Abstract
If Catholic schools are to be distinctive, then much of this distinctiveness will rest upon their displaying an appreciation firstly, that the whole curriculum has a religious dimension, and, secondly, that all the disciplines, although autonomous, have a part to play in promoting the integral development of the whole person. One would need to add to such an appreciation a desire to integrate faith with both culture and life. This distinctiveness will also depend upon a shared world-view and a shared concept of the sort of person that education should be aiming to develop, with Christ being taken as the prime role model. No attempt to articulate a consistently thought through approach to education could avoid implying at least a view of the nature of persons and their place in the general order of things, including some ideas about what it is important for them to be like. As Philip May has pointed out, “behind every educational system, its aims, curricula, teaching methods and organization, lie assumptions about the nature of man and the purpose of life.”1 From a rather different perspective, Fred Inglis comments, “by implying a view of what to do with knowledge, the curriculum, like the culture, implies a picture of how to live and who to be.”2
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Notes for Chapter 5
Quoted by V. A. McClelland in Society in Conflict: The Value of Education, edited by Elizabeth Ashton and Brenda Watson, (Aspects of Education, Number 51, The University of Hull, 1994 ), p. 28.
Fred Inglis, The Management of Ignorance, Oxford, Blackwell, 1985, p. 47.
See Stanton Jones, ‘Recovering the Person’, in Agenda for Educational Change,edited by John Shortt and Trevor Cooling, Leicester, Apollos, 1997, especially pp. 110–115. Jones articulates an evangelical Christian analysis of the human person that closely matches the one I present here.
For a comparison of Islamic and Christian approaches to understanding personhood, aspects of the curriculum and the purpose of education, see Religion and Education, edited by Syed Ali Ashraf and Paul Hirst, Cambridge, The Islamic Academy, 1994, especially pp. 218–236.
A landmark study of these models is that by Avery Dulles, Models of the Church, Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 1974.
For a major reinterpretation of Catholic ecclesiology, critical of both neo-conservative and liberal Catholic approaches, see David Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church, Edinburgh, T & T Clark/Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1996.
See below, chapter seven.
John Henry Newman The Idea of a University, London, Longmans, Green & Co, 1912 (originally published 1852 ). See especially pp. xvi, 50–51, 70, 113, 137, 441.
Ibid., Discourses III, IV, VIII, I X.
Ibid., pp.471–6; 398.
Newman, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, London, Longmans, Green & Co, 1921, pp.64–68. “Ibid., pp.64–65.
Ibid., p.65. Cf. Newman, University Sermons, edited and introduced by D. M. MacKinnon and J. D. Holmes, London, SPCK, 1970, p. 18.
Newman, A Grammar of Assent, introduced by Nicholas Lash, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1979, p.331. (originally published 1870 )
Ibid., pp.9, 247.
Newman’s University Sermons, p.234.
For the relation between conversion and objectivity in our knowledge, see my two articles in Theology, ‘Subjectivity and Religious Understanding,’ November 1982, pp.410–417 and ’Lonergan, Conversion and Objectivity,’ September 1983, pp. 345–353.
Stephen Carter, The Culture of Disbelief, New York, Doubleday/Anchor, 1993; George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Carter, p.xv.
Carter, passim.
Marsden, op. cit., pp.20, 35, 84, 86. ‘Methodological atheism’ means acting (and theorizing) as if God does not exist, bracketing out the question of the truth of God’s existence and relying in one’s studies solely on data which can be verified empirically.
Ibid., pp.63–64. Such influence will not exert any predictably direct or uniform effect, for, as Marsden says with reference to Christianity, “influences vary with the type of Christianity, the type of individual, the field and sub-field of scholarship, and the types of traditions of interpretation currently available.” (p.70)
Ibid., p.63.
bid., p.64.
S/bid., pp.88, 90.
For some useful analyses of human nature from a theological perspective, see John Macquarrie, In Search of Humanity, London, SCM Press, 1982; Rene Latourelle, Man and His Problems in the Light of Jesus Christ, New York, Alba House, Society of St Paul, 1983; John Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person, Washington DC, Catholic University of America Press, 1996.
For example, by that most authoritative Catholic philosopher and theologian, Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae. However, the equally influential Christian theologian Augustine was much less confident about the power of human reason and freedom to withstand the urges of desire and the demands of a flawed will.
Edward Farley, Can church education be theological education?’ in Jeff Astley, Leslie Francis and Colin Crowder, Theological Perspectives on Christian Formation, Leominster, Gracewing, 1996, p. 38.
There have been and are, of course, some secular thinkers, for example, Hobbes in the seventeenth century, Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century, who held ‘lower’ views of human nature.
although in both of these cases it could be argued that within their secularism there is a residual element of a Judaeo-Christian mind-set.
Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 130.
bid., pp. 130, 131, 271.
John Redden and Francis Ryan, A Catholic Philosophy of Education, Milwaukee, The Bruce Publishing Company, 1956, p.vii.
Ibid., p.29.
bid., p.22.
John Crosby, op. cit., pp.41, 65.
See Pope Pius XI, On Christian Education of Youth (Divini Illius Magistri), in Selected Papal Encyclicals & Letters, vol. 1, 1896–1931, London, Catholic Truth Society, 1939, p. 29.
