Catholic Education Must Be Both Education and Catholic

by Mark Brumley

Much of Catholic education today lacks integrity. By integrity, I don't mean what is commonly meant by the word — consistent adherence to a code of conduct — although a bit more of that couldn't hurt either. By integrity, I mean completeness. Catholic schooling must possess all the constitutive parts of education, in proper relation to one another, if such schooling is truly to be education as well as truly Catholic.

Now I know what many of those engaged professionally in Catholic education are apt to say about this. They will claim that Catholic schooling today has such integrity. They will argue that Catholic education is more "professional" than ever, with Catholic school teachers having more advanced degrees than ever. And they will point to the comparatively high academic standards and testing results of students in Catholic schools as proof that Catholic education has got its act together.

Notwithstanding all of that, one thing overwhelmingly supports the claim that most Catholic education today lacks integrity: the fact that most teachers in Catholic schools today are educated either in secular schools or Catholic schools of education that have been secularized — that have bought the basic presuppositions of secular educational philosophy and philosophy of human nature on which rested Catholic education.

Most Catholic home schoolers probably agree with the assessment of Catholic education given above. But the question must be asked, "To what extent do the maladies afflicting Catholic schools also affect home schooling?" In other words, do Catholic home schooling families have an integral view of education? Do they understand the constitutive elements of education and their relation to each other? And does this understanding lead to effective teaching and learning?

To be honest, I don't know the answer to these questions. But I suspect that most Catholic home schoolers could only benefit from reflecting on the principles of genuine Catholic education and asking themselves where, perhaps, they may need to shore up things in their own educational thinking and practice.

In considering such principles, however, we should note the two basic elements of Catholic education. They are, first, that Catholic education is truly education and, second, that Catholic education is truly Catholic. Since the word "Catholic" modifies the word "education" here, we must be clear about what true education is before we can understand the specifically Catholic contribution to it.

Two Meanings of Education

Before anything else is said on the subject, we should distinguish two senses of the word education. On the one hand, people sometimes understand education to refer to teaching. When a college student decides he wants to "go into education," he probably means he wants to go into teaching as a profession. On the other hand, people also sometimes use the word education to refer to learning. When parents say that they sent their daughter to college to "get an education," they refer primarily to education as learning.

Having distinguished between education-as-teaching and education-as-learning, let me state what should be obvious, but isn't always: that education-as-teaching is ordered or directed to education-as-learning. That is, the primary purpose of teaching should be learning on the part of those taught. What is called teaching is truly teaching only when learning occurs, not when material is merely "covered."

All education, then, involves learning in one way or another, either directly, as when we use the word education synonymously with learning, or indirectly, when we use education to refer to teaching, which implies learning on the part of those who have been "taught." That being the case, we can see that education, in either use of the word, is really about learning more than anything else.

Teachers as Facilitators of Learning

This brings us to a fundamental point — if not the fundamental point — regarding education: education is mainly about the activity of the learner, not the teacher. Unfortunately, many people, including some home schooling teachers, mistakenly think the opposite. They believe that the principle cause of learning is the teacher's activity. In fact, the teacher merely facilitates learning, but doesn't cause it. Even for the most difficult of topics or the slowest of students, the teacher is at best a sine qua non, not the efficient cause of learning.

The teacher may be a highly trained guide; he may in fact be a master-teacher of outstanding skill. Nevertheless, education refers primarily to what happens in the mind of his students, not what he does. As Jacques Maritain put it a half century ago in Education at the Crossroads:

All this boils down to the fact that the mind's natural activity on the part of the learner and the intellectual guidance on the part of the teacher are both dynamic factors in education, but that the principal agent in education, the primary dynamic factor or propelling force, is the internal vital principle in the one to be educated; the educator or teacher is only the secondary — though a genuinely effective — dynamic factor and ministerial agent.

