In this issue, the Catholic Herald focuses on a remarkable experiment: the American Regina Academies and the way that they are putting into effect the principles that Dorothy L Sayers identified in her 1947 lecture, “The Lost Tools of Learning”. The gist of her lecture is that it is more important to equip children how to think than to teach them many subjects and she identifies the medieval tools of grammar, logic and dialectic/rhetoric as the way to do it.
By helping them to understand how language works, to identify tendentious arguments and to make good arguments, she wanted to enable children to deal with the complexities of the world, and in particular, false and misleading propaganda. She would have had no doubt what to make of its new incarnation: fake news, social media and online manipulation of our appetites. The essay is accessible online; it’s worth reading as a bracing Christian articulation of what education is for.
Notwithstanding brave endeavours like the Regina Academies, Catholic education, certainly in Britain, Ireland and North America, is not in conspicuously good heart. The very fact that so many Americans identify as former Catholics is a dismal reflection on the Catholic schools that formed them; those schools are significantly less popular than a couple of generations ago. American Catholic universities are another matter: the vitality of the Church in America owes a great deal to institutions such as Notre Dame – which is, incidentally, sending a couple of bright interns to the Herald this summer.
In Britain, Catholic schools educate over 825,000 children and make up ten per cent of the total of state schools, but many of those who attend or attended Catholic schools do not practice their faith or understand it. As for Ireland, the number of schools with church management has done nothing to stem the alienation of young people from the Church. Sayers insisted that learning things by heart early on was quite compatible with teaching children to think independently. One thing children could return to learning by heart is the Catechism – simply as a starting point.
Many British Catholics were formed in monastic or Jesuit public schools. Two are undergoing traumatic change: Benedictine monks have left Downside, and the education secretary banned Ampleforth College from taking new pupils after an unfavourable Ofsted report of its safeguarding regime. The prohibition is now lifted but Ofsted observes that safeguarding pupils from potential abuse by adults is not yet “embedded” in its practice. Of course, it is welcome that Church schools are subjected to close scrutiny by independent inspectors but it is dispiriting that the very thing that parents once wanted for their children – proximity to and tuition from the monks – is now seen as a problem.
Catholic schools are part of the wider culture – they were among those identified on a British social media platform, Everyone’s Invited, where girls complained of being subjected to sexual harassment by boys, in and out of school. It’s not a new issue, but unquestionably, online pornography has dehumanised perceptions of sex, especially among boys’.
How schools teach children about mature relationships while respecting Catholic norms of sexual conduct is especially pertinent now that schools have to teach Relationships and Sex Education. At the very least, Catholic sexual ethics imply respect for the other person. There must be a culture of openness in schools whereby pupils can discuss social and emotional issues within a framework of clear moral values; schools must also have a pastoral network in which there is someone pupils can go to about their concerns.
These are all disparate challenges but at heart there lies the question of identity: what is Catholic education for? The old joke – that ordinary schools prepare pupils for life; a Catholic school prepares them for death – is not far off the truth. Further, what a Catholic school does, or should do, is inculcate respect for human dignity, because we are all made in God’s likeness. This aim is of course compatible with Dorothy L Sayers’ insistence that “the true end of education is to teach men to learn for themselves”. In short, what Catholic educators need now is radicalism: to return to their roots.
This article appears in the May issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe now.
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