excellence comes along with it. My own young academy has already seen this to be true, and we are proud of these fruits. Our graduates are going on to fruitful university life at public and private universities. They are well prepared for these environments and are finding success and fulfillment in their studies. We also have graduates entering the military, workforce, and finishing trade school. We even have our eyes on a few graduates, watching for holy marriages and priestly vocations. With two graduating classes so far, we are elated at their trajectory and successes.

Now that Pope Leo XIV has named St. John Henry Newman as both Doctor of the Church and co-patron of education, my prayer for the future of education is three-fold. Firstly, there are non-Catholic classical educators doing amazing work in protestant and public-charter school contexts. I pray that they will begin to see the Catholic Church—founded by Jesus Christ, her head—as “the pillar and bulwark” (1 Timothy 3:15) of all the good principles toward which they aspire in their tireless formation of young people. Secondly, I pray that Catholic educators the world-over would join in the renewal of Catholic education. More than merely forming students for worldly excellence, we must form them to be saints! There are wonderful resources for joining this renewal, from the Cardinal Newman Society to the Institute of Catholic Liberal Education, the Augustine Institute, the Boethius Institute, Adeodatus, the Classic Learning Test, and many more. Third, I pray that more Catholic parents will beseech their parochial schools and dioceses to provide the kind of education called for by St. John Henry Newman.

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All these critiques of modern education are—of course—legitimate and important. Yet, if we start new schools, divert public funds, and fail to properly diagnose the source of our problems, then we’ll end up with the same failures in a few years.

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Diagnosis and Prescription

Jeremy Tate of CLT is right when he says that at the national scale, there are essentially four strategic targets for educational reform:

• Control of public educational funds

• Accreditation

• Teacher Certification and Licensure

• Standardized Testing

All four of these must be considered deeply as Americans and Catholics reform both public and private education. There are classical Charters as well as school choice legislation doing great work in diverting public funds to support good curriculum and pedagogy. While there is much to do in the accreditation space, several organizations are doing important work, including Lumen Accreditation, NAPC*IS, ACCS, the Classical Latin School Association, and others. I discussed solutions to teacher licensure last week. CLT is doing great work in standardized testing for grades 3-12. At the ground level, new schools are coming up everywhere. There is at least one Catholic Bishop that is working on the intentional renewal of Catholic education in every school in his diocese.

If these various endeavors, organizations, and individuals are to be successful, they must consider the root causes of the present crisis. While contemporary Americans often don’t want to consider underlying philosophies, we would be silly to think we have the cure to an illness we don’t understand. One such underlying cause is the philosophical basis of modern, progressive education itself, and its founder: John Dewey.

The Engineer of Modern Education

John Dewey (1859-1952) was an American philosopher and educational reformer. If you’ve heard of him, it was probably in reference to the Dewey Decimal system in libraries. His greatest influence, however, was in his 26 years as a professor in the Teacher’s College at Columbia University. He taught the nation’s future leading teachers, principals, and superintendents their educational philosophy. As a result, his impact on American education was a great deal more influential than most people might think.

Dewey sharply opposed what education had been up to his day. He rejected traditional education’s tendency to “impose” knowledge “from above;” his own educational philosophy prioritized “expression and cultivation of individuality.”1 Dewey preferred the “free activity” of students over external discipline. He replaced learning from texts and teachers to learning by “experience.” These and other hallmarks of Dewey’s philosophy birthed what is now referred to as “child-centered” education.

Inspired by Jean Jaçques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), Dewey’s approach to education drove a wedge between the received tradition and a narcissistic individualism. R. Jared Staudt rightly points out:

a child-centered approach to education has undermined the passing on of tradition. The claim that children learn incrementally only in set stages has translated into the dumbing down of the curriculum, putting off complex thoughts into the future (or not at all). That children should be active rather than passive in the classroom has itself resulted in a different form of passivity in not aspiring to knowledge. That education should relate to the child’s direct experience and environment has cut students off from consideration of the transcendent. That education should provide useful preparation has sidetracked the need to enrich the human person with noble thoughts and aspirations.2

Modern education has traded the tradition of initiating the young into our shared humanity and into Christian discipleship for asking the young what they want to be, and forming them for that. It is no wonder that this has been a disaster.

What did we lose?

Staudt rightly points out the neglect of the transcendent. Catholic education is meant to be inspired by a supernatural vision and Christian anthropology. As I’ve noted before:

Dewey’s understanding of the human person cuts the student off from the transcendent. Catholic education, on the other hand, is inspired by a supernatural vision. Catholics study the world and its creator because that contact between our minds and reality is something worthwhile in itself. We don’t ask about the practical utility of reading Shakespeare or studying biology, because we know that Shakespeare reveals human nature to us and biology reveals living creatures to us. When our minds grasp the complexities of our nature or the world, we find truth. Truth is transcendent of any particular fact or use. Ultimately, all contact with truth is contact the Truth which Jesus reveals himself to be.

This sort of knowledge (of Truth) enables us to grasp our own nature, and what it’s for. Beyond a navel gazing exercise of self-discovery, true knowledge of human nature puts on display what it means to be good as a human. Like truth, goodness transcends this life and it transcends the created world (Mark 10:18).

Truth and goodness, when seen and appreciated by the well-formed soul is delightful. This delight is a result of beauty. Truth, Goodness, and Beauty—those three words that grace the mission statements of classical schools everywhere—are three of the transcendentals. They are shared in by everything that exists because they are the mark of the creator.

It is man’s purpose to know the truth, do the good, and love the beautiful. Dewey and modern education have cut us off from these transcendental properties of the world. Without them, we fail to achieve our ends as human beings. Without their pursuit, we see other failures as evidence: failing academic progress, evil political indoctrination, and ultimately a diminished participation in our shared humanity.

One more way to support this work on a lower level of commitment is to check out my profile over on buymeacoffee.com/cocrucified. Except, I won’t use those funds to buy coffee; instead I’ll buy books that help further the mission of Catholic education, and share that wisdom with you!

Now, on to today’s topic:

Catholic or Secular Degree?

The Catholic Church has her own system of universities and degrees. Pontifical universities confer pontifical degrees: Baccalaureate, the Licentiate (license), and the Ecclesiastical Doctorate. Aside from some nuances, they are roughly equivalent to the secular Bachelor, Master, and Doctorate degrees respectively. Just as the secular world offers a terminal law degree— the J.D. (Juris Doctor)—so too do Pontifical Universities offer J.C.D. for canon law. Typically, it is somewhat rare for lay people to obtain these degrees, but it can and does happen.

Many Catholic schools require their teachers to get a teaching license or certification from the state. There are general certifications, licenses to teach in specific grades, license to teach particular subjects or special education, etc. Perhaps it goes without saying, but these certificates and licenses typically form secular teachers in modern educational theory and practice. Famously, school leaders participating in the renewal of Catholic liberal arts education typically view these secular certifications and teaching licenses (as well as “education” majors in college) with some suspicion.