This truth should be especially clear to the Catholic educator because he believes human beings to have been made in the image of God, which means he believes they possess real intellects, not simply a highly advanced system of sense memory as mere animals do. Consequently, a Catholic educator, to the extent he embraces what he professes as a Catholic, knows that human beings learn as intellectual beings, not as chimpanzees who can be trained to use sign language. When in college I first heard the notion that teachers are facilitators of learning, I dismissed it as warmed-over, left-wing ideology. It sounded too much like the idea that teachers should never correct students' mistakes or take a position about right or wrong — essentially the progressivist view of learning I associated with John Dewey. Years later, after teaching in Catholic school, I came to see the truth of the matter. I realized that the same material, presented to the same students — even students with roughly the same intellectual ability — was learned in varying degrees. The differences in learning were the result of differences in the activity of the students' minds, with some students' minds actively engaged and others not. As their teacher, I might have been responsible for not adequately engaging some of my pupils' minds. But it was the non-engagement of their minds itself which resulted in the failure to learn.

Later still, I again came across the idea that teachers are facilitators rather than primary causes of learning. It wasn't in an avant garde, more-modern-than-thou teachers' journal or from the mouth of an establishment liberal professor of education; it was straight out of Plato — Socrates description of the teacher's function as being like that of a midwife who assists a woman in giving birth, which is found in the Theaetetus. It was also in St. Thomas Aquinas and his modern disciples such as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson. Though Maritain and Gilson were critical of aspects of progressivism in education, especially its relativistic denial of a proper order of learning, they were not advocates of mere rote indoctrination. The idea that teaching is mainly facilitating learning wasn't a modernist innovation as I had thought, but a major strand of the Western educational tradition.

Most recently, I have found the idea of teachers as facilitators of learning expounded by Dr. Mortimer Adler in his various books on education. Adler, a renowned Aristotelian philosopher associated with the Great Books program and friend of Maritain, has served as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica and is one of our society's leading educators. He is also the primary force behind the Paideia Proposal, a secular plan to reform American education.

Adler's book Reforming Education contains an illuminating essay called "The Order of Learning," taken from an address given to the western division of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 1941. Therein he enumerates truths about education the understanding of which, he writes, "every Catholic educator must possess if he understands the nature of man and of human teaching, according to the principles of the philosophy he generally affirms." Among those truths, states Adler, is the notion that "habits of understanding can be formed only by intellectual acts on the part of the student." Thus, Adler concludes, the Catholic educator "knows that the teacher is always a secondary cause of learning, never a primary cause, for the primary cause must always be an act on the part of the learner's own intellect."

Adler affirms the Aristotelian-Thomist notion that teaching is a cooperative rather than an operative or productive process, operating on or producing a passive thing. Teaching is cooperative because, on the one hand, the teacher cooperates with a natural process — the process of learning — and on the other hand because while the activity of the student's mind is the primary cause of learning, it isn't the only important factor. Teachers don't shape minds as a sculptor shapes his sculpture, but they can contribute to the process of learning. They do so as doctors assist the body's natural process of healing.

Three Kinds of Learning

Thus far we have considered the who of education. That is, who is the primary agent of learning. We turn now to matter of the what and how of learning or the modes of knowing. In his book A Guide to Learning, Adler provides a contemporary restatement of some traditional ideas. He identifies the following modes of learning: 1) obtaining or receiving information; 2) acquiring knowledge; 3) understanding knowledge acquired; and 4) attaining wisdom. Going from mere information to wisdom is like climbing stairs, with each successive level resting on the previous ones.

Information here means raw data, and much of the information we come by daily is, as we all know, irrelevant. And yet some of it is important and even basic to being a generally educated human being. Knowledge is organized information: it is systematic, with some elements standing in certain relations and sequence to others. Understanding (knowing why) is more important than the possession of mere knowledge because it entails perceiving the significance of what one knows. And, finally, wisdom (the deepest form of knowing why) involves possessing not only information, knowledge and understanding, but having these things in such a way that one penetrates the fundamental principles of things.

A further division of knowledge is possible. We can distinguish, as Adler does, between knowing that and knowing how. Knowledge which amounts to knowing how we often call, obviously enough, know-how. This refers to knowledge as skill of performance. A ballet dancer, a classical pianist, a mystery writer, a sculptor and an airplane pilot are examples of people who possess know-how in this sense. Theirs is the knowledge of making or doing, which we call art.

