Tag Archives: Education

What is to be done?

07 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in Education, Faith, Politics

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Lenin’s famous booklet, What is to be done? argued that the proletariat would not be radicalised simply though activities designed to secure better pay and conditions. He was right; they weren’t. By extension, one might assert that Catholics have not been converted through an emphasis on how the Church deals with social and economic problems. Indeed, it would be interesting to know how many converts came into the Church because of its social teaching? That is not to say that such teaching is not important, nor to deny the Gospel imperative to help the poor, but it is to suggest that such an emphasis lies to one side of what brings people to Christianity and to the Catholic Church.

Social and economic concerns provides a point of openness to the world, but is not solely the concern of the Churches; if we provide nothing more than what the world can provide, then why would anyone go the extra mile to join a Church?

We either provide a remedy for the spiritual ills of the world, or we are wasting our time, which would be better employed helping those many agencies whose reason for being lies in tackling such ills. We can provide a reason for a bias toward the poor, and we can, do, and should, insert a moral dimension to what might otherwise be a rather utilitarian approach to the poor. We help because they are our brothers and sisters, not because they are suitable objects for our social engineering or because helping them would be a salve to our consciences. We help them because Christ tells us we should.

All of which is to say that while we can rightly concern ourselves with some of the things that are Caesar’s. we do not speak with special authority in those realms; men and woman can do good via working in them, but they do not become more Christ-like by so doing.

A sense of brokenness haunts us. We have many names for that internal emptiness which assaults our most private moments, and we have developed a rich language of therapy to help each other, not to mention a multi-billion pound pharmaceutical industry. Yet with all of that, the problem persists and, like death, is universal.

The purpose of Christian culture is to inculturate the people of the world with the culture of the Kingdom of God, and helping others is simply part of that wider culture. The Good News is that we do not need to get what we deserve. In no way do I “deserve” salvation. I cannot earn it through right belief or orthopraxis. If I were judged by the standards even of this world, I would be lost. But I have a great advocate in Christ, who has paid the price for me.

I am saved by His sacrifice, and I am being saved by it, and at the last I hope that I shall be saved, and that in my way of living I can evidence what He has done for me. If my Faith has no fruits then it is in vain; if my deeds are not done in Him, then they will avail others, but not my eternal soul. That is why knowing Christ is so important. It lies at the heart of everything.

So, for those who have, they say found Him, I cannot and do not say they are wrong. I say only that for me, He is to be found where He said He would be found, which is in His Church. I believe that Church is the Catholic Church, and that being in Communion with Rome is the safest guarantee of that fact. But I would not and do not dare say that others who say they have found Him, and evidence that in their lives, are wrong. I can and do say that the Church is our best assurance, and the best guide against too great a dependence on our own emotionalism and intellectualism.

It is the task of Christian Pastors to proclaim the Good News. Healing is there for what ails us. Do we do that? Is that what people think of when the Church is mentioned? If not, then we might ask what part we play as disciples? Do we give reasons for the hope that is in us? Do we model our Faith or just preach it? If our Faith does not quicken our hearts, then what is to be done?

Across the Divide: Education and Faith

05 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Education

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It is some time since I published here, but seeing that the site is well used by others, I have kept it up and kept an eye on it. I’d like to thank Nicholas in particular for his interesting contributions.

I have had three main reasons for not writing: the first is that any controversy would be unhelpful to the greater cause I serve; the second is time; and the third is that there are enough people offering views on what is happening in the Roman Catholic Church without my adding my mite.

Though I blog pseudonymously, my identity is easily guessed. Indeed, the very week I arrived where I now work, the subject of an unflattering blog piece from me wrote to me here to protest. As I am not in the business of giving egotists attention, I filed the letter in the cylindrical receptacle in my office and decided then and there to avoid any chance of a repeat. In the interim I have been able to help my current University to improve its position in the academic world, which is a much better use of my energies and time. But the question which accompanied me here is now, perhaps because of that, more clamant. What is the place of the Church in education?

In England the Church has been involved in education for far longer than the state. About a third of the schools are Faith Schools, and whether secularists like it or not, the Churches have been, remain, and will continue to be, involved in education. Most Church schools have long waiting lists, and parents will go to great lengths to get their children into one. They must be doing something right.

At tertiary level it is a different matter. It was the need for a Faith-based University to begin to rival the performance at secondary level, which took me to where I am now. But why is the thing worth doing at all? Isn’t Faith a private matter which should be left at the door of any educational institution?