Origins of Modern Education at Columbia

Modern, progressive education took control of the schools in America in large part due to the influence of Columbia’s Teacher’s College. John Dewey (of the Dewey Decimal System) was a professor of philosophy at the Teacher’s College from 1904 to 1930, and had an outsized impact on American education. If anyone could be called the father of modern, progressive education’s hold on the hearts and minds of American teachers, school leaders, and students, it is John Dewey. More about him another time. This one teaching school formed thousands of teachers, principals, and school leaders who went on to implement Dewey’s pernicious education philosophy in schools across the country. All that is to say: the formation of teachers matters pretty dramatically.

When I interview teachers, I’m not terribly concerned with whether the state says they have the qualifications to teach. I work in private education specifically because I don’t think the state knows what to teach or how to educate children. The state’s concept of education was formed by Dewey. Instead, the state or secular university endorsement is often more of a liability than an asset as I’m looking through resumes. While I have known some teachers who flourish in a faithfully Catholic educational context, that is despite their teacher training, more than because of it.

What about Catholic Universities?

In America, we can’t expect to hire candidates out of Pontifical Universities with Pontifical degrees (though there are a few in the U.S.); and even if we could, those universities aren’t always educating faithfully either. We also cannot depend on secular universities to form our future teachers. Instead, we have the Cardinal Newman Society as a helpful guide to which American universities and colleges are giving their students authentic Catholic formation. However, even Newman Guide recommended colleges and universities are not all committed to the Catholic liberal arts tradition of education. While they don’t sacrifice the faith in terms of orthodoxy or campus culture, sometimes they still form their Education majors for modern, progressive education.

The question is not even about whether secular teaching credentials, certifications, and degrees are of sufficient quality. While they vary in quality, the problem is that there is a difference in kind between the education for which such teachers were formed and the Catholic tradition of liberal arts education. Their goals are different. Their metrics for success are different. That means that strategies, techniques, and much more will be different. It is true that in some cases the differences are only subtle, and it is true that there is overlap. However, the foundational differences in questions like what is education and what is the human person that exists underneath these concepts of teaching will change both major and minor decisions of how and what to teach as well as how to run a school or a homeschool.

So, what’s left?

Blessedly, there does exist a selection of excellent and faithful opportunities out there for Catholics to be formed in the uniquely Catholic tradition of education:

• The Institute of Catholic Liberal Education has a teacher certification that is actually faithful to the Catholic tradition of education. It is growing rapidly, and I fully expect (and hope) that Catholic dioceses will someday start requiring this or similar certifications.

• [EDIT: My friend Thomas Jay pointed out an egregious omission on LinkedIn: I can’t believe I missed Memoria Press and Memoria College in my original posting! They have a teacher certification program that is not explicitly Catholic but is definitely mission aligned with the Catholic tradition of education. Martin Cothran (one of the primary architects of the program) is a Catholic faithful to this tradition. Memoria College also has a wonderful M.A. in the Great Books.]

• Thomas Carroll out of the Archdiocese of Boston started the Thomas More Teaching Fellowship as part of a larger effort called the Catholic Talent Project. They are using an apprenticeship model following a teaching boot-camp that seems to me to be the model that more schools and dioceses ought to pursue.

• Franciscan University of Steubenville has an MA in Catholic Studies, which would mean much more to me than their degrees in education.

• Belmont Abbey has a Master of Arts in Classical and Liberal Education.

• Benedictine College has a Master of Arts in Classical Education.

• The University of Dallas has an exciting MA in Humanities with a concentration in Classical Education.

• The Augustine Institute has a Master of Arts in Catholic Education with some of the best minds in this field behind it. Drs. Andrew Seeley and Jeffrey Lehman—professors at the Augustine Institute—are brilliant and important thinkers in this movement of renewal. The rest of the faculty there is world-class as well.

• Christendom College offers a Master of Education degree and—as far as I can tell—the only faithful, Catholic Education Doctorate (Ed.D.) in existence. If I ever went on to get a terminal degree, I think it would be Christendom’s Ed.D. I’ve spoken to Dr. Jon Kirwan, who is heading it up, and would love to do that someday if providence so ordains.

If applicants to work with me had any of these credentials, I would be pretty excited to get them on board. Many of these degree and certification paths are quite new, but they uphold and resurrect a long-forgotten tradition of education. While the above listing isn’t exhaustive, it isn’t far off either.

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Thank you for being here and supporting CoCrucified! This movement of renewal is growing rapidly. Even for those who teach or want to teach and cannot immediately pursue one of these avenues of formal education, there is no shortage of helpful material online, on podcasts, and in excellent books. In fact, a project I’d like to work on (and have informally started) is a collection of texts, articles, and podcasts that could easily supply for independent-study teacher formation, faculty-wide professional development, and new teacher training in school contexts. I plan to release that here on CoCrucified in installments for our paid subscribers.

The future for the renewal of Catholic education is probably not reducible to getting an ecclesiastical degree in teaching. Rather, it is communities of devoted and intelligent Catholics tethered to the tradition and forming one another for this mission.

And now, for this week’s article:

A dear friend recently asked me, what is Classical Education? This is someone who has seen the healthy culture and impressive fruits of the classical academy in which I serve, so I think a related question that exists underneath it is how do we convince more people to choose and support classical education? I’ve written a number of articles answering the former question in different ways. See any of these linked articles for a sampling:

As to the latter, it is a difficult subject. Perhaps by understanding the question better, we can begin to answer it. David Denton, from the magnificent Arcadia Education, recently posted the following to LinkedIn:

I wonder and marvel at the inclination to try to do classical education without calling it “classical.” It is a perspective I struggle to understand. The opposite makes more sense. There are schools out there that want to use “classical” and similar terms in their branding, but when you open the hood, it’s just a typical modern, progressive approach to education. I’ve seen that before and I understand it because classical education is sweeping the nation, so there’s a little money to be made.

But to brand classical education as something other than what it is… this is foreign to me. Different audiences and demographics react to “classical” education differently, and foreign as it may be to someone like me, there is no shortage of hesitancy, lack of understanding, and outright hostility toward this kind of education. Some view it as archaic and out-dated. Others view it as “impractical” in a pejorative sense. Still others view it as elitist. Whatever the negative reaction, my own reflection has led me to think that it comes from one of the following places, each of which is often interrelated to the others.

Archaic and Out-Dated

This allegation comes from a the tendency to think that as a default change is good. It sounds a lot like President Barak Obama’s original campaign: “Hope and Change.” Hope for what? Change from what to what? It doesn’t matter. For those in this mindset, history moves progressively, which means that new is always (or at least reliably) better than old.

