Observations on the Reform of Catholic High School Education

Matthew Briel, Head of School

A friend in the Catholic school world recently asked me what one should do if he finds himself on a desert island. The answer: establish a classical school because three people will immediately find you and tell you what you’re doing wrong. There is wisdom in the old Italian saying “don’t make what’s better be the enemy of the good.” With those caveats in mind, I would like to outline what I believe the best Catholic classical schools are doing but perhaps aren’t articulating in four parts: 1. I will offer a critique of the common Great Books pedagogy; 2. I will distinguish the immediate and final goals of education 3. I will discuss the role of the imagination, as understood by Lewis and Tolkien, in attaining the immediate end of education; and 4. I will discuss how an earlier understanding of imagination, that of Aristotle and Aquinas, can prepare the ground for the ultimate goal of education.

The Background

The past forty-five years have seen an enormous reform in private education. Beginning in the early 1980s, Christian classical schools began offering something like Great Books programs alongside Latin and Greek study. The curricula of these classical schools seem to have been inspired by programs at the University of Chicago, St. John’s College and Notre Dame, among others. This was a significant improvement over mainstream education. Graduates of these Great Books schools are very well prepared for undergraduate study.

For the past twenty years, many Catholic schools have changed to a trivium and quadrivium program that combines the Great Books idea with the ancient and medieval codification of the liberal arts. The aim of many of these schools is explicitly “to make saints.” Many of these have been successful in changing their curriculum and drawing in new students.

Indeed, many new Catholic classical schools have popped up as well. Seventy Chesterton Academies have been founded since 2008 and are an important part of this reform of education. Alumni of these schools are, for the most part, very well prepared for college and, more importantly, are grounded in the faith. They are a delight to teach as undergraduates. It has been one of my greatest pleasures to teach alumni from these schools who know their faith, can write and read well, and have a depth and breadth of reading that can no longer be expected of most college freshmen.

I. The Danger of Great Books

This may shock classical school educators and parents, but I want to argue that there is a danger in accepting the Great Books premise of reading, in Matthew Arnold’s words, “the best that has been thought and said in the world” (Culture and Anarchy). Or, in another phrasing, the University of Chicago’s tag from Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, “entering the great conversation.”

In his well-known First Things article, Patrick Deneen argues that many of the later texts in a chronological Great Books curriculum are “the very source of the decline of the study of great books.” That is, the later great books (such as Bacon’s Novum Organum) argue specifically against the reading of great books!

There is another, perhaps more dangerous risk, as well as a missed opportunity, in younger students pursuing a Great Books education. At its core the standard Great Books approach has an Enlightenment anthropology. We expose students to “the great conversation” with all its pitfalls, and leave the student to make what sense he can of it in a community of other readers.

Two aspects (at least) seem important here. First, according to the Enlightenment vision, we are not fallen, and therefore our minds do not need illumination. That is, we do not need to be saved from ignorance and blindness. This makes the whole intellectual enterprise a very different one from the Catholic pedagogical tradition with its attention to original sin. Second, the idea of the atomic individual is present, one who is abstracted from any particular social or historical context, and who can dispassionately examine, from a position of supposed objectivity, the various ideas and visions of the world presented to him. This is essentially a position of pride; but it also assumes what can never be: that of a position of neutrality from which the individual can decide between competing accounts of reality as if he is not already deeply enmeshed on one or another mode of looking at things. The result of these assumptions too often is to foster a critical spirit that sees around every corner, that criticizes every possible view of things, and that leaves its sceptic possessor with cynicism or despair.

Rather than a Great Books approach, I propose that a Catholic school’s main task is to form students in a vision of reality permeated by the Incarnation. It is a sacramental vision that recognizes that “the world is charged by the grandeur of God” (Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”).

Abstract or theoretical philosophy and dogmatic theology have a role here, but they are subordinate or play supporting, ordering, roles to the main task of forming the Catholic Imagination.

II. The Immediate and Final Goals of Education

While it must be acknowledged that the purpose of the Church’s apostolate is ultimately sanctification, not all apostolates have this as an immediate goal. There is a danger in collapsing the Church’s educational apostolate into “making saints.” While the goal of Benedictine study in the Middle Ages was, as Jean LeClercq argued, to better understand scripture and thereby to search for God, for most students salvation is the ultimate, not immediate, telos. What LeClercq argued as the immediate end of liberal arts study for the monks is the true final goal for all Catholic education. However, we must acknowledge that it is the final, not the immediate end of education outside of monasteries. Indeed, salvation is the final end of all human activities- farming, engineering, banking, politics and family life. The danger in promoting a school as a saint-making institution is that we might lose sight of what Newman called the “very tangible, real and sufficient” end of liberal education- knowledge (Idea of a University, Discourse 5). (Newman, of course, was speaking of university education. But it is important to note that undergraduates at his Catholic University of Ireland would begin their liberal arts degree at 16 and finish at 18 or 19- that is, they were the equivalent of our high school juniors and seniors).

There is a dual aim in all apostolates, including education. In their work in hospitals, refugee camps, schools, and think-tanks Catholics are undertaking good, human work that “penetrates and perfects the temporal order” (Apostolicam Actuositatem). Catholic doctors want to heal the patients in front of them, workers in migrant camps want to improve the lives of those they are serving, and writers in think-tanks want to work towards justice. At the same time, whenever the Church is involved in what we normally conceive of as “secular work” she has an apostolic angle. So, the immediate end of Catholic liberal education is knowledge and, Newman argues, specifically to gain the ability to imagine, to see, the whole of reality. The ultimate end of education, as of all apostolates, must be in some sense, as some Catholic schools claim, “to make saints.” However, I will argue it is a little bit less than that, or that there is an important, immediate end to education.

