Catholic
Culture:
Passing On Wisdom
 What are we doing? In today’s confusing, demanding world, Catholic
educators must frequently ask this question of themselves. Standards,
tests, mandates, accreditation, programs, parents, students, board
members, pull us this way and that all the time. But what is
our goal? How can we steer a consistent path to that goal?
In our pluralistic society, Catholic schools have a unique goal: to
pass on wisdom—not just knowledge, but wisdom. Ideally,
all schools share this aim, but the sad reality is that most have lost
any vision of what makes human life really worth living. Catholic
schools, however, have the great privilege and blessing of forming
their students in the accumulated wisdom of the Church. The result
of our commitment to it will be truly free adults who can lead the
best human life possible as they prepare for the divine life to come.
Assimilation of Culture
[A school is] a place of integral formation by means of a systematic
and critical assimilation of culture. A school is, therefore, a privileged
place in which, through a living encounter with a cultural inheritance,
integral formation occurs. [The Catholic School,
n.26]
As this quote from the Sacred Congregation for Catholic
Education points out, the primary instrument of education and formation
in a school is a culture. No one student or educator can sort through
the diverse visions of the good, true, and beautiful that assault us
everywhere in the “marketplace of ideas.” This is where culture
comes into the picture. A developed, lasting, impressive
culture is one that has encountered the whole, diversified experience
of human activities, and, from this, is able to provide a unified wisdom.
As Catholics, we are blessed to be the inheritors of a rich, beautiful,
rational yet mysterious, transcendent yet fully human, culture that
has developed over 2000 years. Our greatest task as Catholic
educators is to form students who will be at home in that culture,
who will draw on it throughout their lives, share it with others, and
enrich it with the blessings of contemporary life.
The role of culture is so critical to education that recent Magisterial
documents identify “cultural pluralism,” the idea that all cultures are
of equal value, as the greatest challenge facing education today. So,
those of us entrusted with the responsibility of Catholic education have
to reflect on the culture we are passing on in our Catholic schools. Is
it a truly Catholic culture, or has our unique culture been replaced
by a secular one? Do we understand where and how our Catholic culture
is rooted? We will address this in next month’s article.
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