If this progressive outlook were true, then retreating to the way education has always been done in the west until the last century or so certainly does seem like a silly thing to do. I wouldn’t trade in my car for a horse and buggy, so they don’t want to trade in their modern, progressive college and career readiness for old books, virtue ethics, and hand-written essays.

This mindset fails to account for ends. It sees movement, change, and updating as intrinsically progressive without a specific account of what it is that lies ahead, or sometimes with the intended goal of shooting for the wrong target. Sure, progress toward good ends is good. That much we can agree upon. From this perspective, the best question for consideration is to what ends are we progressing? If we can answer that question, then we’re getting somewhere.

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It is Impractical

Here, we get to some deeper substance. The mindset that uses “impractical” as a pejorative for classical education reveals their ends. College and career readiness (the typically presumed ends of education) are fine so far as they go. The aim is a little low for my taste. I’ve written before on finding the mean between idealism and utilitarianism in Catholic education, so I won’t rehearse those ideas here too much. Suffice it to say, the mindset that aims for utilitarianism will not find classical education attractive.

The mindset that makes education primarily about preparing students for the practical concerns of life often leads to a maximalist invitation of technology into the classroom (one-to-one laptops in every classroom, etc.). That experiment has been tried. It has been a catastrophic failure. For many of the salient details on just how certainly and terribly technology in the classroom fails, I can’t recommend highly enough Jared Cooney Horvath’s excellent analysis over at AfterBabel:

After Babel

The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

Introduction from Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch…

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2 years ago · 415 likes · 135 comments · Jared Cooney Horvath

A second, and perhaps more relevant problem with college and career readiness as the goal is the dynamic movement of the target. More than ever in history, we cannot reliably predict what the job market looks like in five to ten years. AI is growing exponentially in its perceived ability to replace human workers in many industries. Already, if you’re learning to code, it seems like the machines are about to take your future job. Of course, I say “perceived ability” because AI will, no doubt, soon be used in the place of human teachers. Regardless of whatever progress and abilities this technology develops, that seems to miss the mark of what teaching is.

The third problem is the statement it makes about human dignity. Every time someone suggests something about education they are simultaneously making a statement about what they think the human person is. If the highest goal of education is a career, then human beings are nothing more than cogs in the economic machine, and this I must strongly reject as a Catholic (and as a human).

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Classical Education is Elitist

This final critique of classical education is at once both the most serious and the most perplexingly misguided. This critique takes a few different forms, so I’ll briefly treat as many as I can.

First, elitist can mean that classical educators think classical education is the best kind. I would both admit that this is true, and point out that it is entirely meaningless. STEM educators focus on the STEM disciplines because they think that’s best. Every educator educates in the way they think is best, to the neglect of other forms.

Second, elitist can be in reference to classical education’s typical focus on western civilization and Christianity as good, and relative neglect of other cultures. Elitist here means that we don’t value certain kinds of cultural diversity for the sake of diversity. Some cultures get left out. In fact, we may even disparage other cultures as in some way contrary to truth, goodness, or beauty. I certainly do that when I claim that China’s one-child-policy is an evil policy.

This critique amounts to: making qualitative truth claims about cultures makes a person elitist. Catholics are obliged to maintain that other religions are false, yet I’ve heard this critique from Catholics. It seems to be self-contradictory. Even for non-Catholics, claiming the superiority of diverse multiculturalism over a particular culture (like western civilization) seems to break the very founding rule of tolerant multiculturalism.

Third, elitist can simply mean that this form of education engenders the vice of pride. Critics might claim that educating in this way makes students think of themselves as superior to others. This critique is the most serious of all because if it is true, then I am ready to abandon ship.

However, my experience has been the opposite. Catching up on the education I’ve missed has been a constant source of humility for me, personally. You’ll know a tree by its fruits, and that has been my experience of my graduates as well. Through this very humanizing education, they grow in humility, generosity, kindness, affability, and most importantly, charity. They’re still men and women, surely flawed and constantly developing in holiness, but classical education offers them the human tools available for growth in these virtues. It also offers them the humble realization that they need divine help in order to progress, especially in charity.

Returning to our opening question, what is classical education? It is quite simply “men transmitting manhood to men” (C. S. Lewis, Abolition of Man). We are trying to make our sons and daughters more human. We operate under the fundamental belief that slavery to ignorance, vice, and sin stifles important parts of our humanity. What it means to be fully human is to be virtuous. It is to model our lives after the one man who was also God. Ultimately, it is to be divinized by him, to be more God-like:

Parents discerning high school for their children should (among other things) sit in classes and have conversations with teachers. They should be sure that they’re not just willing, but excited to place their most valuable possession—the eternal soul of their child—in the hands of professional, knowledgable, well-rounded, and faithful men and women.

At my Academy, here are some quotes from parents about specific faculty members:

• “[Redacted] is exactly the kind of man I want (indirectly) teaching my future man what it is to be a man.”

• “[Redacted] inspires virtue in all his/her interactions.”

• “The depth of [redacted]’s spirituality is so evident in what s/he does. We are grateful that s/he discusses the faith in all subjects.”

• “We think having the young men see his example is imperative for the growth of the male students into young men. And we find his example for the young ladies to see virtuous masculinity.”

• “[Redacted] is a very talented teacher who genuinely sees the good in every person and enthusiastically loves his/her subjects.”

• “I won’t be surprised (from heaven) when [redacted] is canonized by the Church.”

These are the marks of spectacular faculty. These are the kinds of people that school leaders ought to hire and to whom parents are excited to entrust their greatest treasures.

Working in classical, Catholic education is not for the faint of heart. It is overwhelming, difficult, tiring, and demanding. Yet, it is some of the most spiritually rewarding work a Catholic can do. What follows is my profile of what it takes to be an excellent teacher.

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The greatest teachers choose the teaching vocation because they love the Lord, they love teenagers enough to call them higher than the world calls them, and they love the intellectual life.

Excellent teachers enjoy and contribute to the social, intellectual, and spiritual culture of a faculty of friends; but the excellent teacher is also a competent professional who takes initiative, maintains high standards, and meets deadlines.

The excellent teacher speaks well, listens to his students, and sees his students with a loving gaze. She laughs and sings with her students. Great teachers never stop studying; they themselves remain always students, but the best teachers also know their discipline well enough to explain it excellently. They know their disciplines deeply enough to ask the most illuminating questions. Teaching is an adventure, so great teachers also explore God’s creation with their students. The excellent teacher is also a role-model, an exemplar of the theological, moral, and intellectual virtues.

At the secondary level, the greatest of teachers aren’t often narrow specialists in one field. Typically they have an academic expertise or two, and coach a team, volunteer in parish youth ministry or OCIA, and have some academic and non-academic hobbies. Such teachers are often generalists, experts in humanity and holiness.