III. How Tolkien, Lewis, and O’Connor Can Help Us Understand the Immediate Goal of Education

For Newman, the end of liberal education is seeing the whole of reality. Philosophical knowledge (not the academic discipline of philosophy) is a form of knowledge that synthesizes the views of particular disciplines into a coherent vision of all of reality. Catholic schools ought to pass on this vision of things. For Lewis and Tolkien, this synthesis is best accomplished through the imagination. Lewis, influenced by Coleridge, treats the imagination as genuinely productive. It doesn’t just relay sense data upwards- it actively unifies disparate experiences into meaningful wholes. It is a vital, unifying power. And it works through particulars.

We can move from here to a sort of reciprocity between the abstract and the particular. While the vision of the whole is acquired through particulars, the whole helps us better see the particulars. There is a parallel with the relationship between scripture and doctrine. One who studies doctrine without scripture is studying the skeleton of a dead animal. One who studies scripture without some sort of doctrinal framework is studying a living creature without a skeleton- like a slime mold. This relationship between the abstract (and doctrine is a true abstraction of scripture) and the particular, is true also of the relationship between doctrine and all of reality.

As Flannery O’Connor writes of the Catholic novel:

What we call the Catholic novel is not necessarily about a Christianized or Catholicized

world, but simply that it is one in which the truth as Christians know it has been used as a

light to see the world by. This may or may not be a Catholic world” (“Catholic Novelists

and their Readers”).

Later in the same essay she claims that

…dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality…The Catholic fiction writer is entirely

free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of God or to create a new universe.

He feels perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly what he

sees…open and free observation is founded on our ultimate faith that the universe is

meaningful, as the Church teaches.

For Catholics, doctrine illuminates what we see and the particulars make present and clarify, in some sense, the doctrine. This seems to me essential to a Catholic imaginative vision that also makes clear that we are in need of Christ’s light (Oxford’s motto from Psalm 26- Dominus illuminatio mea). Here we also overcome the Enlightenment’s philosophically naïve “objective” viewpoint which is really a self-deception. Catholics have a distinctive, if capacious, vision of reality. Submission to the Magisterium’s proclamations of doctrine is also a cure to the pride inherent in the anthropology of most Great Books programs.

IV. Aristotle and Aquinas’ Understanding of Imagination Essential for the Final Goal of Education

At the same time that Tolkien and Lewis’s understanding of imagination is essential to forming Catholics, the Aristotelian and Thomistic sense of imagination is essential for students to choose to grow in their faith. If the final end of any human activity is salvation, it is here that formal education can play a significant role. Before getting to Aquinas and Aristotle, however, I think that an insight from Aristotelian John Henry Newman could be helpful. Later in life Newman distinguished between real (concrete) and notional (abstract) knowledge. The distinction can already be seen in his Anglican Oxford University Sermons (1843) and in the quote from his Tamworth Reading Room (1841) that one so often sees in Catholic faculty offices:

Deductions have no power of persuasion. The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.

We can see the importance of the concrete, impressions of which are formed by the imagination. It is the imagination that presents the good we should strive for. If Aristotle and Aquinas are correct, the imagination is both essential and central to changing lives. Doctrines and philosophy order that knowledge and can never be left behind in our pursuit of the absolute. However, it is more important to faculty than to students to have that abstract knowledge of philosophy. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that most of the time given to traditional philosophy in a Catholic classical school ought to be given to literature and history, and that courses in Catholic doctrine should be less abstract and more literary and historical.

While it is important that the teachers arrange their students’ engagements with particulars (art, history, biology, literature, scripture) according to the ordered Catholic vision of reality, the students would be best served by being guided, in an ordered way, to a deeper engagement with particulars, because saints and sinners (whether studied in history or literature), landscapes, poetry, music and art make impressions on the imagination. We learn to live a good life by imitation. A central intellectual task for a student to develop in high school is how doctrines, which, again, are true abstractions from scripture, can be seen embodied, incarnated, in particular lives.

It is important to note that a Catholic school doesn’t inculcate virtue directly. Indeed, MacIntyre once quipped that if you want to be virtuous don’t study the Nicomachean Ethics, or, God forbid, After Virtue; rather, become a sailor or a fire fighter. That’s true in a sense. Sanctification is the task of Christ accomplished through the Church. However, by forming imaginations with a goal of Newman’s real knowledge, we are giving them a sense of the good- an object for the will, or something to aim for. They are free, of course, to accept or reject this. It is hoped that by presenting students with the beauty of lives well-lived (which on the surface might be very ugly) they will be inspired to imitate them. But it is ultimately up to the student to accept or reject this vision. The task of the school, it seems to me, is like John the Baptist’s: “to prepare the way of the Lord.”

I hope that many Catholic classical schools are doing this, although they have not articulated how this subverts the modern Great Books programs. It is not that we bring the students into a “great conversation” but rather that we judiciously use “the best that has been thought and said in the world” (including pagan and “heretical” texts but with a preponderance of Catholic texts) to both form and bring students to a Catholic vision of reality. It is in pursuing this intermediate goal that we aid in preparing the soul (St. Maximus Confessor’s “preparatory disposition”- ἐπιτηδειότης) for God to make saints.