The Good News in Education

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - January 26, 2007

The celebration of Catholic Schools Week causes us to reflect on the blessing of a Catholic education and why it is worth the many sacrifices — from parents, teachers, parish communities, and so many others — that make it possible.

The irreplaceable value of Catholic schools goes well beyond the safe environments, smaller class sizes, and high quality instruction for which they are generally known. Their worth is centered on their capacity to form the entire young person and not just the head.

The difference between integral education of a young person and instruction was described famously by a Holocaust Survivor, Chaim Ginott, who wrote a moving letter to teachers after his liberation.

"Dear Teacher," he wrote, "I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers; children poisoned by educated physicians; infants killed by trained nurses; women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is: help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane."

Instruction, in other words, is like fire: it can be used for good or for evil. The difference between a pediatrician and an abortionist, a trustworthy airline pilot and a Mohammed Atta, a high school bookworm and a Columbine serial killer is not one of I.Q. It's that one is humane and the other is not.

As Ginott illustrated, the most important part of a young person's education is not the three R's. It's to form a person's freedom properly, because it's only in the right use of one's freedom that one becomes humane. Said in another way, the most important part of education is moral education.

This is why Catholic schools are more important now than ever, because it is getting increasingly harder and rarer for young people to receive a solid moral education in our public schools and through popular culture. Good public school teachers often feel constrained from passing on genuine moral wisdom on right and wrong, because they know that almost anything they say that a particular parent or colleague doesn't like can be the subject of a politically-correct lawsuit or disciplinary investigation. Certain school systems now mandate that kindergarteners learn, through fairy tales and other propaganda, that there's really no difference between having a mom and a dad or two mommies or two daddies. Older students learn about human sexuality as a contact sport divorced from love and commitment. Their teachers and popular culture both communicate that it's completely unrealistic to think they will remain chaste before marriage; therefore, the principal "moral" education they learn is how to use "protection." And as atheists and secularists continue to sue to try to eliminate all references to God in public education, the situation is bound to worsen, as young people, deprived of any reference to a Creator, risk losing their identity as creatures.

But even if public schools and popular culture were still able to provide a solid secular moral formation of their students, the value and uniqueness of a Catholic education would stand out all the more, because the most distinctive aspect of Catholic moral formation is that it can be done with explicit reference to Jesus Christ. Catholic schools can introduce the student not merely to "moral values" but to their Source.

Christ, as the fathers of Vatican II reminded us, "fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme vocation clear." He teaches us our great dignity and discloses to us our "supreme vocation," the path to true human goodness and fulfillment: to use our freedom to love others as Jesus has loved us. It is by imitating Jesus in his human nature — laying down our lives out of love for others — that we will become most humane.

The greatest gift of a Catholic education, therefore, is that students can be introduced not only to the truths of math, science, history, and language, but to Truth incarnate (Jn 8:32).

In a Catholic school, students find not just smaller classrooms, but a divine Master who tutors everyone individually. They are educated not just in a safer environment, but where a Shepherd protects them from the wolf and guides them safely with his familiar voice and the simple instruction "follow me."

They are prepared not just for the SAT and for entrance into college, but for the final exam of life and for admittance, God-willing, into the college of saints.

Catholic schools do make students fully humane — and they do more. They communicate the Good News in its fullness, by making students disciples of the Master who teaches with the words of everlasting life.

That is why all Catholics should recognize their inestimable value, celebrate them and support them.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.