Faith and reason, student welfare and a role for parents: Cardinal Newman’s vision of education was way ahead of its time
Aristotle praised the value of the golden mean: the perfect balance to be found between two competing extremes. At The Oratory School near Reading, where I work, we believe that our founder Blessed John Henry Newman’s ideal of a Catholic education represents just such a balance.
In a world in which the very concept of truth has been made increasingly subjective, a Catholic school, with its ethos firmly rooted in the Gospel message, provides an anchor – a secure base from which our students are able to grapple with and understand the world. For Newman, however, this should not be a blind faith that relies on doctrine by rote. Rather, he argues for a community that uses reason to inform its conscience (“The aboriginal vicar of Christ”, as he put it in a letter to the Duke of Norfolk).
