Catholic Education: Principles of Recovery John O'Brien Adapted for Issue XV of Vulgata, September, 2004.  Originally published at www.waysideacademy.ca

The author is the Director of Wayside Academy, an independent Catholic school near Peterborough, Ont., which focuses on employing a classical method of education.  It is a small school, currently running out of a parish hall in Wayside Ontario (near Peterborough).  It doesn't fit the common conception of a private school, most of which operate for profit and have high tuition fees.  Wayside sees its role more as presenting parents with a viable alternative to the public system that is affordable for families with more average incomes.  Wayside is not entirely unique, but schools like it, particularly ones that have its longevity, are rare in Canada.  The only two similar schools that I have been able to find in Ontario are Mary Mother of God School in Toronto (no web site) and St. Clement's School in Ottawa.  The independent schools movement is much stronger in the United States.  You can find schools in every state at napcis.org (National Association of Private Catholic and Independent Schools).  According to Director John O'Brien, one of the reasons why Wayside has been so successful is that it is supported by the local community.  Much like a good parish, Wayside is the focus of a local catholic culture that includes not only students and their parents, but friends, relatives, alumni and others.  Fundraisers for the school are usually well-attended and are social in nature (concerts, dances etc.).  Because thy appeal to a wide audience (i.e. both the kids and the adults have fun) they also serve a community-building role and in every way stand in sharp contrast to the hated door-to-door chocolate bar selling fundraising schema.  To find out more about Wayside Academy, please visit their web site at www.waysideacademy.ca.

What follows is a talk delivered on December 7, 2001 at a Wayside Academy fundraiser by John O'Brien in which he presents a vision of Catholic education.

-- Editor
 
 

Now I am always in danger of trying to say too much in too short a time. But I will attempt to imitate all good speakers by paring down tonight's talk to a single topic, the topic unites us under this roof: what do we at Wayside Academy mean when we say we teach a "classical curriculum."

To do so, I am going to stand on the shoulders of two giants, who are much more articulate and perceptive than I am; two thinkers, from two different academic backgrounds, who shared a common love of truth, the human person, God, and His Church. They were contemporaries, yet, to my knowledge, they never met. One was widely regarded as one of the most eminent philosophers of the 20th century, and the other was a writer of detective fiction.

I - Jaques Maritain

The first is the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. He wrote a penetrating book in 1943 called Education at the Crossroads, and it was based on a series of lectures he gave at Yale University around that time. In Education at the Crossroads, he recognized and explained 7 misconceptions or errors often at the root of the problems in modern education. Examining these will help us understand the foundation we must base our school upon. In the second part of this talk I'll discuss the more practical system of classical learning. But for now, gird your loins and buckle your seatbelts, and get ready for a nosedive into the deep waters of philosophy!

Let's look at what Jacques Maritain identifies as the first modern error: a lack or disregard for ends.  Ends are final half of the phrase "means and ends". Now in any art or science, if the means are cultivated for their own sake, not merely as a way of achieving the ultimate end, any art quickly loses its viability; it ceases to work. The means used in modern education are not bad. In fact they seem to be much better than those of the past. The misfortune is that they are so dazzling that we lose sight of what we are educating for. Modern schools always seek to become more efficient, our laboratories more equipped, our teachers required to do more and more training, but what is the ultimate end of the whole procedure? Is the student after 12 years of state schooling wise and knoweldgable? Or, for that matter, a better person? Clearly, a proper education must have the ultimate ends of the student in mind.

The second error is not a lack of ends, but false or incomplete ideas about that end. Maritain writes that:

the educational task is both greater and more mysterious and, in a sense, humbler than many imagine. If the aim of education is the helping and guiding of man toward his own human achievement, education cannot escape the problems and entanglements of philosophy, for supposes by its very nature a philosophy of man, and from the outset it is obliged to answer the question: "What is man?"

The philosophical model, however, does deal with the great questions of being, "it is not entirely verifiable in sense-experience, although it possesses criteria and proofs of its own, and it deals with the essential and intrinsic, though not always the visible or tangible." It is obvious that a purely scientific idea of man can provide us with valuable information on the best means of education, but it can guide us what the proper ends of education. Education needs to know primarily what man is and where he is going.

There are many philosophical-religious ideas of man, but the one that is ours, and the one on which our civilization is based is that of the Christian person. It believes that man is a person who carries himself by his intelligence and his free will. He is not merely a physical being. "There is in him a richer and nobler existence; he has a spiritual superexistence which he achieves through knowledge and love." He is a whole, not just a part, "and through love the human person can give himself freely to beings who are to him, other selves; and for this relationship no equivalent can be found in the physical world…a person possesses dignity because he is in direct relationship with the realm of being, truth, goodness, and beauty, and with God, and it is only with these that he can arrive at complete fulfillment."

