“If we don’t educate our children,” Fr Ronald Knox once warned, “someone else will. In our day, of course, the someone else is the State; and the State, we can be quite certain, will make a hash of it.”
Fr Knox’s hope was that the Church and the family would not ‘make a hash of it’. Most teachers today probably also hope that they are not turning out the moral and mental equivalents of a starchy sausage fry-up. Yet many of us who have passed through Catholic schooling may find that a comparison to a scrambled stovetop mess hits rather near the knuckle.
For Catholics who teach, not just teachers, but parents, school heads, administrators, priests, and even bishops, the New Year is an excellent time to consider how to avoid making a ‘hash of it’. It is, of course, the middle of the academic year, and if resolutions help make course corrections where needed, so much the better.
Another reason for doing so now, however, comes from an important but largely forgotten anniversary. It was on New Year’s Eve, 1929, that Pope Pius XI promulgated his great encyclical letter on Catholic education, Divini illius magistri. Little discussed these days, and omitted even from an otherwise admirable anthology on the Catholic educational tradition, Divini illius magistri may well be the most comprehensive yet succinct treatment of the question ever written.
It may be objected that ninety-six years, while a venerable age, is nonetheless a ragged sort of number as far as publication anniversaries go. It may further be argued that the letter’s centenary is still too far away to justify dusting it off. So let the soul-searching begin, if so it must, with a slightly smoother anniversary. Sixty years have passed since the publication of Vatican II’s Gravissimum educationis, the Council’s statement on education. Marking the occasion back in October, Pope Leo XIV exhorted Catholic educators to think teleologically, that is, to think about purposes:
"Raise your eyes. As God said to Abraham, 'Look toward heaven, and number the stars' (Gen. 15:15): know how to ask yourselves where you are going, and why."(Drawing New Maps of Hope, 11.2)
It is a refreshing exhortation to a sector more often noted for drift and vagueness of aims than for purposiveness. The interrogative key, moreover, is challenging. It takes some courage to stand alone with God, perhaps quite literally under the canopy of a starry night sky, and to ask: what am I doing? Why am I doing it?
Yet Leo’s call for teleology is terse. However salutary the other themes his letter highlights, it is not immediately clear how they help answer the next natural questions: am I headed in the right direction? And what is the right direction?
On those points, his nod to Gravissimum gives us rather more to work with. There we find that education is first the prerogative of parents; that it is to be grounded in local culture and national traditions; and that it is to be ordered both to the common good of human society and to the ultimate end of our existence, God, whom we are to worship (1–3).
That pithy text, however, is even shorter than Leo’s letter. If we want more, we need to follow the red thread further back, to an educational text which Gravissimum itself cites far more often than any other. And that takes us to 1929, to today’s ninety-sixth anniversary.
Pope Pius XI was a relentlessly teleological thinker. Like Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and, likely enough, the current pontiff, he saw natures and purposes everywhere. In Divini illius magistri, this ordering, and thus liberating, vision allows him to ask basic questions. What is the purpose of Christian education? What is the educative role of the family? What makes a school Catholic? What should a curriculum look like? What kind of ethos should a school cultivate? What kind of person is a good teacher? Who is our ideal graduate?
Simply posing those questions from time to time, alone, in staff meetings, or in parent teacher conferences, can work wonders. These questions cut through the stultifying jargon, bureaucratic waffle, infantilising kitsch, emotive fictions, and utilitarian credentialism which we have come to accept as normal in contemporary schooling. What are we doing?
But if Pius XI raises questions, he does so not merely for the asking. He has answers of his own, and these too he wants us to take seriously. Though this means grappling with a writer who did not think in tweets, and though the Vatican’s online versions suffer from an unmerciful lack of subheadings, grapple we should. What Pius has to say will reward the effort.
For instance, the pope reminds us that in order to know what education is for, we need some idea of what human beings are for. We are “created by God unto His image and likeness and destined for Him Who is infinite perfection”. The schoolroom implications are immediate: “education consists essentially in preparing man for what he must be and for what he must do here below, in order to reach the sublime end for which he was created.” Thus, “there can be no true education which is not wholly directed to man’s last end”, namely God.
A father and mother’s education of their children serves the same end. The children are theirs, but they are from God and, like their parents, ultimately for God. They are not the property of the State. While justice may at times demand state intervention, parents must resist unjust demands. The State’s own legitimate reasons for educating for temporal ends must not conflict with man’s ultimate purpose, as when it pollutes its schools with “filth” or “poison”. Claims of neutrality must be scrutinised vigilantly. For her part, the Church sees an educational mandate in the divine commission to proclaim the forgiveness of sin, our new life in Christ, and our eternal end in God.
A school will be Catholic, Pius argues, by keeping this mandate in view at all times and throughout the curriculum. Relegating Catholic formation to catechetical factoids in a religious studies class will not do. Pupils are formed by the literature we assign and by the questions we ask about it, by the way we teach history, by all the humane letters and especially Latin, sometimes neglected, but “wrongly, of course”. They are also formed by science and mathematics and music, as they are by habits in the classroom and on the playground. They are formed at play, in athletics and in the theatre. In all of this, he reminds us, our underlying philosophy makes all the difference.
This is clearest in pedagogy. Our teaching theories need to respect the reality of the human being, both our high vocation and our deep fall. Any educational ‘naturalism’ that denies man’s fallenness, his sluggishness in pursuing the good, and his proclivity to sin will simply fail. We need grace, and to make a home for it we need to promote habits that instil virtue while curbing those that foster vice. Gushy concern about hurt feelings does more harm than good, leaving a child warped for life.
