The Soul of the Catholic School

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 42, 25 October 1923, Page 23

The Soul of the Catholic School

llfs : (By J. Edward Coffey, S.J., in America.)

The litany in praise of our “half-of-one-per-cent Oath3pf- olic” is hardly complete without a reference to one of his favorite remarks at commencement time, or on occasions when school problems come up for discussion. He doesn’t •pj believe that Catholic teachers are “sufficiently prepared” ■£i'<^fpr^. the business of education. How few really eminent i|. men and women are. to be found in their ranks 1 How ; 'i\,h noticeable the absence of finished specialists, of efficiencyexperts, of the nicely articulated organisation that so. • highly recommends the secular temples of learning! His «. n boy and girl will be 'jtlaced in- the care of professional educators, just as his money is entrusted to professional . bankers. Now it is proverbially easy to argue with a business man, and our critic certainly professes to be one. But few K • real business - men would allow themselves to be betrayed into the confusion of shadow with substance which characV■ terises his indictment of the Catholic teacher. Bustle and complexity have deceived him. He accepts and applies a / newspaper standard of eminence^and his concept of organisation embraces all the externals of buildings, books and bells, stopping just short of that unity of the curricu- . r ■ ; lum which is all that really matters in education. Is it not a paradox fit for the genial' pen of Mr. Ches- . terton that so much praise should be lavished upon secular , / schools by Catholics, the . while our own are charged with incompetency; whereas our system is the admiration and the envy of sincere educators outside the fold, who do not hesitate to admit their own failure to realise the essential aims of teaching ? One university authority confesses that the schools are “choked with apparatus”; another calls their curricula “an elaborate menu ■ in an unknown tongue”; and a third places the radical difficulty in “the essential fact that we, the teachers, have no philosophy.” Not long ago a Catholic college professor, discussing an item in class-room method with a veteran in the educational department of- one of our largest eastern universities, was somewhat'startled to hear: “Father, reform, if it comes . at all, must come through you religious teachers. We should have to begin all over and fashion ourselves a philosophy.” Finally, let Doctor Meikeljohn remind us that the blessings of material abundance and of perfect business organisation are not really blessings at all where the soul of education, which they are meant to clothe and adorn, is looked for in vain: . “The chief trouble with our teaching to-day is that we haven’t anything to teach. That is why we teach chemistry and physics and botany and economics and mathematics and the rest; we haven’t wisdom to teach. We don’t know what to say about life to-day as our fathers did. We haven’t got the whole body of the curriculum bound together .in terms of a single enterprise in which we are engager!, in which we could take our pupils. . . America to-day, like the countries of Europe and the rest of the j world, America particularly, doesn’t. know what to think about any of the essential features of our human experience. We are lost and mixed up and bewildered, and if you ask what is the matter with our young people, it is just because they know it in their bones, whether they know , it with their minds or not, we haven’t got a gospel, a philosophy, we haven’t in the proper sense of the term any religion to give them. So we touch it here and we touch it there and try to make them believe things that we don’t believe ourselves, and we try to make them do things that w we, don’t know are essential. The task of the leaders- of’ small colleges is to engage again 1 in the attempt to make ■ ..a phijpsophy of life or a. religion, if that is what you call 4"l . it, a scheme of values, a, settled belief, , a formulation of ‘■-v v questions, a feeling of enterprises and appreciations out of which human life may be made a significant and beautiful | and splendid thing. . . But what is essential to all of that is | the making of teachers, teachers for American youth. We . --- _ haven’t • teachers enough, teaching has fallen away into mere instruction. We have got to make teachers who can , take hold of »the youth of America and lead them into the . ' beauty and significance and meaning not only of American life but, of human life as an essentially beautiful thing.” : ’ Surely this is the language of sincerity! And yet, in f , the face of dozens of such confessions, we will remain - blind and dull to the secret of ‘ onr success ns educators, and catch ~ ; •

ourselves paying unwelcome; homage to a system that has lost confidence in its own effectiveness. Far from the thoughts of apologetic Catholics is Newman’s charming compliment to the Church in her office of teacher: “St. Peter has! spoken, and has a claim on us to trust - him. He is no recluse, no. solitary student, no dreamer about the past, no doter upon the dead and'gone, no projector of the visionary. He for 1800 years has lived in the world; he has seen all fortunes, he has encountered all adversaries, he has shaped himself for all emergencies. If ever there was a power on earth who had an eye for the times, who has confined himself , to the practicable,' and has been happy in his anticipations, whose words have been facts, and whose commands prophesies, such is he in the history of ages, who sits from generation to generation in ■ the Chair of the Apostles, as the Vicar of Christ and the Doctor of His Church:’’ ' - . For an eminent proof of this abiding worldly wisdom we need seek no farther than the Catholic school. The interests of Catholic education, ever since it emerged from its kindergarten in the earlier monastery schools, have been cared for by a Saint of God and a Doctor of the Church. The current year is the . 600th anniversary of his canonisation. “The Angel of the Schools,’’ Mother Church ~ loves to call him, and to secular history he is known as Thomas Aquinas. It is the scholastic philosophy to which he gave shape and symmetry, that prepares our Catholic teachers, one and all, directly or indirectly, for their sacred ministry in the class-room. Probably 75 per cent, of American Catholic teachers are formed -in religious seminaries . and houses of studies;’ the major part of the remainder is recruited from Catholic academies and colleges. But every Catholic normal school, within or without the cloister, has its purpose defined and its course outlined by the scholastic ethics and phychology of which St. Thomas is the father and preceptor. Our professors of pedagogy are but his interpreters, and our teachers, from the elementary grades to the university, his pupils. He tells them what a thing of beauty is the soul of a child, and that the school has no other reason for existence than to mould that soul, through its God-given faculties, to the life of the spirit for which it was created. Here we have the most vital of the Angelic Doctor’s instructions to teachers, all science should be the devoted handmaid of true religion. No mere “bundle' of tendencies,” in his eyes, is the urchin who plagues the Sister’s , waking hours, or the sophomore who does the same for Mr. Edison. Here is an intellect that must be shown the whole truth, beginning and ending with God, Who is Truth itself ; here is a will that must be dominated by a gospel of life that is complete and satisfying, St. Thomas has written down that truth and preached' that gospel, and the matter as well as the method of Catholic. teaching are its loyal echoes. - , itc.-w • -'... ■r; •>, In the field of<the arts and sciences there is manifestly no lack of signal scholars among our teachers. We may expect the proportion to grow as an increment in "vocations to the teaching profession affords the leisure requisite for vcontinued study and research. But in defending ourselves against the strictures of our Catholic critics, happily we need not attempt to balance the mighty mass of secular erudition, on every Conceivable subject, with corresponding- , resources of our own. We need but point to a charter that i; dates back to the thirteenth, greatest of centuries.. We need but mention the. soul of. the Catholic school, the schol- ' astic system of life'and thought which has for its father and heavenly patron- St.• Thomas Aquinas, -The essential fact is that we, the teachers, have philosophy. - ---J ; '7 l ' H ;''V y. ' Plate Catholic Works for Blind ■ - A copy of The Faith of Our Fathers, by Cardinal Gibbons, has been plated by the Braille Transcribers Club of the Kenwood Alumna© and presented to the New York • State Library for. its blind readers. ' The presentation was ; through the generosity of Monsignor Glavin of Rensselaer. ' An enthusiastic transcriber who is over sixty years of . age has finished a copy of The Little Office ; of Our Lady-, . which will be used by blind members of the Third Order of St. .Dominic.'; ; > '•' - -■■ •■■■ '. ■ ■ " . ;•.