So according to the Christian philosophical tradition, the most important aspect of an educator is "a respect for the soul as well as for the body of the child, the sense of his innermost essence and his internal resources, and an almost sacred and loving attention to his mysterious identity, which is a hidden thing that no techniques can reach."

In practice, the aim of education is to guide the student in what Maritain calls "the evolving dynamism through which he shapes himself as a human person, armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, and moral virtues, while at the same time conveying to him the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization in which he is living, and preserving in this way the centuries-old achievements of generations."

The pragmatic aspect of education, the enabling of a youth to get a job and make a living, is not to be disregarded, but this practical goal is best provided by the general human capacities developed. And we arrive, in fact, at the third modern error Maritain recognized, which he terms Pragmatism, the erroneous belief that everything must have a practical value. The specialized training which may be required for a particular job, must never imperil the holistic aim of childhood education.

The fourth error he calls Sociologism, which sees proper social conditioning as the aim of education, or the process of "adapting a potential citizen to the conditions and interactions of social life." This is not education, for it fails to see the greater ends of the human person. Sociologism has its goals in reverse order. It fails to see that to be a good citizen you must first have "an inner center, a living source of personal conscience from which originates all idealism and generosity, the sense of law and the sense of friendship, respect for others, but at the same time deep-rooted independence from regard to common opinion." You can manufacture an compliant citizen by brainwashing and conditioning, but that of course runs against the humanistic and Christian concept of human freedom and personhood.

The fifth modern error he calls Intellectualism, which refers to an intellectual elitism based upon rhetorical skill and, even more common today, the employment of smart-sounding jargon and technologies. For Maritain, this trend gives up attempting to achieve universal goods in favour of seeing the supreme achievement in technical specialization. Now, obviously a specialized workforce is more and more needed in modern life, but it should be compensated for by a more vigorous holistic training, especially during youth. As for the benefits of specialization, Maritain reminds us that:

an animal is a specialist. All of its knowing power is fixed on a single task to be done. So an educational program which would aim at forming specialists ever more perfect in ever more specialized fields, and unable to pass judgment on any matter that goes beyond their specialized competence, would lead to a progressive animalization of the human mind and human life.

The sixth potential error of modern education is called Voluntarism (Not volunteerism. Working for your local animal shelter is a good idea) Voluntarism comes from the Latin word voluntas, which means will. It's an intellectual trend in which strength of will is seen as the highest quality a man can cultivate; it promotes the belief that pure will power can conquer everything. As an entrenched educational philosophy this notion went out with Nazi training schools and youth organizations, but milder forms go on today. We've all heard the slogans: "Just do it," "Be all you can be," "Use your Will-power!" It forgets that all things, even something as great as human will, must be subject to the higher laws.

Maritain's seventh and final error is the belief that "everything can be learned". The Greek sophists also thought that everything, even virtue, could be attained by means of learning and discussion. This is not the case, obviously; for it is more important to love what is good, than just to know it. Virtue cannot be learned in a classroom, although it can be encouraged.

So these are the 7 errors of modern education identified by Jacques Maritain. Here we have the wise words of a great thinker, which should help point us in the right direction when it comes to fostering a new approach to education, or should I say, the restoration of education.

How do we begin the task of restoring education to its classical ideals? I believe the answer lies mostly on how we set up cultivating the teaching process. The relationship of teacher to student must reflect the Christian philosophical-religious concept of the human person.

According to Maritain, because the teacher communicates knowledge to the student whose soul has not previously contemplated such ideas before, the teacher is engaging in "the art of ministering" Thus, in teaching, the teacher must offer his student either "examples from living experience or statements the pupil is able to judge by virtue of what he knows already." Because of this, the teacher is "a giver whose own dynamism, moral authority, and positive guidance are indispensable."

It is also important to foster the freedom of the child. Human freedom is not the spontaneity of animal nature, which follows the fixed paths of instinct, but the spontaneity of a human and rational nature. Nonetheless, the plastic nature of the child's freedom is harmed and led astray if it is not helped and guided. Without discipline, a child's freedom becomes more and more like that of a non-rational creature (Without sleep, an adult, too becomes more like a non-rational creature!).

The universe of a child is the universe of imagination-of an imagination which evolves little by little into reason. The knowledge which has to be given to the child, is "knowledge in a state of story, an imaginative grasp of the things of this world." In his task of civilizing the child's mind, therefore, the teacher must progressively tame the imagination to the rule of reason, whilst ever remembering that the tremendous work of the child's intellect, which is endeavoring to grasp the external world, is accomplished under the important and perfectly normal rule of the imagination.