Most crucially: teachers are faithful and devout, and they burn intensely with the desire to share the Sacred Heart of Jesus with their students. They put Christ at the heart of everything and prioritize school mission above all else. Teaching in a Catholic environment is an art more than a science. It is the art of making well-rounded, wise, and virtuous students. It is the art of making—and ourselves becoming—Saints. What a joyful art! What a beautiful vocation!

An art or craft (Gk, τέχνη, techne) is the application of reason and intellect in making. Teaching is an art. In teaching, we’re making Saints, Scholars, and Servants. Excellent teachers refine that art continually by meditating on the most essential truths and practices for academic success across disciplines, teaching styles, and the unique gifts that each of them bring to their work. We should anticipate that developing our craft will remain a work in progress for our whole lives; and for that reason, the greatest teachers remain forever students. They are students of teaching. They are students of western civilization. They are students of the greatest teacher, Jesus Christ.

In the beginning was the Word…

St. John’s gospel opens with these words as a literary allusion to Genesis, as a complex metaphysics of creation, and as essential insight into the divine nature and man’s being made “in the image and likeness of God.” That words can carry such depth of meaning and such intimate encounter with what is real has long been a primary foundation of Catholic doctrine. St. Augustine wrote eloquently about words as external signs of realities in the soul (ideas) and in the world (things). St. John’s prologue offers the Word as a sign proceeding from the Father, but which has the totality of the divine nature such that John can say that “the Word was God.”

Stratford Caldecott offers the liberal arts of the trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric) as the primary vehicle of formation for Catholics in words, establishing a coherence between signs and the things signified. One prominent feature in Caldecott’s theology of education is that the trivium bears a special resemblance to the Holy Trinity. It is the liberal arts of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric that forms a man to reproduce reality in his soul, including the reality of the God-head. The coherence of the soul with reality evokes the classical understanding of truth, which Jesus claims makes us free (John 8) and with which Jesus identifies himself (John 14).

The high stakes of words, meaning, and truth becomes a tension point in human relationships. We argue over semantics, definitions, pronouns, and other words precisely because words matter. Beyond just their coherence with reality, they also have a psychogogical (soul-leading) effect, they can lead souls this way or that. As much as we want to dismiss such debates for the sake of superficial political peace, a truly Catholic approach to human formation and education has always included rigorous training in the liberal arts of the word.

That word “liberal” is one pregnant with meaning and a mine-field of controversy. Contemporary Americans typically hear “liberal” as a synonym of “democrat” and antonym of “conservative” or “republican” in secular politics. Yet there is a range of depth to this term that serves to help us both in the pursuit of noble goods and in traversing the minefield carefully.

Liberality and Freedom

To be liberal is to be virtuous, that is to say: liberality is a virtue. Contemporary American English has ceased using liberal in this way, but its original meaning was in reference to the virtue of generosity, i.e., to be free with one’s money and spending. The liberal man gives money to the right persons, in the right way, and with pleasure. Liberality is classically contrasted with extravagance (spending and giving money too freely) and miserliness (the Scrooge syndrome). Etymologically, “liberal” comes from a term that denotes freedom, and in this usage, liberality is freedom from the slavery that is love of money.

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A second, and more common, way in which we might see this term used is in the sense of “liberty” as a synonym of freedom. Here, the etymological link is far more clear. The Statue of Liberty is a symbol of American freedom. The Declaration of Independence famously promotes “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This concept of liberty our nation’s founders inherited from the enlightenment thinker, John Locke. Locke described it this way:

THE natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule. The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact, according to the trust put in it. … freedom of men under government is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man: as freedom of nature is, to be under no other restraint but the law of nature.1

In Locke’s conception, liberty seems to be the ability to make one’s own choices without the tyrannical control of an outside agent (e.g., a king). He allows for government to limit freedom to a certain extent, but even then, it is by the consent of the governed. The similarity between Locke’s and the typical American’s concept of freedom ought to be apparent. Freedom is doing whatever I want without external constraint. Therefore freedom must be limited by laws.

American freedom could be easily contrasted with a Catholic concept of freedom. Because American and Lockean concepts of liberty are limited to the absence of external constraint, they fit well with what Pope St. John Paul II calls “an illusory freedom.”2 Without truth, we don’t have freedom, but only the illusion of it. Cardinal Ratzinger, on the eve of his election to the papacy put it this way, “We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.”3

For Catholics, however, freedom and truth are intertwined. Possession of truth increases freedom by directing our actions to excellence. We aren’t free to do whatever. We are free to do good. Put simply, Catholics believe in a freedom for excellence and virtue, and not in an indifferent freedom of choices. This leads Catholics to believe something that seems contradictory to many Americans: that laws and rules actually expand and promote freedom rather than merely limit it.

Here lies the key to understanding why certain studies and kinds of education are referred to as “liberal.” The “liberal arts” are the arts of true liberty. By uniting the soul with truth and giving it access to what is real, these arts liberate the human soul. Likewise, “liberal education” is one that focuses on the classical liberal arts over and above formation for employment.

Liberal-ism

Liberal is also a term that we apply to politics in opposition to conservative. If liberality and the liberal arts serve to increase freedom by virtuously living in union with truth, liberalism presents itself as the quintessentially opposite ideological commitment. It also bears an important resemblance to the American misconception of liberty. A tight technical definition of liberalism is elusive, but John Henry Newman offers important insights.

Cardinal Newman is our newest Doctor of the Church and co-patron of education alongside St. Thomas Aquinas. Among his important contributions to Theology (on Catholic education and the development of doctrine), Newman was also a first-rate philosopher. Like Thomas Aquinas, Newman promoted Aristotelian ways of thinking, including intellectual virtues as habits that unite the soul with reality as it truly is.

For an in-depth account of liberalism according to Newman, I can’t highly enough recommend Dr. Joshua Hochschild’s magnificent lecture on the subject. In short, though, liberalism is “a false liberty of thought.”4 It rejects authoritative dogma, reduces religious conviction to sentimentality, and on that basis promotes tolerance of religions indiscriminately, making faith a private affair. It is not dissimilar from what Pope St. Pius X calls “modernism” in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907). This sort of freedom is necessarily severed from truth, and even the possibility of making truth claims.

Newman’s liberalism and Pius X’s modernism bear an extraordinary resemblance to Lockean and American concepts of liberty. Truth and freedom are disconnected, making choice an end in itself. Contrast this with the words of our Lord:

Patterns of good behavior (“continue in my word”) makes a person to “know the truth” which is the basis for freedom. Jesus can say this because his own concept of freedom is wider than the Lockean absence of external constraint. Human nature contains many interior constraints which can enslave just as well as tyrannical governments. These include ignorance, concupiscence, and more. Virtuous behavior, coherence of the mind with reality, and union with the will of God produce true freedom for excellence.

