At this time of year, many students and teachers – including those of us who sincerely love and enjoy the ongoing pursuit of knowledge – feel that the ubiquitous signs advertising bargains for “back to school” sales shout something akin to “time to return to work.” But taken literally, the word for “school” actually comes from the Greek word for “leisure,” as spending time in philosophical studies or contemplating history was seen in the ancient world as a luxury, distinct from the monotony of labor for sustenance or profit or political advancement.
Education still scrambles the highly problematic production/consumption binary, which belittles the plenitude of the human experience, reducing us to mere buyers and sellers, makers and takers. It tells us that there is benefit in knowledge for its own sake, outside of utilitarian ends. Jesus’ most “productive” years for the history of humanity were not spent in the carpenter’s workshop peddling furniture, but rather as an itinerant homeless person, with neither a foxhole nor nest to lay his head (cf. Mt 8:20) and as a despised and dejected criminal, under the boot of an overbearing state and a caste of falsehearted high priests distorting religious fervor. And well before Pontius Pilate’s insincere framing of the classic question, the human race has asked itself, “What is Truth?” Education is nothing if not the lifelong dedication to this timeless inquiry.
No one can deny that the Church has been educating people for two millennia. First and foremost, this holistic learning was offered in terms of the Gospel and the revolutionary demands placed by Jesus Christ upon his followers – the chief one of which was, according to Saint John, to love one another. I see no possible interpretive gymnastics where one can look at history or current events and contort oneself to paint us believers as living up to that charge. I suppose that is why every liturgy opens with the Confiteor and every Easter season opens with Lent. We have built the reality of our shortcomings into our weekly and yearly calendars, and tick the boxes rather routinely. But that should not let us off the hook to work unceasingly so that it not be so.
Catholics have, however, long seen the primary mission of educating people about the Good News to be intimately connected with and concretely present in the secondary mission of educating people to read and write and add and subtract and perform root canals and design skyscrapers and defend the innocent (and guilty) in courts of law and accompany the dying. As someone who has been uninterruptedly involved in Catholic education from kindergarten through doctoral studies through the path to my current role as a tenured professor of theology, my worldview has been profoundly shaped by this Lebenswelt (“life world”); the sum total of every aspect of my familial, social, professional and personal experiences is somehow intertwined with Catholic education.
Today I read a lot of pessimistic reflections focused on the turmoil and upheaval in this pedagogical landscape. I lament alongside some of these voices the loss of familiar cultural touchstones and the sometimes shocking dearth of catechetical formation in many pockets of young adults. But I lay the blame for this Sturm und Drang not at the feet of a wayward and apathetic millennial generation, but rather at those of us teachers, parents, pastors and world leaders who have failed them by our hypocrisy and complacency and haughtiness in trying to dictate to them what causes they should care about or how they should react to the challenges with which we have saddled them. It is, in fact, a poor pedagogical craftsman who blames his students’ social media accounts.
In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato “educates” those who mistake flickering shadows for reality, for after the protagonist escapes to see that more exists in the terra firma beneath the actual sun than he had ever dreamed, he returns to attempt “to lead the others out,” (which is a close approximation of the literal meaning of ex-ducere). For this benevolence, the prisoners – who still prefer their familiar distractions over the painful journey to become acclimatized to unknown terrain above – decide to offer him the reward bestowed on most prophets, namely a violent and resentful execution.
The difference undoubtedly lies in whether or not the educator with the duty to re-enter the cave on a daily basis is autocrat or emancipator, tyrant or co-traveler, “the instrument to bring about conformity or freedom,” as philosopher Paulo Freire puts it. Catholic education at its best encourages the learner in every context to be more authentically him- or her-self, and so “to have life and have it more abundantly.” (John 10:10)
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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