People choose Catholic education for many reasons. Some families choose it for excellence in academic instruction. Some choose it for the tight-knit community. Some choose it so their children will be taught according to a moral compass with an emphasis on virtue.
Most families choose it to assist them in forming their children in the Catholic faith. It helps fulfill the promises they made for their child at Baptism, giving back to God what he gave to them.
While all these reasons for choosing Catholic education are good, it is for this last reason that Catholic schools truly exist – to assist parents in the formation of their child, the whole child: body, mind and soul to be able to know, love and serve God.
All children begin seeking truth from the age of reason, usually around age 6 or 7, and throughout those early years the natural curiosity and desire to learn is paramount. Anyone with a 4-year-old child can testify to this when they recall the number of “why” questions they must answer.
Most forms of education throughout the world have included what are known as the seven liberal arts as a basis for the educational framework they utilize. We can credit the Catholic Church, specifically the monastic orders of the Middle Ages, for reviving the ancient Greek’s process for seeking truth and reason in the world around them and passing knowledge from one generation to another in a formal way.
Initially only available to the wealthy and ruling classes, formal education evolved into the university system and later to schools for younger children. In the United States, Catholic education and parochial schools were developed to assist parents in overcoming religious prejudice and persecution, and to ensure the faith was handed on to children properly according to Catholic teaching.
The ancients before Jesus – while recognizing an implicit philosophy as a starting point for human reason that melded both logically and ethically toward right reason – could not reach the higher levels of knowledge they sought. Why? Because God had not yet sent his Son as his Word made flesh. Without the revelation that comes through Jesus, natural reason cannot reach the higher levels of knowledge that the mind seeks.
In their writings, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine and later, in more detail, Saint Thomas Aquinas and others illustrated these truths by examining the good work of the ancients and realizing that the barrier was an inadequate understanding of what truth is, and the revelation that truth isn’t a thing, but rather a person.
In the Last Supper discourses, Jesus tells Thomas, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” This requires faith and encompasses more than just the understanding of spiritual things; it offers an understanding of all of God’s created world.
The work of these many saints and scholars largely has been responsible for the Church’s understanding of what has come to be known as the Catholic Intellectual Tradition – the contributions and mutual influence of both faith and reason to be used in education and in life.
Many popes have taught accordingly. In his encyclical “Fides et Ratio (On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason),” Saint John Paul II illustrated the importance of this relationship in our world and our specific time. We must search for understanding through use of reason, seeking a truth that transcends us.
He reminds us, “Yet this knowledge refers back constantly to the mystery of God, which the human mind cannot exhaust but can only receive and embrace in faith. Between these two poles, reason has its own specific field in which it can enquire and understand, restricted only by its finiteness before the infinite mystery of God.”
Education of the young cannot reach its full potential without reference to God, the Creator and Redeemer. Seventeen encyclicals on Catholic education have been written since the early 1800s.
The Holy Spirit is trying to get our attention, wanting us to take notice of the value of the young souls searching for truth, searching for God. Let the little children come to him. Mary, Seat of Wisdom, pray for us.