Dogmas do not constrain our intellectual freedom, they open wide the door to it. Truth doesn’t limit us, it sets us free. Liberal education—by this I mean classical Catholic education—is the sort of education that offers freedom. Training in the liberal arts empowers students to access the truth and free themselves for true discipleship. It is the Catholic mission of education to offer children union with the Word, in part by union with the word in Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. It isn’t just one model of education among many for us to pick and choose from indiscriminately or as the market determines, this vision is truly what it means to educate.

In such an environment, there are many who experience a temptation to focus exclusively on making sure that they’ve got the essentials covered. I know in my locale of North Idaho, there are many who are eager to chart a path not unlike one offered recently on Twitter/X. Here it is:

The purpose here is to efficiently game the system for the sake of minimal money spent on maximum earning potential later. As far as that goal goes, it seems like a fair plan. It’s hard to fault anyone for wanting to avoid the pitfalls of most (public and private) high schools and colleges. The stakes are high, and I suppose I’d share many concerns that she would offer. I won’t critique this X user’s plan exactly, because depending on where you’re located, what educational options are available to you, and your children’s aptitude and goals, something like it may indeed be the best plan for your child. Further, this person is doing great work to promote phonics in early childhood reading, something I love to see.

However, I would like to offer the rationale from the Catholic perspective for at least pursuing a more classical liberal arts high school model, especially in a community life imbued with the Catholic faith.

Founded on a Christian Anthropology

Archbishop Michael Miller, in collecting the Catholic Church’s teachings on education, rightfully warned against a vision of education that is reducible to “the learning of various skills and competencies designed to fill the echelons of business and industry.” The reason why is important: Catholic education is meant to be “founded on a Christian anthropology.” I’ve written before justifying practical and career-related elements in Catholic education, so I won’t repeat those justifications here. If we over-prioritize them, though, we risk reducing our children to mere cogs in the machine.

The question of what to include in a child’s education is a question of philosophical and theological anthropology. That is: the study of human nature (anthropos = human) from the perspective of both reason (philosophy) and faith (theology). Every time someone suggests something about education (which I do a lot here at CoCrucified) they are simultaneously making a statement about what they think the human person is. Education and anthropology are that inextricably connected.

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Most of the time, the connection between any particular proposal about education and the anthropology it suggests or depends upon is implicit. Whether I agree with the proposal or not, I often wonder if the anthropological implications are clear to the speaker themselves.

Returning to that original tweet above, what is lost and what does that mean about the human person? If a person were to limit their child’s formation to this plan, the child would gain many great things, including:

• Skills in the three R’s: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic (and she’s right that your typical college student is severely deficient in these areas)

• The bare minimum English, Mathematics, History, and Science to meet state graduation requirements for high school (differs depending on the state) with as much dual enrollment as possible.

• Certifications in a trade, computer science, or similar fill in the blank.

• Some practical experience in entrepreneurship.

There’s no doubt about the general advantages this pathway offers. It would certainly be adequate or better if your child was designed to fill the echelons of business and industry. The Catholic Church teaches that your child was designed for more. If you’ll recall from the Baltimore Catechism, God made your child to know, love, and serve God in this life so as to love him forever in the next.

If that’s our basic anthropology, then what must it mean for education? An immediate hole that the Christian might fill in to the original proposal above would be religious instruction, and fair enough. In my view, religious instruction is wholly insufficient to hand the faith on to the next generation. And I think religious instruction is really important, so that’s saying something!

An added-on religion or theology class does not make a curriculum or education Catholic. The whole of the curriculum and educational program must be directed toward the properly religious end of the human person, and that is true for the approach to Literature and History, Science and Math, Athletics, and every other discipline too.1 It is of course true that none of these are Theology, but they all collect in the mind to form the student’s worldview upon which to build the faith. In a special way, too, Literature, History, and Athletics provide life-experience that contributes rather directly to the cultivation of virtue (intellectual, moral, and theological).

This point bears repeating: these disciplines collect in the mind to form the student’s worldview upon which to build the faith. Grace builds on nature. Theology presupposes reason. It is of paramount importance that the worldview we hand on to our children does not conflict with the faith we also desire to hand on to our children. With contradicting visions of God and the world, we will inadvertently force the child to choose between the two. Most persons would, in this position, accept their vision of reality and reject God (rationalism). Others would cast irrational doubt upon the natural human powers of knowledge, preferring a fundamentalist faith over the integration of human and divine knowledge (fideism).2 I personally know and love people on both extremes, the rationalistic and fideistic, and they are some of my most powerful reasons for desiring to work in Catholic education.

Animated by Communion and Community

Second, academic community life has its own effect upon the formation of a child into a saint. Another of Archbishop Michael Miller’s marks of Catholic education is that it is “animated by communion and community.” This principle follows from the previous. If the Catholic vision of the human person is correct, then Catholic education must form persons in community life, for community life.

Man was made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26). God is love (1 John 4:8). Love presupposes both lover and beloved. Man was made for community and communion. If we build our education on Catholic anthropology, then our education will include forming children in community with peers, younger children, and adults. They will serve their community and benefit from the wisdom of their elders. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, as the place where Catholic communion and community reaches its zenith will be woven into the fabric of this animating force.

This key component is conspicuously missing from the plan outlined above. In it, the child is an atomistic individual who must chart his own path through the world. His goal is too low; mere mechanistic participation in the economic machine and success in financial competition. But that is not all: his path is his own. It is woefully lonely. His path is charted with the presumption that no one needs him, and he likewise needs no one. This is not a human life.

His low goal of just providing for necessities is the goal of a brute beast. Many mammals have such a goal, but shared with one another—the pack, the herd, etc. His charted path to that goal, however, is akin to the solitude and self-sufficiency of a reptile. It is not suited to the dignity of the human person.

An authentic vision of Catholic education seeks to utilize both natural human reason and divine revelation as “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”3 To integrate our humanity with the humanity of those in our community and open it up to union with our creator and redeemer. This integration—both horizontal and vertical—of our modes of knowing and our community life is required for sanctity.

If it is our mission as Catholic educators to form saints, then we cannot seek out the bare minimum. We have to order each and every aspect to the end. At my Academy, and at excellent schools across the country: heaven is our mission.

Thank you for reading, and if you’re at all edified by these weekly articles, please consider sharing with others who might benefit from this kind of material. Again, truly, I’m grateful you’re here.

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It is true that one of the primary contributors to mission drift in Catholic schools in the 20th Century was the over-prioritization of athletics. We saw Catholic high schools and universities sacrifice the essentials of their Catholic missions for higher and higher excellence in athletic competition. I know personally of Catholic high schools that prioritize graduating Division 1 athletes over future priests and religious. Indeed, they boast many dozens of college athletes, but silently zero priests or religious in 60+ years.