Beauty should be the mental atmosphere and the inspiring power fitted to a child's education, and should be the constant quickening and spiritualizing base of that education. Beauty makes understanding pass quietly through the child's sense-awareness. "It is by virtue of the allure of beautiful things and deeds and ideas that the child can be led and awakened to intellectual and moral life."

II- Dorothy Sayers

The other giant, on whose shoulder I will stand for the purpose of tonight's talk, is I think familiar to you. The great Dorothy Sayers first presented her much-acclaimed essay The Lost Tools of Learning at Oxford University in 1947. Many of you have read this essay, and it has been a cornerstone of Wayside's practical approach to its curriculum and methods.

I first read it at university and was very much affected by its lucidity and penetrating diagnoses of the ills of modern education. It helped me understand why I was frustrated by certain deficiencies of the education I was receiving, even at the university level. During my third year of a philosophy and theology program, I felt I still had no integrated personal and intellectual view of reality. Every class I was taking was interesting, challenging and helped me understand the topic of the course; but every class was very specialized. There was no coagulation or synthesis of knowledge, no ripening of understanding in which the many diverse threads of knowledge come together to form a whole. Where was the big picture? I was beginning to feel short-changed.

When I read Dorothy Sayers' essay, it helped me understand what these confusing deficiencies were, and consequently what direction Catholics needed to take to restore education to its proper form. This vision of education had been accepted in the western world for most of the recorded history. It was a vision of man that crystallized during the high middle ages, although the roots of its philosophy extend back into the mists of time, to whenever human beings began thinking about questions like: What is Man? What is his final end? How best does he reach that final end? As such, what we call classical curriculum was taught in schools for nearly 1500 years, and well into the 20th century, when it was gradually replaced or diluted in favour of modern, pseudo-scientific models.

It bears mentioning that Sayers was not a philosopher by training, or even for that matter, an educator. But then again, very few of the great philosophers or revolutionary thinkers of history have had university degrees. A philosopher, after all, is merely a "lover of wisdom". Like a good scientist, a good philosopher merely requires the disposition of an 8 year old: a keen sense of wonder for the world around him.

That Dorothy Sayers had a wonder and zest for life can be amply found in her entertaining and hugely popular Lord Peter Whimsy detective books. But Sayers also translated the Anglo-Saxon poem The Song of Roland, and did one of the most widely-acclaimed translations of Dante's Divine Comedy. So don't get me wrong: she was no academic lightweight.

Sayers began her essay, The Lost Tools of Learning, with a penetrating reflection on life in modern times, a critical temperature-taking of the status quo (which as Ronald Reagan once pointed out, is Latin for "the mess we're in"!). Let's spend a few minutes with Sayers, and, in a sense, close our eyes and ponder with her these questions:

When we think about the remarkably early age at which the young men went up to university in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit to assume responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs, are we altogether comfortable about that artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day? To postpone the acceptance of responsibility to a late date brings with it a number of psychological complications which, while they may interest the psychiatrist, are scarcely beneficial either to the individual or to society. The stock argument in favor of postponing the school-leaving age and prolonging the period of education generally is that there is now so much more to learn than there was in the Middle Ages. This is partly true, but not wholly. The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects-but does that always mean that they actually know more?

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon the extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at committee meetings, and upon the very great rarity of persons capable of acting as chairmen of committees? And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?

Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere and noticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or how often, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply that he was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which he has already defined them? Have you ever been faintly troubled by the amount of slipshod syntax going about? And, if so, are you troubled because it is inelegant or because it may lead to dangerous misunderstanding?

Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected), but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves? Are you often bothered by coming across grown-up men and women who seem unable to distinguish between a book that is sound, scholarly, and properly documented, and one that is, to any trained eye, very conspicuously none of these things? Or who cannot handle a library catalogue? Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curious inability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular question which interests them?

I believe, like most of you, that television has also been a contributing conspirator in the dumbing down of society. My mother grew up in a small community in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia during the 1950s. Because of its remote location, modern media reached the town relatively late, and it retained for much longer the way of life that the rest of North America was in the process of jettisoning. Like the Bedford Falls in the Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life, everybody knew everybody in McBride. Children could safely play all over town. If a child fell off a bike, or needed a drink, he would just go to the nearest house, where a kind-hearted mother would inevitably take care of his needs.

The calendar was marked with community events, fairs, markets, sports days, and concerts. My mother lived in a small house attached to the town jail, for my grandfather was the RCMP Staff Sergeant serving as town constable. Every Christmas, he would unlock the prisoner of the day, and bring him upstairs to share Christmas dinner with the family, disregarding the policies of bureaucratic officialdom in favour of basic human charity. There seemed to be no worry on the part of the criminal, who was generally just the town drunk or a petty thief, nor of the family, about the propriety of the tradition.