But another, more important kind of know-how is moral in nature. It is the know-how of living, of how to live a good life. Here we enter the domain of prescriptive, rather than descriptive, knowledge. Prescriptive knowledge concerns how one ought to live and the development of those habits (the virtues) which incline us to act as we ought. It is moral education.

Keeping these distinctions in mind, we can formulate the three main kinds of learning which the educational reform associated with Adler and known as the Paideia Proposal stresses. These kinds of learning are: 1) the acquisition of organized knowledge; 2) the development of skills; and 3) the enlargement of understanding of fundamental ideas and values.

Let us consider each of these kinds of learning in terms of the kind of teaching they involve. The first is the acquisition of organized knowledge. Mere factual information can be taught simply by communication — by the instruction of a teacher lecturing to a class or by a textbook. It can be reinforced by drills and tests on basic information memorized. Although this is the lowest level of learning — really using the memory primarily rather than the higher, intellectual skills — certain basic facts must be known by people, and that's where didactic instruction comes in. To the extent this aspect of education has been unduly de-emphasized in recent years for fear of sheer rote memorization substituting for genuine learning, its recovery, properly undertaken, is welcome.

The second kind of learning — development of skills — requires more than information and mere memorization, hence more than hearing a lecture or reading a textbook. It requires that a student be shown how to do something and then that he do it until he has mastered it. In other words, it requires "coaching" by the teacher and practice by the student, until a certain level of proficiency in skill is attained.

The third kind of learning, the enlargement of understanding of ideas, is even less concerned about mere information, although it presupposes an essential minimum of it. Nor is it mainly about development of the intellectual skills, although these must be employed. It primarily concerns understanding basic ideas as the first step toward wisdom. This kind of learning, in the educational reform known as the Paideia Proposal, cannot be attained by listening to lectures, reading textbooks or by being coached; it requires Socratic discussion and questioning.

We can summarize what we have said about education as follows. Education is mainly concerned with learning rather than teaching, with the activity of the student's mind rather than the activity of the teacher, even though the latter may be important. What a student is supposed to obtain is knowledge — knowledge of that or what and of know-how and understanding, the highest form of the latter being wisdom, the deepest goal of education as such.

As we shall see, since Catholic education is truly education, what we have said of education in general applies to Catholic education in particular, although with an important qualification.

What's Catholic About Catholic Education?

At the outset I noted that Catholic education consists of two parts, a Catholic part and an educational part. We have examined what education entails; now we consider the Catholic dimension.

Before doing so, however, we must answer two objections frequently posed against the whole notion of a "Catholic" approach to education. The first objection is made by people who rightly point out that truth is the same for everyone, that there is no such thing as, say, "Catholic" science or "Catholic" mathematics. Rather, science is science for Catholic and non-Catholic alike, as mathematics is mathematics for all. How then can we speak, apart from religious education itself, of Catholic education other than as the education of Catholics or education by Catholics? And, in either case, why should we expect, if such education is truly education, that the qualifier Catholic adds anything? In other words, what has Jerusalem to do with Athens?

The second objection to Catholic education comes from the opposite direction. Since the mission of the Church is to get people to heaven, so it is argued, why should institutions of the Church bother about education at all, unless such education is explicitly religious? Why not let secular education be provided by secular people — provided the educational environment is safe and secure — and let the Church concentrate her efforts on evangelization and catechesis? In other words, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

Catholic home schoolers obviously have at least part of an answer to the second objection. Since they have chosen to fulfill their responsibility as primary educators of their children by teaching them themselves, they have decided to turn over neither the secular nor religious aspects of education to others. Insofar as the Church is an institution, home schoolers are actually freeing up institutional church resources for other purposes such as evangelization.

Nevertheless, the first question remains: what, apart from religious instruction, does Catholicism have to add to education? Not merely another subject in the curriculum — religion. Catholic education means education directed to its proper end, its proper objective or goal. Catholicism enables us to know most fully what education is for — the attainment of truth and the acquisition of intellectual virtue — because it enables us to know fully what the human beings we seek to educate are for.