No. The idea that it should be so it, itself, a partisan position. The Churches have huge assets invested in education, and the idea that they should simply be put at the service of those who would like to use them to drive their own agenda has about it a sense of chutzpah which is almost endearing in its bare-faced cheek.

We have passed through an era when education and vocational training became synonymous; it is now widely recognised that what makes people employable are so-called soft skills – the ability to think critically, to solve complex problems, to be creative and to be able to manage people. Lest it be thought that this is special pleading on my part, this list comes from the World Trade Organization, not me. A faith-based education offers a holistic, values-based experience to its students. Anyone who wonders why that might matter to, say, a Banker, might care to ponder the root causes of the crash of 2008. The word “Credit” is from the Latin “Credo,” meaning “I believe.” But if there are no agreed and shared values, if all is relative, how can anyone’s word be their bond? It is every person for themself and the devil take the hindmost. No system of finance or, for that matter, governance, can work on that basis. The best place to lay the right foundations is in schools.

I do not say only Faith-based institutions can offer this, but I do want to suggest that they offer an explicit rationale for the values they espouse, values which still, just, lie at the heart of our civilisation

Of course, any fool can point out that religion has been a divisive force, which is why so many do, but that ignores Original Sin. There is nothing good which fallen mankind cannot put to  a bad use; that does not make it bad.

Viewed aright, the Christian ethic is one of love, and anyone who thinks that is a soft and soppy idea needs to re-read what St Paul says about love. Anyone who has seriously tried to practice that sort of love knows how very hard it is for us. But it is good for us. we are not called simply to tolerate others (a hard enough task for many nowadays) we are called to exercise self-restrain and to love them. A Society as riven and divided as the one in which we live has need of that quality. If it is not inculcated via a Faith-based route, it is unclear who else will provide it.

Our society pays a good deal of attention to physical well-being, and also increasingly to mental well-being. But if we are not careful – and we have not been as a society – these lead down a material route: if I have a healthy body and lots of “stuff” then I am fine. Yet the evidence suggests that our young people are suffering from a crisis of mental health. 

Humankind has always needed more than the material if it is to be healthy; but our impoverished materialism is what is offered, and so when our young want bread, we offer them stones. Again, those educated in a Faith-based system have other indicators of what is an is not the “good life.” Man does not live by bread alone.

The Churches in this country are sitting on a great asset, if one wants to put it bluntly, and if one does, one might add the question of what they are doing to ensure it is well-used? If the Churches do not use that asset properly, then they are poor stewards of a precious inheritance. One of the privileges of my current position is to see the ways in which the Churches are using those assets to make a difference. One might want more, one always will, but the part played by the Churches in the world of education is, on the whole, a noble one.

If Christ will not help us heal, then who else can?

We might reflect on why we have so often given the secularists so much ammunition to show that religion is a divisive affair? It is sin which divides us. If we can follow Him in questioning the lazy assumptions of the comfortable, and in helping those who most need it, then we do His work.

Across the UK the Churches can work together more closely to ensure that there is real diversity in our society – a diversity which includes respect for the part the Churches play in that society. We are not rooted in the shallow soil of Enlightenment assumptions about the perfectibility of humankind, but rather in the insight St Paul offers in Romans 7, which tells us that each of us is the problem. However hard we will the good, we do the bad. Our Faith grounds us in the humility that comes from that, and the fact that the only answer to our fallen nature is Christ.

In a world where “leaders” are expected to be those who always succeed, our Faith reminds us that failure is inevitable, and that what matters is how we use that experience and to whom we dedicate it. The divide in our society, and within us, is to be bridged only by that insight.

 

Faith and education

03 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Bible, Faith

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C’s piece yesterday interested me greatly. As a Christian who spent his working life in education (secondary) and even taught RE (as it was then called). I’ve a deal of sympathy for anyone trying to do it, and I shared some thoughts with him, which he’s suggested I do more widely here.

The biggest difference between the start of my career in teaching (1967/8) and the end six years ago, was what educationalists call the ‘cultural capital’ pupils brought to school in respect of Christianity. As I started my career on what was then not called Merseyside, it might well be that because of a large number of Catholics of Irish descent, what I encountered by atypical, but since it tended to be the same with the more numerous Protestants, I think not. On the whole they knew the basics. No one had to explain what Easter was about, or tell them it wasn’t about a ‘bunny rabbit’; by the end that was necessary. No one had to tell them who Jesus was, although we might have had to tell them about how to understand some of the things they had read in the Bible – and they all had a Bible at home. Many of them were occasional church goers, some regular, but they were all part of a broadly Christian culture, however diluted in parts. This was reinforced by social norms. No one back then was arguing that marriage meant other than what it had always meant, or that to call children boys and girls was some sort of prejudiced comment which discriminated against the ‘genderfluid’. Shops were shut on a Sunday, which felt very different to the rest of the week; indeed, most shops closed on a Saturday lunch hour. This made teaching RE easier, as we were largely dealing with Christianity and in filling in the gaps in their knowledge – which admittedly were often quite large.