In recovering what was lost, the mission of Catholic educators requires that we preserve the proverbial babies as we drain the bathwater. This raises the question:

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Body and Soul

I believe it is an important consideration, and to the extent that we neglect it, we do so to our detriment. Our tradition of education was formed by the Ancient Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle, the former of whom argued that the ideal education is gymnastics for the body and music for the soul. Music, to Plato, was anything inspired by the nine muses, which includes much of the academic curriculum (more on this another day). Gymnasium was the subjection of the body to the mind. It included the whole of physical education. In Ancient Greece, that included activities such as,

• wrestling and other combat training,

• running,

• physical conditioning, and

• strength training.

It isn’t reducible to P.E., though. Plato’s conception of gymnastics trained the body for physical excellence. It played a special role in building what he called the thumos (θυμός), or spiritedness. This is where Plato would locate man’s competitiveness. He argued that it was the spiritedness which enabled man to subject his lower, bodily desires to his rational intellect. Indeed, this is a constant refrain in the west, and is itself a crucial aspect of cultivating virtue.

This tripartite view of human nature (intellect, spiritedness, body) is so fundamental, that C. S. Lewis articulated in the 1940s how our education systems have been failing us specifically by neglecting the thumotic, spirited element in man:

The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of [modern education] is to produce what may be called Men without Chests (The Abolition of Man, 24-25).

The first and foundational benefit of athletics (to this we could add P.E. class) for the mission of Catholic education is to unify each student in an integrated whole—to unify head and chest. We form their intellects in the classroom. They should also build the ability to subject their bodies to their intellects, and this is done on the football field and the volleyball court.

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Communion and Community

Dr. Santiago Schnell, who serves as Provost in an Ivy League university, recently offered EWTN some insight into how his Catholicism animates his vision for the future of higher education and the Ivies specifically. The full interview is illuminative, but between 13:45 and 19:31, Dr. Schnell integrates athletics into the vision seamlessly.

He notes that an important, but too often neglected aspect of an academic institution is friendship, a sharing in the life of another. Anyone who places virtue and human flourishing at the center of education’s purpose must agree with this. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—an overview of the good life and what it requires—devotes two out of ten chapters to the notion of friendship. Living in friendship and community is essential to the virtuous life. From a Catholic standpoint, sanctity and life in heaven is nothing more than the ultimate friendship.

God’s invitation of salvation is one in which he is offering to share his life, the inner life of the trinity, with each of us. The Trinity is a communion of interpersonal knowledge that justifies our belief that God is love (1 John 4:8). It is this life of love begotten by knowledge that the saints in heaven enjoy for all eternity. It is the ultimate fulfillment of human life. This is the purpose of a Catholic education.

Dr. Schnell tells us that athletics become a mirror of this life of love. Academics cultivate a sense of awe and mystery, opening up the heart to beauty. Exploring our academics in this way together results in a deep kind of friendship. That friendship is expressed by play. For Dr. Schnell, sports aren’t merely entertainment, but they are a principle of unity among friends. He presents the friendship as rooted in the pursuit of truth and flowering in athletics, but the reverse can be just as helpful to train the hearts of young people.

Fr. James Schall, S.J. went even further. He argued in Another Sort of Learning (Ignatius Press, 1988) that athletic competition is the among the closest that the average person will get in this life to the kind of enjoyment of contemplation that we will have in heaven. He says,

I want to suggest rather that the closest the average man ever gets to contemplation in the Greek sense is watching a good, significant sporting event, be it the sixth game o f the World Series, the European Cup soccer finals, the center court at Wimbledon, or the county championships of his daughter’s volley ball team.

These games say something important about human nature, and they unite us in community together. There’s a relationship between the joy of play and the joy of heaven.

The importance of the communion that athletics can foster can hardly be overstated. Archbishop Michael J. Miller collected the Church’s teachings on education and distilled them into five essential marks, the third mark of a Catholic school is that it is animated by communion and community. Athletics play an important role in forming that community.

Formation in Virtue

Formation in the moral, intellectual, and theological virtues is the backbone of any classical or Catholic education worth the name. Sports constitute a wonderful analogy for the formation of virtue. Athletes practice highly specialized movements repeatedly until they can perform them under extreme pressure with ease and little thought. They condition their bodies to reach great heights of physical prowess. Similarly, resisting sin and doing good requires practice and endurance.

Take the virtue of generosity, for example. Generosity is not reducible to any individual act of generosity any more than shooting a basket can be reduced to haphazardly lobbing a basketball such that it just so happens to fall into the hoop. The generous man repeatedly gives alms as a habit, and he enjoys it. That way, when the going gets tough, the generous man will still give. The basketball player practices his shot hundreds and hundreds of times so that when there are 3.5 seconds on the clock and two opponents guarding him, he can still make the game-winning basket.

Another wonderful example is the passion of anger. On the one hand, Jesus tells us in his Sermon on the Mount not to be angry. On the other, he seemed pretty incensed when he drove the money changers out of the temple with a whip. At my academy, our football coach trains young men to channel a “controlled rage” in order to perform on the field. He is training their platonic thumos, their spiritedness. He is building up their chest. Anger is destructive if uncontrolled. But if we do not get angry at injustice, we may suffer from the coolness of sloth.

Within the Christian tradition, the analogous link between sports and virtue becomes spiritual. St. Paul says,

Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air; but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9:24-27)

Just as we shoot for victory in basketball, or run to win in track, or fight to beat our opponent in martial arts, so too should we live the Christian life fully. This is also the spirit in which we should train our students: don’t do things half-way. Pommel your body and subdue it. The point isn’t for state or national championships. As St. Paul tells us, those will perish. The point is to win the imperishable trophy of perfect, eternal union with God.

We must guard against our human weakness as we weigh the goods available to us. It should go without saying that athletics ought not distract from the mission. Catholic education has fallen into that temptation in the last century. But if we allow fear to cause us to neglect athletics and produce graduates with big heads and no chest, it is to our peril and our students’ peril.

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One feature that has caused a number of intense conversations and debates is that of educational standards.1 After a friend gave me an apologia for the use of modern educational standards (a concept of which I had heard, but with which I was not intimately familiar at the time). This friend noted that there are problems with Common Core Standards, but that a school needs to have clearly articulated, quantifiable educational standards in order to teach well. The necessity of modern educational standards is a common opinion among faculty in private schools, even many classical schools.

I’ve come to believe that “standard” is a confusing term. It comes to us English speakers originally as a reference to flags and military banners which stand fast, or firm in the ground as a rallying point for the soldiers and as a symbol of hope. Think of the American national anthem, how it describes the light of explosions in the dark of battle illuminating the American standard:

It offers hope of victory to battle-stricken soldiers, and a reminder of those for whom they endure the evils of war. St. Joan of Arc famously preferred the banner to the sword, and carried one that embodied and proclaimed her bold trust in Jesus.

On the other hand, the modern educational “standard” has come to refer to mathematically calculable abstractions that dictate highly specific skills and facts for students to learn. They are a primary vehicle of standardization in teaching and curriculum. Their intended goals include school accountability and quality assurance in teaching and learning. Certainly, these goals are noble, but we should be cautious about what we might be sacrificing as we examine their pursuit.