Here the issue of integrity, raised at the outset, is central. Integrity means having all the proper parts of a thing and having them properly ordered — in right relation to each other and to the purpose of that of which they are a part. Bodily integrity, for example, means having all the bodily parts properly placed in relation to one another and functioning well with respect to the physical well-being a person.

Similarly, the integrity of Catholic education means that all the proper parts of education are in place and that they are directed to their proper end, from a Catholic perspective. Most secular education today is not integral education, even from the perspective of the principles of education we discussed earlier. But even if it were and even if it were carried out per impossible untainted by Original Sin, such education would still lack something, from the Catholic point of view, and therefore the educational procedure it would generate would lack something as well.

As good as secular education projects such as the Paideia Proposal may be, they remain deficient from the Catholic perspective. By their very secularity, they leave out an important truth they cannot of themselves know: the purely gratuitous reality that God has called human beings to participate in the divine life of the Trinity, a life which is both existentially and essentially beyond man's own power. And consequently, the approach to education they take, while perhaps open to that higher calling, does not embrace it. They may educate human beings for a purely terrestrial goal of happiness in this life, but they cannot put that goal in proper relation to happiness in the life to come.

I want to be especially clear about this last point. What Catholic adds to education to make it truly Catholic education isn't simply the bare fact of the life of grace and redemption. Nor is it merely the inclusion of religion into the course of study. Rather, it is the elevation of education and its goals to the life of grace so that what and how one learns is made to serve the fuller purpose of our divine call to participate in the life of the Holy Trinity.

An example may help here. In studying law, one learns the genuine principles of civil law knowable to believers and non-believers alike. But only the believer can integrate the knowledge of civil law into the larger pattern of God's plan for man, for only the believer knows that plan and can consciously cooperate with it in the study and (later) the practice of civil law. The same is true of other fields of endeavor.

I hasten to add that the elevation of human learning does not destroy learning with respect to the things of this world, to the extent that such education was authentically human to begin with. It does not suffocate education by making theology or religion the primary or exclusive course of study. Nor does it violate those inherent principles of education we have already considered. Since grace elevates rather than destroys nature, it merely puts learning about the things of this world into the larger context of helping us advance toward the fullness of life in the next.

But isn't there something else Catholicism adds to educational content and method, apart from adding religion as a course of study and a bigger perspective? The answer is yes.

With respect to content, a truly Catholic education will not only teach about the life of grace in religion class, it will also consider, for example, how that life has been lived in history. To be sure, it will be as true to the merely nature principles of history as any secular education. But it will add the larger Christian view. It will study, for example, the works of Christian culture as well as the "Great Books" of Western Culture (as the great Catholic historian and sociologist Christopher Dawson proposed), and it will pose and answer the question in studying the physical sciences, "Simply because we can do something, does that mean we should?" In short, if it is truly Catholic, such education will integrate faith and learning, by being true to the authentic principles of both.

With respect to method, a truly Catholic education will facilitate learning by means of the educational principles we discussed earlier: the notion that the activity of the student's mind is the primary cause of learning; that genuine education entails ascending from mere acquisition of information to knowledge, from knowledge to understanding, and from understanding to wisdom — that it involves knowing-how (the acquisition and perfection of skills, whether intellectual, physical or moral) and knowing-why, as well as knowing that. And it does so because truly Catholic education respects human beings as images of God called to use their minds as well as their memories.

In short, a truly Catholic education integrates the truths of human learning discoverable by human reason, with the truths of revelation known only by faith, so that the believer may serve God and man in this world in preparation for the next.

How prevalent is this integral view of education among Catholic home schoolers? Probably far more so than among those in the traditional education establishment, but no doubt we home educators, too, would be well-served, as noted at the outset, by reflecting on these basic truths about Catholic education and examining our own efforts. In this way we can better implement them in our educational activities.

Mark Brumley is managing editor of The Catholic Faith and Catholic Dossier magazines, published by Ignatius Press. He and his wife Debbie live in Napa, California with their five children.

© National Association of Catholic Home Educators

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