Catholic Reading Wednesday & Men's Night Out

With many thanks to our wonderful and insightful curator, Karen Celano, you can delve into a faith-related news article each Wednesday! Karen writes:

It’s that time of year again, when high schools and colleges across the country send their graduates off into the world to put their education to good use. It’s also a good time for thoughtful Catholics to reflect on the purpose and nature of education, especially when the educational system in our country is undergoing tumultuous (and controversial) change. The USCCB, in addressing certain concerns they have about the Common Core Curriculum now being adopted in many locales, quotes Vatican II in reminding us that the goal of education is “the formation of the human person in the pursuit of his ultimate end and the good of the societies of which he . . . is a member and in whose obligations as an adult he will share.” This is a statement worth unpacking. Forming the human person in the Catholic sense entails a holistic view of the human person, who is not merely a rational mind but also a free moral creature endowed with an immortal soul. The idea of pursuing [man’s] ultimate end means that education must empower its students to ask and answer the questions: What is our ultimate end? For what purpose were we made? And the concept of seeking the good of society demands that we ask moral questions about goodness, and vocational questions about how we are each called to contribute to that good. True Christian education, then, must incorporate not only lessons that teach us how to think, but also empower us to make moral choices by forcing us to confront questions of ultimate truth and goodness.

But, as R.R. Reno writes in First Things, modern education in the Western world is not demanding of its students that they ask these moral questions. Indeed, he writes, schools are no longer demanding that students ask and answer the “most important question” of their lives – “that is to say, the question of how they should live.” On college campuses, he says, holistic community is not promoted; instead, college culture promotes an environment in which students’ lives and minds are dichotomized into parts that “drink, vomit, and fornicate by night” and parts that “posture critically and ironically” by day. Education is no longer motivated by the desire to know “good or evil, truth or falsehood, beauty or ugliness.” Students know only how to “critique and correct” but not how to form genuine moral commitments.

Wendell Berry, in a 2012 Commencement Address at Bellarmine University, lays part of the blame on education’s increasing emphasis on technical, utilitarian training under the guise of the “STEM” agenda, which he believes encourages a technological determinism that serves to further the money-making enterprises of technological corporations rather than responsible citizenship. He argues that the STEM mentality implies that students must adapt to the rapidly-evolving technological corporate world that threatens to steamroll over them if they don’t cooperate with its all-powerful momentum, without giving students any sense that they have the moral freedom and responsibility to change or critique that world. He encourages students to take a stand: “To urge you toward responsible citizenship,” he says, “is to say that I do not accept either the technological determinism or the conventional greed or the thoughtless individualism of that world. . . Nor do I accept the global corporate empire and its economic totalitarianism. . . If you love your family, your neighbors, your community, and your place, you are going to have to resist.”

Even the humanities are being swept up by the technological determinism Berry deplores. The Editors of The Point Magazine write of how the humanities have also been coopted by an overly-technical, research-based mentality that “distances [us] from those. . . who continue to appeal to the humanities for reflection on such topics as how to live or what to value.” Anthony Kronman’s book Education’s End echoes this concern, arguing that academic philosophers have abdicated their responsibility to ask questions of “ultimate meaning” because they lack confidence in their authority to do so. Instead, humanities professors seek refuge in the shelter of pseudo-science, doing research to demonstrate that there is a “measurable difference” between reading Virginia Woolf and Dan Brown, or trying to elucidate psychological correlations between characters in Victorian fiction and real-life human beings.

There are still signs of hope, however. There are educators who recognize that education means more than vocational training, such as Scott Samuelson, who writes in The Atlantic of his own resistance to the notion that “the goal of an education is simply economic advancement and technological power,” arguing that “we should strive to be a society of free people, not simply one of well-compensated managers.” There are students such as those at Franciscan University, who see themselves as citizens with moral responsibilities towards their communities. And there are students who are rejecting what Wendell Berry calls the “logic of success” in favor of the “logic of vocation,” as they take time off from school and career to volunteer around the world.

Though he wrote over a century ago, I believe that G.K. Chesterton still has it right when he argued that many educators are “too timid to endure responsibilities,” particularly that “awful and ancestral responsibility. . . of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority.” Education is only worthy of its name when teachers are “sure enough that something is true that [they] dare to tell it to a child.” But this is an enormous responsibility, and one that our relativistic culture encourages us to renounce. However, as Catholics we must acknowledge that any type of education that does not empower its students to ask questions about objective truth, value, and meaning is doing a grave disservice to the dignity of human person, who is created in the image of God and endowed with freedom and responsibility. And to create responsible students, we must have responsible educators. Let us pray that our Catholic institutions of education continue to foster a sense of moral responsibility in the young ones who are our Church’s future on earth.

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Here's a friendly reminder that tonight, May 21st, is Men's Night.  Join other Catholic men from the parish for a low-key gathering, games (think: Settlers of Catan) and food.  The host's address will not be published publicly online, however if you are interested in joining us, please email Hudelson [at] gmail.com.  Bring a drink or food to share.  We will start at 7 pm. Hope you can join us!