Brett Salkeld writes, “Teaching students what to think without teaching them how to think is dangerous and irresponsible.” In his book “Educating for Eternity: A Teacher’s Companion for Making Every Class Catholic,” Salkeld makes an argument for Catholic education that goes beyond the utilitarian preparation for employment and trains a student to think like a Catholic. Salkeld is a theologian for the Archdiocese of Regina, Saskatchewan, in Canada. He lives in Regina with his wife Flannery and their seven children.
Charlie Camosy: I imagine that your book is responding to a particular need. What is your sense of how “Catholic” Catholic education actually is in U.S. Catholic schools?
Brett Salkeld: I think there is a huge spectrum here. I hear intriguing stories all the time about great teachers, great schools and great programs, and I also hear laments about schools with no real sense of Catholic identity. There’s no doubt that there are real challenges on this front. But there are also lots of people who are deeply committed to making their Catholic schools genuinely Catholic. I want to do anything I can do to support them.
Toward that end, my book is about teaching every subject from a Catholic point of view. That’s not the only thing necessary to deepen the Catholic identity of a school, of course, but it is an increasingly important one, especially as the cultural default position – on a whole range of issues – has less and less in common with a Catholic perspective.
It is very easy to imagine that there is some “neutral” position from which subjects might be taught and that teaching from a Catholic position compromises the purity of the subject area. The truth is, though, we are always teaching from some point of view or other; there is no neutral.
The education we provide is aimed at some good, or set of goods, whether we have taken the time to be intentional about this or not. In a Catholic school, the final aim of education is communion with God. This does not mean we are not also aimed at objectives like gainful employment or responsible citizenship, but those goods are seen in proper perspective when they are not imagined to be the ultimate reasons for an education. In fact, seeking God first protects these other goods from becoming idols.
Camosy: Chapter four has a bold title: “Catholicism Makes Everything Interesting.” Could that possibly be the case?
Salkeld: Ha! Yes, I certainly think so. I mean, one reason I am Catholic is because a Catholic worldview makes reality so intriguing. The conviction that there is such a thing as truth, that we humans can know true things, and that the truth of things matters is essential for developing curiosity. If truth is inaccessible or nonexistent, then why study anything except for your own material advantage? Getting a job is good, but it’s hardly enough to excite a student about chemistry. An education that is aimed only at acquiring worldly goods is boring. The pursuit of transcendent matters like goodness, truth and beauty is always exciting.
More than this, as I argue in the chapter you mention, things like science and history do not even come to exist, at least as we understand them, without the worldview imparted by the Bible – especially the doctrine of creation. The existence of science and history seems so straightforward to us as to not require any explanation, but in truth, it’s only a Christian worldview that makes them seem that way. So, it is not simply that Christianity makes science or history exciting, though it certainly does that; it is rather that the Christian worldview made them possible.
Camosy: Some readers might be a bit skeptical about the “Science” chapter – especially if they think of faith and science as opposed to each other.
Salkeld: The science chapter is key, precisely because of this attitude. Teachers are going to face students who have been taught by popular culture to think of science and faith as opposed.
One of the things I do in this chapter is to walk through some of the history of the development of science and show that the roots of what we call modern science are in fact theological.
Modern science emerges when and where it does because of a whole set of presuppositions about reality, and our capacity to know about it, that were worked out by scholastic theologians in the high Middle Ages. Something like the theory of evolution, for example, is a great example of what those theologians called “secondary causality.”
This was a way of distinguishing God’s action (primary) from the natural actions of the created order (secondary).
Of course, it’s a mistake to jump from this perfectly legitimate distinction to the conclusion that there is no need for any causality beyond that found in the natural order, as contemporary atheism tends to do. That order cannot account for itself. But recognizing that the question “why is there anything at all?” is a different kind of question than “how did this thing become the kind of thing it is?” was essential for the development of a scientific worldview.
Catholic science teachers need to be equipped to have these kinds of conversations because it is often in science class where students’ biggest questions about faith come to light. In a
Catholic school, science teachers need to be experts in science, but also in the relationship between science and faith.
There is a real opportunity right now to put forth a positive vision of education, and of the human person, that will resonate with many parents and communities seeking something better for their kids.
Charles Camosy teaches moral theology and bioethics at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.