For an intimation that the sense of the eternal and the infinite are not merely brought to human lives (as foreign imports, as it were) through the medium of certain religious beliefs, but are rather already immanent within human experience, as revealed in an endless restlessness and questioning, a passion for ultimacy and a sense of the infinite, see Crosby, op. cit., pp. 161, 162, 164. Catholic liberation theologians (for example, Leonardo Boff or Gustavo Gutierrez,) might wish to ‘up-grade’ the importance of this-worldly concerns by comparison with some traditional emphases.
Redden and Ryan, op. cit., p.56.
London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1994, p.398.
Among others we could cite here: Colossians 3. 10, on having to put on a new nature; 2 Corinthians 3: 18 on being changed into God’s likeness; (cf Romans 8: 29); 2 Corinthians 5:17 on identification with Christ helping us to overcome our sinful nature and our self-destruction; 1 Corinthians 2:16 on having the mind of Christ; 2 Peter 1:4 on being sharers in the divine nature.
Matthew 16:15; Mark 8:29; Luke 9:20.
Michael Himes, ‘Catholicism as Integral Humanism: Christian Participation in Pluralistic Moral Education’, in The Challenge of Pluralism, edited by F. Clark Power and Daniel Lapsley, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1992, p. 123.
bid.
For a detailed analysis on this topic, see Joel Kupperman, Character, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991.
Joseph Dunne, “Philosophies of the Self and the Scope of Education”, in Papers of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Conference, Oxford, 1995, pp.170–180.
see particularly pp.171–4. 46lbid., p.174.
Nicholas Dent, The moral psychology of the virtues, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 12.
Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p.179; quotation from p.56.
Craig Dykstra, Vision and Character, New York, Paulist Press, 1981, p. 3.
St Paul, Romans 7:15, 20, 22–23.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, p.389.
See, for example, H. Skolimowski, Living Philosophy, London, Arkana, 1992 ); R. Bellah et al, Habits of the Heart, London, Hutchinson, 1988; D. Selboume, The Principle of Duty, London, Sinclair Stevenson, 1994; A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, London, Duckworth, 1985.
C. Gunton, The One, The Three and The Many, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 187.
J Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, Yale University Press, 1943, pp. 8–9.
bid., p.34.
bid.
bid.
See, for example, The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, The Common Good and the Catholic Church’s Social Teaching, Manchester, Gabriel Communications, 1996 and Catholic Education Service, The Common Good in Education, London, 1997.
Jane Kopas, Sacred Identity, New York, Paulist Press, 1994, p. 145.
The Common Good and the Catholic Church’s Social Teaching, para 13.
Richard Pring, Closing the Gap: Liberal Education and Vocational Preparation, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1995, p. 134.
Richard Pring, op. cit., pp.128–130.
These last two sentences summarise the carefully argued essay, ‘Liberal & Vocational Education: A conflict of value’, in the Victor Cook Lectures, ’Education, Values and the State’, edited by John Haldane, University of St Andrews, 1994, pp. 7–41.
Kevin Kelly, New Directions in Moral Theology, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1992, p. 38.
If we accept that we are made in the image of God, and that this includes the notion that we are offered friendship with God and a share in divine life, then treating our life purely as a personally constructed work of art, as an act of self assertion or self-realisation, is no longer a tenable option. We need the truth to set us free. For these implications of believing that we are made in God’s image, see John O’Donnell, ‘Theological Anthropology in the Encyclicals of John Paul II’, in Continuity and Plurality in Catholic Theology, edited by Anthony Cemera,1998 and Louis Dupre, ’On the Task and Vocation of the Catholic College’, in Examining the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, edited by Anthony Cernera and Oliver Morgan, 2000, both Fairfield, Connecticut, Sacred Heart University Press.
A. McFadyen, The call to personhood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp.29, 30. 67Aidan Nichols, Byzantine Gospel: Maximus the Confessor in Modern Scholarship, Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1993, p. 168.
Stephen Duffy, The Graced Horizon, Collegeville, Minnesota, The Liturgical Press, 1991, p.106. The theme of human restlessness requiring God as the only source of satisfaction was expressed most powerfully and memorably by Augustine in his Confessions.
J. Sachs, The Christian Vision of Humanity, Collegeville, Minnesota, The Liturgical Press, 1991, p.106. 70P. Vermes, Buber on God and the Perfect Man, Scholars Press, 1980, p. 180.
A. McFadyen, op. cit., p.57.
See note 18, above.
John Dwyer, in The New Dictionary of Catholic Social Thought, edited by J.A. Dwyer and E.L. Montgomery, Collegeville, Minnesota, Liturgical Press, 1994, p. 724.
bid., p.731.
Charles Wood, ‘Theological education and education for church leadership’ in Astley, Francis and Crowder (1996), op. cit., p.304. (see note 28)
Robert Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence, Washington, DC, The Catholic University of America Press, 1994, p. 130.
For two very different, yet richly rewarding and sophisticated analyses of the bearing of a Christian ontology and worldview on an understanding of education, see Robert Martin, The Incarnate Ground of Christian Faith, Lanham, University Press of America, 1998, and Signe Sandsmark, Is World View Neutral Education Possible and Desirable? Carlisle, Paternoster, 2000.
For an alternative, complementary interpretation of the relationship between key aspects of a Catholic worldview and the educational endeavour, see Anthony Cernera and Oliver Morgan, Examining The Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Fairfield, Connecticut, Sacred Heart University Press, 2000, pp.208214.
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Sullivan, J. (2001). Distinctive Worldview. In: Catholic Education: Distinctive and Inclusive. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0988-0_5
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