After exploring different lists of standards, and reflecting on the tradition of the classical liberal arts and Catholic education, the differences in educational philosophies seems to be traceable to differences of anthropology, the concept of what the human person is. In short, the quantitative measure of academic standards is intended to lift a weight it cannot bear, the human soul. As a result, the quantitative measure of teaching and learning will always be insufficient (but not unnecessary) in assessing student achievement and teacher effectiveness.

Mathematizing Human Flourishing

In their comprehensive introduction to classroom teaching, Harry and Rosemary Wong state “Standards state what students are to accomplish, not what to teach or how to teach it.”2 While they don’t argue explicitly for standards, they speak to teachers who are bound to follow such impersonal guides in their profession. On the surface, these standards seem like an important part of the educational equation: standards + pedagogy + curriculum = teaching.

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Wong’s description of standards as measurable accomplishments imply that there exists a set number of quantifiable skills and facts that suffice for a child’s education. This is simply not true. The purpose of education does not find its terminus in the regurgitation of information or the performance of practical tasks. Such is the concept of modern, progressive, utilitarian education: giving kids facts and skills of practical use. It betrays a problematic conception of the human person, i.e., that children are essentially factory machines or computers that must be programed for a uniform and particular output.

Catholic education is a different thing. Catholic educations seeks to impart a vision, and to enlarge the soul. Consider G.K. Chesterton’s commentary on education:

The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions. …

Anyhow, that is what is the matter with [modern] Education; that it narrows the mind; whereas the whole object of education is to broaden the mind and especially to broaden it so as to enable it to criticize and condemn such narrowness. Everybody ought to learn first a general view of the history of man, of the nature of man, and (as I, for one, should add) of the nature of God. This may enable him to consider the rights and wrongs of slavery in a slave community, of cannibalism in a cannibal community, or of commerce in a commercial community.3

Chesterton’s reflection here is monumental. Catholics ought not train students merely for success in the modern world. We shouldn’t program children for narrow tasks, skills, or professions. In the words of Pope St. John Paul II, we ought to “transmit a coherent, comprehensive vision of life, in the conviction that the truths contained in that vision liberate students in the most profound meaning of human freedom.”4 Aristotle offers a similar vision of education: “Hence we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth… so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; this is the right education.”5

Conversely, the educator that seeks to measure and count as the primary vehicle of assessing the education considers—we hope unconsciously—the student to be an instrument to be tuned or a mechanistic system to be programmed. In taking this view of education, we have dehumanized the child. C. S. Lewis makes this clear in his famous essay on education The Abolition of Man. There he states,

Now I take it that when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience, we reduce it to the level of ‘Nature’ in the sense that we suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity. This repression of elements in what would otherwise be our total reaction to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful: something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room.6

Note that we need only “ignore” the child’s final cause to dehumanize. As Catholic schools adopt state standards, they don’t deny that the child is destined to love God forever, they merely ignore that truth so as to program the meat computer between the child’s ears.

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What Chesterton refers to as “abstract and eternal standards” are not quantifiable. Nor is Aristotle’s “delight” in delightful things and “pain” toward painful things. Whether a child can meet measurable, quantifiable standards does not sufficiently tell us whether the child has been educated, much less whether we have educated the child.

This is one reason why classical academies do not typically obsess over quantifiable metrics. When we reduce education to quantitative analysis and cold technique, we do damage to the souls of our students (and their teachers). This is what the Education Industry in the government and many private schools fails to understand. The problem with Common Core Standards is not the low standards; it isn’t the strange ways of doing math; it is the very mathematization of education.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Modern educational standards are, in a way, an expansion of Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives, developed in the 1950s. Bloom’s Taxonomy is famous in its own right, usually seen as a paradigm shift (and accepted uncritically, as far as I can tell). It seems helpful, but it seeks to subject the student’s mind to exclusively quantifiable metrics. It presumes that the intellect can be divorced from the heart and the body. Bloom’s Taxonomy paved the way for reducing the quality of education to student performance on modern standardized tests. It would be dishonest to ignore the benefits and noble intentions of Bloom’s work, especially that such clear objectives:

• avoid subjective and ideological “learning” activities,

• drive observable growth, and

• promote a healthy “flow”—a state of active focus on a meaningful task7—in students.

Having briefly acknowledged the benefits, I can think of two important problems with Bloom, both of which result in training what C.S. Lewis called “men without chests.”8

First, Bloom’s Taxonomy is reductionistic of the human mind by imposing upon it a philosophy of naturalistic scientism. This reveals the reason for obsessing over objectivity and measurability. Bloom is straightforward about this in the forward to his text:

Most readers will have heard of the biological taxonomies which permit classification into such categories as [phylum], class, order, family, genus, species, variety. Biologists have found their taxonomy markedly helpful as a means of insuring accuracy of communication about their science and as a means of understanding the organization and interrelation of the various parts of the animal and plant world. You are reading about an attempt to build a taxonomy of educational objectives. It is intended to provide for classification of the goals of our educational system. It is expected to be of general help to all teachers, administrators, professional specialists, and research workers who deal with curricular and evaluation problems. It is especially intended to help them discuss these problems with greater precision.9

Imposing the philosophy of mathematized physical sciences upon the arts of human flourishing is precisely the problem of Friedrich Nietzsche in works like his On the Genealogy of Morals: namely, that the biological principle of evolution explains how humans came up with what he thought were primitive and illusory notions such as “good” and “evil.” Nietzsche’s moral nihilism results from scientism’s mathematization of the human and the spiritual.

No, Nietzsche and Bloom aren’t making the same argument, but—despite the fact that Bloom wrote and lived after Nietzsche—Bloom’s philosophy of the person leads necessarily to Nietzsche’s philosophy of morals. Put another way, they’re both making the same philosophical mistake.

Second, and as a result, Bloom’s taxonomy presumes a mythical neutrality (common in modern and contemporary social sciences) rather than holistically embracing traditional moral philosophy. The naturalistic scientism being applied to the activity of education reduces human reasoning to what is observable and testable under the scrutiny of modern physical science, which limits the causes of a thing to the efficient (i.e., cause and effect) and material (i.e., of what material is a thing composed) causes. It completely excises formal and final causality precisely because they are not quantifiable.

In reducing the child to a meat machine, Bloom’s Taxonomy also presumes the position of a scientist who studies a thing from outside and therefore (ostensibly, at least) can be objectively neutral in their study of the thing. If education were merely about training children in programable skills, perhaps Bloom could be useful. However, if a school is to be authentically Catholic, it must have as its end authentic human flourishing, moral and intellectual virtue, and the cultivation of wonder and wisdom. If a school is to be authentically Catholic, it must have as its end all these things as ordered to knowing, loving, and serving God.