State-promoted sexual education unsurprisingly earns special censure from Pius. Under the pretext of helping teenagers make good decisions, he says, it too often amounts to a mere “incitement to sin”. What is true of ‘health’ classes today was essentially apparent already in the 1920s. Be honest, says the pope.
What of teachers? Pius begins with the obvious, but alas too rare: the true teacher knows his subject inside and out, and he is able to teach it. As such, the teacher incarnates the forgotten etymology that took magister, or teacher, and gave us master. Yet he also has a pastoral eye, imparting discipline sternly but without brutality. He knows that his high office is all the weightier given the impressionable character of his young charges. This teacher takes responsibility and does what he does out of love for his pupils, for their families, for his nation, for Jesus Christ, and for the Church. This is genuine love, not one of its saccharine counterfeits.
Finally, in driving home the nature and purpose of education, Pius leaves us with a portrait of the ideal alumnus:
"The proper and immediate end of Christian education is to cooperate with divine grace in forming the true and complete Christian.
That is, the purpose is to form Christ Himself in those reborn through Baptism… For the true Christian must live a supernatural life in Christ, “Christ who is your life”, and display it in all his actions, 'so that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh.'" (94)
By using St Paul as he does here, Pius gives us an educational charter for a muscular Christian humanism. This is worlds away from the defeatist spirit in which a school with an institutionally Christian background, perhaps even some vestigial theism, in fact embraces relativism. That temptation, of course, is strong. It is what most states and many pushy parents want to find.
Resist it, Pius would urge. Yes, find the good in everything. But do so by seeking the near occasions of God’s grace. Teach so as to make the face of the God-Man visible in your disciplines and schools, in yourselves and in your pupils:
"For precisely this reason, Christian education takes in the whole aggregate of human life, physical and spiritual, intellectual and moral, individual, domestic and social, not with a view to reducing it in any way, but in order to elevate, regulate and perfect it, in accordance with the example and teaching of Christ." (95)
The Christocentric hope is that, besides achieving technical excellence in various fields, besides being able and inclined to think logically, speak clearly, and act nobly, the graduate will also be, and will want to be, a trustworthy disciple and bearer of Christ, even an ‘other Christ’, for life.
To interpolate, we are to hope that when our pupils leave school, they will go on to be, and to make manifest to the world, countless Christs: Christ the chemist, Christ the pilot, Christ the artist, Christ the doctor, Christ the soldier, Christ the builder, Christ the farmer, Christ the engineer, Christ the poet, Christ the vintner, Christ the programmer, Christ the statesman, Christ the priest or sister, Christ the father or mother. We are therefore meant to teach so as to remove any obstacles in our pupils’ minds and hearts that would prevent Christ from so manifestly dwelling in them.
"Hence the true Christian, the product of Christian education, is the person whose life is ordered beyond the natural world, who thinks, judges and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of the example and teaching of Christ." (96)
In Divini illius magistri, then, Pius XI gives us a comprehensive view of Catholic education. Its totalising character should not surprise us. The letter, after all, is from the same pope who established the ‘Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe’.
Now that may rattle twenty-first-century sensibilities. But before you recoil in horror at the prospect of a papal madrasa in which the correct answer to every question is ‘God’, permit a further thought or two.
First, the “consuming fire” that is the Christian God is not an obliterative one. His strange sovereignty respects the ends and natures of the creatures that He has made. A tree is not God, but a tree, and it lives, grows, and dies in a treeish sort of way. If we want to understand a tree, we need to attend to the tree. So with maths: the sum of 2 + 2 is not ‘Jesus’, but 4; the answer to 1 + 2 is not even ‘Trinity’, but the humble sum of 3. For all David sings from his heart, the cardiovascular system is a marvel that must be learned on terms other than those of the Psalter. The course and causes of the crisis of the late Roman Republic cannot be deduced from the New Testament, and yet are worthy of study. One needs some Christianity to understand Shakespeare, but one will not find Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet in the Bible.
This should all be obvious. It was to Pius XI. Each kind of thing, and the study of each kind of thing, has its own principles. He is thus not suggesting we deny any discipline its proper methods, or pervert its proximate ends by turning every lesson into catechism. His proclamation of Christ as king of the curriculum no more turns biology into theology than his proclamation of Christ as king of the universe turns a tree into God.
That said, Pius is suggesting that in some sense, by the creative Logos and by the life-giving Spirit, God really is in all things, holding them in existence. God, in other words, is to be found in twos and threes and trees and hearts, in Caesar and Pompey, in brief candles and happy daggers, regardless of whether we always see Him there, or whether, seeing Him, we point Him out. But it matters that the things of the world, of life and literature, of virtue and vice, of word and number, really are connected, and that they find their origin and end in God.
So yes, the undergirding and overarching order Pius lays out for us is a comprehensive one. But, far from obliterating its constituent parts, it gives us a framework for comprehending them both on their own terms and in view of a whole.
A truly Catholic education is imbued with this vision. Parents, clergy and school heads may find in it the tools and the courage they need to defend their rights while building healthy institutions and homes. In the bleak midwinter, teachers may find in it a framework for breathing life and meaning back into their lessons and even their pastoral care.
This New Year’s, then, let us take a Leonine moment or two with God out under a wintry sky. A little soul-searching, and some upward-bound questioning about what, how and why we teach, will do us good. And when we head indoors again, let us take Pius for a guide, too. A bit of ordered reflection on our part can make a world of difference in the lives of those in our care. It will be worth it. After all, they deserve much better than hash.
