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Words of Wisdom
Recovering a Catholic Philosophy of Elementary Education
Curtis L. Hancock
Mt. Pocona, Pennsylvania: Newman House Press, 2005
Implicit in the Catholic worldview are the aims of Catholic education: knowledge of what is real; elucidation of what makes us human; judgment about how we ought to live, individually and communally; and explanation of how we human beings through our own choices and actions cooperate with God’s intentions for history. (p.37)
[According to St. Augustine in On the Teacher] Because of divine love, the human mind is so illumined that it is empowered to see in all things a sign of Christ’s divinity and creative power. Things, thought, and language all point to Jesus’ presence and power. Aware of this, the Christian instructor can always point the student toward the things of God, for the content of all we think, say, and know signifies divine truth, the Logos. (p. 47)
Education is about realizing our human potentialities. Education perfects the whole person by developing the students capacities as a rational animal. (p. 52)
[Bishop John] Carroll’s initial campaign for parish schools was motivated by a simple concern. Without Catholic schools or some similar social institution, untold numbers of Catholics would be lost to the Church through intermarriage and what Carroll called “unavoidable intercourses with non-Catholic.” (p. 58 – quoted from Timothy Walch, Parish School: American Catholic Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present, p. 16).
As Catholic teachers, then, we must resist any tendency to oversimplify the teaching task. It is not putting information into the intellect of a passive knower. It is about habituating a whole human being to desire learning so much that he or she will delight in becoming a self-learner. (p. 77)
Newman – University Subjects
Christianity and Letters
Now, before going on to speak of the education, and the standards of education, which the Civilized World, as I may now call it, has enjoined and requires, I wish to draw your attention, Gentlemen, to the circumstance that this same orbis terrarum, which has been the seat of Civilization, will be found, on the whole, to be the seat also of that supernatural society and system which our Maker has given us directly from Himself, the Christian Polity. The natural and divine associations are not indeed exactly coincident, nor ever have been....Christianity waited till the orbis terrarum attained its most perfect form before it appeared; and it soon coalesced, and has ever since co-operated, and often seemed identical, with the Civilization which is its companion. (3)
The medieval sciences [Theology, Law and Medicine], great as is their dignity and utility, were never intended to supersede that more real and proper cultivation of the mind which is effected by the study of the liberal Arts; and, when certain of these sciences did in fact go out of their province and did attempt to prejudice the traditional course of education, the encroachment was in matter of fact resisted. (5)
The grace stored in Jerusalem, and the gifts which radiate from Athens, are made over and concentrated in Rome. This is true as a matter of history. Rome has inherited both sacred and profane learning; she has perpetuated and dispensed the traditions of Moses and David in the supernatural order, and of Homer and Aristotle in the natural. To separate those distinct teachings, human and divine, which meet in Rome, is to retrograde; it is to rebuild the Jewish Temple and to plant anew the groves of Academus. (5)
Elementary Studies
IT has often been observed that, when the eyes of the infant first open upon the world, the reflected rays of light which strike them from the myriad of surrounding objects present to him no image, but a medley of colours and shadows. They do not form into a whole; they do not rise into foregrounds and melt into distances; they do not divide into groups; they do not coalesce into unities; they do not combine into persons; but each particular hue and tint stands by itself, wedged in amid a thousand others upon the vast and flat mosaic, having no intelligence, and conveying no story, any more than the wrong side of some rich tapestry. The little babe stretches out his arms and fingers, as if to grasp or to fathom the many-coloured vision; and thus he gradually learns the connexion of part with part, separates what moves from what is stationary, watches the coming and going of figures, masters the idea of shape and of perspective, calls in the information conveyed through the other senses to assist him in his mental process, and thus gradually converts a calidoscope into a picture. The first view was the more splendid, the second the more real; the former more poetical, the latter more philosophical. Alas! what are we doing all through life, both as a necessity and as a duty, but unlearning the world's {332} poetry, and attaining to its prose! (Proemium)
