Can the Catholic Church Save Education?

There’s a strange ferment underway in American education. This week, two promising Catholic initiatives emerged: a gathering at Christendom College on K-12 education that resulted in the Front Royal Principles, and a high-level consultation in Washington D.C. organized by the Cardinal Newman Society, pursuing the renewal of everything from kindergarten to college-level Catholic instruction. But in recent months, there have been similar efforts for education renewal at secular universities: one from Yale – yes, Ivy-League Yale – addressing the “lack of trust” in higher education, and another convened jointly by Vanderbilt and Washington Universities over the crisis in the humanities. Among the various aims of these studies, the common concern is that much modern education, Catholic and not, is not working and needs to be different – and better.   

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education – an unconstitutional agency (education is not among the “enumerated powers” allotted by the Constitution to the Federal government) – is downsizing and offloading various activities to other agencies. The DOE’s enormous bureaucracy and budget ($250 billion a year) couldn’t help doing some good over the decades, of course. But since it got “woke,” it has also trespassed constitutional limits intended to prevent precisely such abuses: politicizing learning and inserting itself into everything from obsessing over racism in U.S. history to pushing LGBT activism.  

The Yale report (here), written by a faculty committee, provides a kind of skeleton key to everything else. Many people today lament the politicization and bias in university education. What’s not so common is an actual effort to understand – and do something – about a problem that you almost have to willfully choose to ignore. The report was prompted by the need to “regain trust” at a time when high tuitions and dubious campus politics have led many to question the value of education, even at prestigious institutions like Yale. And given the “demographic cliff” – the smaller numbers of young people who are now turning college age – institutions of higher learning need all the help they can get just to survive.

Yale’s president emphasized several salient findings, beginning with “trust needs to be earned.” She pointed out the need for a rigorous admissions process – even the best universities are finding more and more students incapable of basic reading and thinking.  On campus, students often don’t discover openness in classroom discussions: “echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.” Self-censorship results. And grade inflation has further distorted undergraduate study. The committee rightly recommended renewed attention to the liberal arts, the “foundational wisdom. . .that will serve [students] throughout their lives.”

But as the Vanderbilt-Washington University study found, the liberal arts are themselves currently in crisis not least because of a “deterioration in scholarly standards.” It was written by professors drawn from several distinguished institutions who were careful to point out that there’s much good work still being done by their colleagues. But it allows there’s some truth in the widespread complaint that standards have been:

distorted within these disciplines both to privilege work on topics that are taken to be relevant to social justice, and…designed to ensure that only politically acceptable work is published, taught, and valorized. The result of this distortion…is an academic ecosystem in which much of what passes as scholarship in the humanistic disciplines is in fact a mix of tendentious, biased research, feeble academic agitprop, and jargon-laden nonsense.  

Both studies propose reasonable remedies, too reasonable given the depth of the crisis, whose source – and remedy – lie elsewhere.

If there is a solution, it may have to come from the institution that created the university with its emphasis on the proper study of the liberal arts: the Catholic Church.  Bishop of Lincoln, James D. Conley, himself an alumnus of the fabled Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas (suspended after producing too many Catholic converts), writes in the Introduction to the Front Royal Principles, “One cannot teach human beings without a profound understanding of their nature and purpose.” 

He adds: 

Every educational enterprise is ultimately rooted in a particular vision of the human person, an anthropology, and much of contemporary educational thought and pedagogy has been shaped by pragmatic, utilitarian, and secular influences. Catholic education, however, must remain distinct and draw deeply from its intellectual tradition, the Church’s rich understanding of the human person, truth, virtue, and man’s eternal destiny. 

Which gives rise to the seven “Front Royal Principles,” geared to both content and practicality: 1) the supernatural end of education; 2) the nature and dignity of the human person; 3) what children deserve, the rights of parents, and the duties of the state; 4) the ecclesial responsibility of bishops and priests; 5) the formation and responsibilities of teachers and leaders; 6) the integrity and order of the curriculum; and 7) the transmission of a living Catholic culture.

Authentic Catholic education is “a restauratio, healing the wounds of sin to reorder the soul in an ascent from dispersion to unity.”

Patrick Reilly, the Cardinal Newman Society’s president, quoted the great saint to a similar end in remarks at the CNS Leaders’ Summit: “the church’s objective for education,” [Newman] said, is “to reunite things which were in the beginning joined by God and have been put asunder by man.”

Reilly told the assembled educational leaders: “You are restoring the integrity of the soul. . . . As America today is celebrating her 250th anniversary of liberty, we see our nation falling into radical secularism, and even hatred for our Catholic faith. . . . The integrity of Catholics, indeed the integrity of our nation, and of human society, depends on citizenship in the Kingdom of God, as well as our American citizenship. This has a higher law and a supreme lawgiver, who in mercy and grace leads us to the true city of God that the pilgrims thought they could establish here.”

If America is to survive another 250 years – and prepare more souls for Heaven – we have a steep effort at re-education, Catholic and secular alike, ahead of us.