Now I must avoid the impression that life in pre-television McBride was a Norman Rockwell utopia. Human nature was present then just as it is here today. My only point is that McBride, in the years before television, with an old-fashioned school house that taught what would today be regarded as old-fashioned education, seemed to have retained something the rest of modern society had lost, and is now desperately trying to recover. McBride lost its culture of life, by the way, in the early 1960s when TV reception was finally relayed through the mountains to the town, and I am told that within 2 years the old ways of the community were gone.

Modernity lives by many false assumptions, and most of these will only be corrected when we return to a deeper examination of what is good for the human person. But the education of children remains a critical consideration, for the young need formation today. It will be our children who bring about the greater cultural changes of tomorrow, so it is our task to help prepare them to be those apostles and leaders of the third millennium.

So how do we restore to our children an education that fits their needs as citizens and as human persons with physical, spiritual and intellectual dimensions to their being? Echoing the diagnoses if Maritian, Dorothy Sayers writes:

Is not the great defect of our education today-a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned-that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.

The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning, before he began to apply them to "subjects" at all. First, he learned a language; not just how to order a meal in a foreign language, but the structure of a language, and hence of language itself-what it was, how it was put together, and how it worked. Secondly, he learned how to use language; how to define his terms and make accurate statements; how to construct an argument and how to detect fallacies in argument. Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic and Disputation. Thirdly, he learned to express himself in language-how to say what he had to say elegantly and persuasively.

How does the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric appy to the schooling? Sayers took these three stages and humorously termed them the Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic stages. The Grammar, or Poll-Parrot stage is the one in which for the young child memorizing is easy; reasoning is difficult and, on the whole, disliked. At this age, he rapidly memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; likes to recite things like license plate numbers; enjoys chanting rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; and the mere accumulation of things.

The Logic, or Pert stage begins around grade 6 or 7, and is characterized by contradicting, answering back, liking to "catch people" (especially one's elders) in errors especially of logic; and by enjoying riddles and paradoxes. Sayers reminds us that "its nuisance-value is extremely high."

The Rhetoric of Poetic stage kicks in sometime in the upper years of high school. It is popularly known as the "difficult" age. It is, frankly, self-centered; it yearns to express itself; "it rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and with good guidance, it can show the beginnings of creativity; a reaching out towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a deliberate eagerness to know and do a single thing in preference to all others."

Wayside Academy, in its current shape, teaches students who are primarily in the first stage, the grammar stage, or what used to be called grammar school. In our upper grades, our students are beginning to question, to see the relationships between sets of facts, to enter the pert stage. When we eventually have a high school, we will deal with students in all three stages.

So how do we implement a classical curriculum, geared primarily for students in the grammar stage? It involves teaching all subjects with an emphasis on their grammatical properties. In practice, they ought to learn the grammar of some language in particular, and Sayers has the following to say about that:

I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least fifty percent. It is the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents. Latin should be begun as early as possible--at a time when inflected speech seems no more astonishing than any other phenomenon in an astonishing world; and when the chanting of "Amo, amas, amat" is as ritually agreeable to the feelings as the chanting of "eeny, meeny, miney, moe."

Sayers tells us that anything and everything which can be usefully committed to memory should be memorized at this period, whether it is immediately intelligible or not. The modern tendency is to try and force rational explanations on a child's mind at too early an age. Intelligent questions, spontaneously asked, should, of course, receive an immediate and rational answer; but it is a great mistake to suppose that a child cannot readily enjoy and remember things that are beyond his power to analyze-particularly if those things have a strong imaginative appeal.

Although Jacques Maritain wrote some 4 years before Sayers first delivered her essay The Lost Tools of Learning at Oxford University, you can see how their understanding was similar. He understood the stages of learning children naturally go through, although he did not always use the same terms as Sayers. But they both shared a common understanding of the proper means and ends of education.

Tonight I have spoken about many ideals. At Wayside Academy many of these principles are already in practice. But Wayside is, and always will be, a work in progress. There is no exact formula when it comes to educating the human person, because the human person is ultimately a very mysterious creature, made in the image and likeness of a Creator who surpasses the limits of our human understanding. To be successful, I believe that foremost the educator must heed the words of St. Francis de Sales who said: "Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly start remedying them - in every day begin the task anew."

Teaching primarily requires a genuine humility before the immensity of the task, a submission to the will of God in the everyday life of the school, and a holy trust in the economy of God's grace. We must first of all order our lives in prayer if we wish to attain these goals.