What is Catholic classical education?

- About

A basic schemata for Catholic education is the list of the five pillars delineated by the Cardinal Newman Society:
1. Catholic schools are inspired by a divine mission. All educational efforts are part of the Church’s mission of salvation and evangelization for the good of each student and the good of society.
2. Catholic schools model Christian communion. Students are formed for relationship with God and
with others in love and in service. All instruction is in fidelity with Catholic teaching.
3. They are places where students encounter Christ in prayer, scripture and sacrament.
4. They are places that integrally form students’ intellectual, spiritual, moral and physical dimensions.
5. They seek to seek to impart a Christian view of the world, humanity, life, culture and of history, ordering the whole of human culture to the news of salvation and the unity of all knowledge.

A helpful list for principles guiding classical education is as follows:
1. Is structured and integrated and has as its goal not only the transmission of knowledge but also the integration and synthesis of complex ideas.
2. Focuses on the acquisition of knowledge through reading by focusing whenever possible on original texts and classics.
3. Presents various academic disciplines in a sequence corresponding to a pupil’s developing ability to think abstractly, and in a developmentally and age-appropriate manner.
4. Studies not simply individual academic disciplines, but also essential truths that transcend the disciplines, especially those truths emphasizing human dignity and worth.
5. Develops a sense of wonder and a love for learning.
6. Assists the students to become self-motivated and self-correcting learners.

Pedagogically, Catholic identity implies a unique perspective of the end or purpose of education. Not merely ordered toward helping young people become productive and successful adults serving the world according to their own special gifts, Catholic education aims to make saints: the goal is to get young people to heaven.

Catholic education flows from faithful Catholic teachers who manifest the life of faith in all that they do; they also strive, as part of their contract, to witness to that faith in word and deed. Thus, their formation of students works through proclamation and social osmosis. On the one hand, teachers find ways to announce the saving truth of Christ or any “smaller” truth connected to their particular class or discipline; on the other hand, through lived witness to the faith in loving joy, they draw the hearts of their students to follow Christ and embrace the virtuous life.

Moreover, Catholic education implies ample opportunities for sacramental encounter. Catholic education should offer students Mass and confession regularly (preferably daily, if possible) while encouraging baptism and confirmation for those who have not yet received all of the sacraments of initiation. Finally, students should encounter many positive role models of the sacraments of holy orders and matrimony.

Finally, the whole work of education is to form students who think, desire, and live their lives within a Catholic worldview.

To embrace the classical dimension of teaching, we need to consider that the movement of the instruction is always toward the transcendentals: truth, goodness, and beauty. Students see how the finite participates in the infinite, so that the smaller truths, goods, and beautiful things they encounter in this life are vehicles or pointers to the fullness of Being: God.

At the same time, this pursuit of the infinite, the desire for the divine, is one which cannot be fully quenched in this life; thus, classical education aims to inspire in students a sense of wonder.

Meanwhile, classical educators teach the classics. This means that time-tested works that the human tradition has found challenge or inspiration from are a key factor in the books, ideas, and questions we study.

Finally, we follow the lead of Dorothy Sayers, whose famous work, The Lost Tools of Learning, sets out a vision for education that is ordered toward a recovery of the proper mode of pedagogy to the mode of learning. She delineates grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages in what is usually called, elementary, middle, and high school. The terminology is apt, however, for it sets out the particular way in which children learn in the three stages of growth through schooling: grammar, when they are absorbing facts and knowledge of things; logic, when they are seeing how all things fit together; and rhetoric, when they are testing, affirming, and defending. The proper instruction of the child leads, ultimately, to his own discovery of the tools of learning so that he becomes, we hope, a lifelong learner.

In conclusion, it should be understood that all of these principles are either explicitly or implicitly adumbrated in the Church's Declaration on Christian Education, Gravissimum Educationis, especially paragraphs 1 and 2 which define natural and supernatural education respectively.

(Adapted from drafts written for The Shamrock and the Donahue Academy website -ed.)