I love Catholic education for two main reasons: First, it is my home field so to speak, as a Catholic educator in the classical model. Second, it’s a good topic since good Catholic education is needed to accrue social capital.
In his book “Renewing Catholic Schools: How to Regain a Catholic Vision for a Secular Age,” Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila articulates that Catholic education sought to “innovate” and abandon its 2,000-year educational model rooted in the classics and adopt secular teaching methods. The result was a catastrophe. Enrollment plummeted and schools closed across the country. Now, as we see throughout the West, the collapse of the Catholic school system has gone hand in hand with the spiritual poverty Mother Teresa warned was more deadly than the material poverty she witnessed in Calcutta.
So what can we do? British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once said that “the postmodern believes he rarely finds things he loves, always finds something gone wrong, something hateful even, and you’ve got to mobilize against it.” To restore Catholic education, we must instead be more like Scruton’s vision of how man ought to be, the man who “looks around himself finding things that he loves and thinks ‘well those things are threatened, they’re vulnerable, I’ve got to protect them.’”
As St. Thomas Aquinas once said, “Wonder is the desire for knowledge.” Our educational institutions should protect and love this wonderful heritage of centuries of grasping for the transcendent, where a genuine sense of delight and satisfaction can be found in pondering the mysterious questions of who God is and why He deemed to create.
Stephen Thomas is the middle school history teacher at St. Michael School in Gastonia.