With the benefits and fatal flaws of Bloom’s taxonomy and modern educational standards acknowledged, where do we go from here? Do we abandon measuring our goals? Do we abandon clear objectives? Conversely, do we abandon the ideals of classical education? Certainly not! We must commit to maintaining accountability as well as quality assurance without reducing education to quantifiable metrics.

For my part, I’m glad to see that there are some educational standards which address these issues. The Cardinal Newman Society offers Catholic Curriculum standards (which are very classical in nature) that avoid the mere mathematization of human knowledge and promote various kinds of integrated investigations into human nature, poetic knowledge, the liberating arts, and humane studies. Here, wonder, wisdom, and virtue are relevant. I grow as an educator whenever I seek to implement them in my classroom. In more than just this way, the Cardinal Newman Society has made itself a significant standard bearer, raising up beacons of hope for those who fight for the renewal of Catholic education.

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Classical liberal arts educators rightly point out that education has higher goals than the merely practical. They emphasize truths such as virtue is the true end of education. Yet, until very recently, this pitch hasn’t been an easy one for admissions and development representatives of such schools. Nearly all of the stakeholders, from donors and administrators to parents and students themselves consistently ask, “how will this education prepare students for the real world?” The question is a fair one, but the discussion is difficult.

Should Catholics pursue idealistic purity in education, only providing liberal arts, philosophy, and theology? Should they seek to emphasize more modern and practical studies so that their students can rise to the top echelons of the world and potentially make more dramatic impact for the Church? As much as the idealists are scoffed at, they raise important points that the more practically minded ought to heed. Yet, the notion of education for its own sake in neglect of the practical concerns of life is an untenable proposal, doomed to wither and die—even if it was the examined life.

As is typical in debates between extreme opposites, wisdom is somewhere in between. Catholic discourse is famous for finding resolutions in a “both/and” proposal rather than one that requires an “either/or.” This information alone doesn’t help us much, however. The real question lies in locating the balance, not in arguing for balance. I would submit that—like many such questions—our analysis might proceed according to the principle virtues requisite for excellence in making decisions of any major consequence.

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Prudence

Aristotle, that chief advocate of virtue as the mean between extremes, offers a few insights that might help Catholic educators to approach the mean in their own context. First, how to educate is a practical question. So, we can know that prudence is the operative virtue required in the decision-maker (parent, heads of schools, school boards, Diocesan superintendents, etc.). Aristotle tells us that the right answer is whatever the prudent man would do.

Standing at the gates of purgatory, having just emerged from the depths of hell, Dante Alighieri offers a crucial first step (literally). Mt. Purgatory’s entrance sits atop three stair steps, the first of which is important for us.

The lowest stair was marble white, so smooth

And polish’d, that therein my mirror’d form

Distinct I saw. (Dante, Purgatorio, Canto IX)

Prudence requires first that we can see ourselves clearly. We have to be able to see our imperfections and desires so that we can think clearly and rationally without undue influence. For Dante, that means taking a humble look at his own vices to purify them. For educators, that means recognizing where we might falter and succumb to temptation, whether to intellectual pride or utilitarianism. Indeed, these are the extremes in the question at hand.

Temperance

Second, we can observe certain features about the extremes themselves. Aristotle, when discussing temperance in his Nicomachean Ethics, notes that the middle point between gluttony and insensitivity is not perfectly in the middle of the two. Rather, our material and physical nature means that we tend to prefer pleasures. We’re generally more inclined to gluttony and lust than to eschew all pleasure. God made us this way because he wants us to understand goodness, and to be attracted by it.

Our fallen nature too often succumbs to the extremes of pleasure pursuits. So, temperance skews closer to the extreme of neglecting and rejecting pleasure than it does to enjoyment. Catholics should be very familiar with this concept because our tradition is very intentional about fasting. We have seasons of fasting (eating too little) in part because tending toward the extreme opposite of gluttony assists us in preserving right reason with respect to the pursuit of pleasure.

Analogously, because of the weight of practical concerns, our pedagogy and curriculum selection (classical? STEM? dead languages? uniform? etc.) should tend away from the utilitarian concerns. The extreme of utilitarianism, like gluttony, is more powerful than the extreme of idealistic purity. If we are to temper those good tendencies toward pursuit of monetary gain, comfortable living standards, and successful careers, the Catholic educator ought to give preference and pride of place to the ideals. Just as we fast to preserve temperance, so too should we emphasize and prioritize Latin, literature, philosophy, and theology. Those useless1 disciplines will help preserve our schools from slavery to the pursuit of money and comfort.

Still, this is insufficient as an answer.

Justice

Good Catholic education is expensive. The cost to educate a child (especially at the high school level, and especially to do so well) is enormously expensive, a fact usually reflected (to a certain degree) in tuition prices. Schools ought to take care that families should not also have to pay to make their child ready for the world. This, of course, follows from our third virtue: justice.

The graduate of an excellent educational program ought to be able to continue learning independently, hold a job, and pursue higher education. Such formation is due to the student. A merely esoteric intellectualism without due regard for the student’s ability to support a family is not worthy of the name “education.”

Contrary to the opinion of some ideological purists, career and practical training was not neglected in some of the best of educational centers in the Catholic tradition. Hugh of St. Victor discusses the liberal arts education of his day in his Didascalicon. There, he describes the Trivium and Quadrivium, the liberal arts which prepare the mind of higher order thinking, as well as the role of Philosophy and Theology. It is true that these disciplines merit and receive the greatest focus.

He also discusses what he calls the “mechanical arts” of fabric making, armament, commerce, agriculture, hunting, medicine, and theatrics. Certainly, these arts are not liberal. None are done for their own sake. They also aren’t the highest goals. What they are is necessary. The philosopher needs agriculture and hunting because he must eat. We don’t live in the medieval ages, so these arts may need some updating to be relevant. One could imagine entrepreneurship, STEM courses, or certain kinds of computer and technology class being among the necessities of modern life. Justice requires that we attempt to empower our students to pursue necessary things too, even if the idealist sees the perfect in enmity with the good.

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Courage

Most of this discussion is highly theoretical, but that’s because prudence takes into account the particular circumstances of a local situation. At my academy, I teach a liberal art (Rhetoric), a noble science (Theology), and something of a mechanical art for our contemporary time (Entrepreneurship). Of course, there will be many who are not attracted to classical education and all its useless classes. There will be some who demand college prep with urgent necessity. Others will focus on career readiness. A precious few will share my own defect in wanting to study nothing but theology. All such extremes will require courage to oppose. Someone will always be dissatisfied and disappointed.

The truly Catholic way of education will prudently consider what is best for the formation of the student as a saint. It will include avoiding the seemly glimmer of both the practical and the pure. It will provide ample return on investment for tuition paying families—that is, both a temporal and spiritual return. It will courageously pursue the good for students even when it finds its content and approach unpopular.