Celebrate the Flourishing of Authentic Catholic Education

 
As a veteran educator approaching “retirement” several years ago, I  lamented any failures in ensuring faithful Catholic school environments, and this included public settings despite the obvious barriers.  Today, though, Let us  rejoice that a plethora of authentically Catholic education credentialing degrees, instructional models, associations, co-ops, and resources have emerged to the point of joyfully overwhelming me with the Good News.      

Many prayers for our novice Catholic teachers and for the wisdom of veteran educators as they start a new school year.  Though blessed to help instruct my grandchildren in a home setting, I empathize with both the Catholic parent and the educator seeking a wholesome Catholic learning environment.  Wholly faithful  curriculum and instruction is ever assailed by so-called sage pundits, inside and outside the Church, and secular ghosts still haunt many parochial school corridors.   These include false reliance on more (government) money; proportionally inappropriate demand for extracurriculars and high tech to attract both Catholics and nonCatholics (though not necessarily for evangelization), and the closeting—sometimes literally—of a confident, competent Catholic identity.     However, on a most hopeful note, I observe strong movements towards the fullness of Truth and Love and sense a tsunami of renewed Catholic schooling in the model of  the original founders focussed on the good, true,  and beautiful.  Most critically, Catholic leaders are once again emphasizing vocation—a calling or summons—over careerism; the classical over common core; and tests of Faith over test scores.  These endeavors are uniting Catholic families and forming trustworthy Catholic schools across the nation.   Moreover, students are rising to the higher expectations.

 
Opportunities include an array of classical education schools, Chesterton Academies, the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, an abundance of networking homeschool curriculum and instruction, the Lincoln, Nebraska Archdiocese school support model (though many others are following suit), numerous Catholic educators providing Catholic education scaffolding and teacher development, and so many online tutorials.   Pontifex University  for Catholic school administrators is another exemplary offering. Then there is FIRE Foundation which originated in Kansas to provide Catholic education for students with special needs, now in Denver.  Truly, Catholic education is re surging, ironically ensuring no one is left behind.  And no more union labels.  Healthy Catholic education embraces the unity label to paraphrase Bishop James Conley.  Still, further advancement will succeed by recalling and avoiding those traps that stalled and even harmed Catholic education for several decades.

 
Background:  

At one time teaching was considered a vocation from the Latin “vocatio”—to call or summon.  Multitudes of Saints dating back to the Church Fathers and including Church Doctors but also ”simple servants” like St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and, in our time St. Mother Teresa, answered without regard to cost or hardship. Then, there grew a proliferation of religious orders of nuns who liven in convents nearby to their Catholic schools, as well as male congregations of Brothers and priests dedicated to educating youth. In the earlier 20th Century, most families belonged to a parish with a school.  Enrollment was a given, literally,  or at least for modest tuition, as little as $50 per family annually.   Those school sites significantly decreased for myriad reasons, including population decline, fractured families, and migration. Fewer religious vocations too frequently resulted in well intentioned but increasingly poorly catechized laity that filled the vacuum of most of the Catholic schools from teachers to administration.  Then, the spirit of “professionalism’ bumped piety.   As tuition costs exploded, Catholic schools began to compete with the concepts of charter and magnet public schools.   At times, banners boasting STEM or academic excellence overshadowed the school’s Saint’s name and mission.  A nonCatholic science whiz might have joined the faculty instead of a very capable but less lettered solidly Catholic teacher.   Catholic school leaders also boasted not of Catholic enriched environments but of well-disciplined learning centers with the understanding that the mischievous or learning different would be excluded or expelled.  Also as religious teaching orders dwindled, a spirit of competition for the best among the secular credentialed teachers grew.  Hundreds of Catholic schools today also imitate the public sector in compensation and benefits though still below their government funded packages.  This has fostered temptation and envy rather than temperance and charity. 

Now, it is imperative to boldly interject that any employee, including those in the Church, should be justly compensated, along with health insurance, sick leave, and retirement plans.  And we seek to have more males in the schools as well, but being a breadwinner while maintaining healthy family formation can be most daunting.  Still,  I would be remiss, as a decades long teacher in five states, coast to coast,  if I failed to cite the aura of entitlement that also seeped into the Catholic schools. Employees began to imitate their more secular colleagues in financial expectations, leniency about use of “sick” leave, and an aversion to any critical evaluations.  

However, along with the intentional and explicit return to authentically Catholic education is the calling for competent candidates who are vocationally inspired and virtuously driven to teach in or administer robust Catholic schools.  Rather than merely being agents of macro change, continuously formed educators are oriented to the whole well being of the person, to be elicitors of a child’s innate abilities while tempering faults and imperfections.  However, it is not just teachers being “summoned.”

In broader outreach, whole parishes are being invited to partner with these settings, financially and otherwise.  On Archdiocese levels, Bishops appeal for a prudent spirit that encourages generosity in time and personal involvement.  For example, how many in all Parishes, even those without an immediately joining school, may be retired educators who could contribute a few hours every week or substitute for nominal compensation?  Tutors are always welcome, especially for the growing number of students with special needs.  Speaking of retirees, not everyone has to have an education credential to assist or volunteer.  Playground supervision, lunch room duty, creating a classroom bulletin board, after school care, etc,  are all “callings”—opportunities to tithe with talent and time.  Other avenues include regular stipends from parishioners—counting also owners of businesses— for a family tuition fund. At the very least, everyone can pray and explicitly promote Catholic education, advocating to strengthen the weakest schools.  (See The Ten Red Flags of Catholic schools in trouble., recently published by the Cardinal Newman Society).   

Let  us rejoice that there is a bright light in the tunnel and work together to enable our youth to prosper here but most importantly in eternity.