That changed across time. By the mid 1980s I was not the only teacher at my new school, which was in God’s own country of Yorkshire – who noticed that we could not assume any longer that the children would know what we meant when we talked about ‘Anglican’ or “Catholic’. Church seemed a foreign place to many. Our lessons seemed suddenly to require us to do more of what had always been a small part of them – comparative religion. I was never sure that, knowing little about the faith of their own country, the children got very much out of superficial thumb-nail sketches of what Sikhism was, but with the advent of a national curriculum, even public schools felt an obligation to steer in that direction, not least because that was where the public examinations syllabi were all going.

There was a point at which RE lessons became ‘Personal and Social Education’, and seemed to be about ethics – abortion rights, contraception rights, that sort of ethics – sex and ‘finding yourself’. A generation which on the whole, by the 1990s, knew very little about Christianity, was deliberately not taught anything, at least on the whole. I recall saying this at a staff meeting and being told that was the job of church schools and Sunday schools; the colleague had a point, not as good as he’d imagined, as in my view knowledge of Christianity was necessary to study Shakespeare and much English literature, as well as to understand our history, but of course, what he didn’t know was the extent to which the churches were failing to do this.

I wish C and his diocese well in their efforts. They are brave to set out to sea in the current stormy weather, and I shall pray for their good success – they’ll need it.

Religious Literacy

02 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Faith

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I have written elsewhere on the theme of the importance of our secular society and its leaders acquiring a form of religious literacy – if only so they can understand what they are doing before they intervene in areas of the world where people are willing to die for their beliefs, here I want to reflect a little more on how the Catholic Church can respond to this heightened awareness of the place and importance of faith.

In my own diocese the Bishop is driving an impressive agenda of reforming the whole catechetical and educational process. He is proceeding as a successor to the Apostles should. He could have had a long consultation process, in which those most opposed to reform would have been most vocal in explaining why the current useless system should not be changed, and eloquent in analysing the 101 reasons why nothing should be done. His proposal for an annual pilgrimage of witness through Norwich was, when he first proposed it, criticised as too ‘daring’ – it worked, so it is now being called successful; if he had listened to the nay-sayers, nothing would have happened. We were told no one would come, young people wouldn’t come and wouldn’t like it, locals would feel uneasy at a procession with a Crucifix and a statue of the Blessed Virgin: well the young were highly represented, the locals welcoming, and the gloom-mongers confounded.

Now, taking some good orthodox models of catechesis for children and adults, and some good ones for RCIA, we are engaged in adapting them for our diocese and getting them out to the parishes. Those most directly responsible for the current dire state of affairs in all these areas, are prophesying doom, some even asking why it is necessary – perhaps they have grown so used to managing decline that they regard anyone going to church for any reason as a success? Who knows? We don’t really have the time or the resources to engage in an argument with them, and the Bishop is leading from the front – these things will happen.

Will they work? The evidence thus far is that if the trumpet gives a steady note, people respond. They don’t want to hear about nuance and metaphor, they want to hear the Good News. That involves ingesting some really bad news first: we are all sinners; that means sin is real; we are all in danger of hell; that means hell is real; we can none of us heal what ails us by ourselves; that means original sin is real. The Good News is that from all of these things we have been delivered by Christ, and we can encounter him every day if we will at the altar. We can follow his ways, we can walk with him. when we fall, and fall and fail we shall, we have a recourse to confession and absolution. Here, it is not just that no child will be left behind, no human need be.

Our job, under the direction of the Bishop, is to draw up the materials which will underpin this through an orthodox exposition of the timeless faith of the Church. It is, I suppose what the Marxists used to call ‘vanguardism’ – a small group of people motivated to provide leadership in the right direction. It has a longer history than that – a man called St Paul was the first Christian to do it. He wasn’t, history tells us, universally popular, and many thought him too daring, and his ideas remain ones which fail to find a consensus among those for whom fudge is one of life’s necessities – but his method worked, and in the absence of any better model, we thought we’d revert to it.

 

Conversionary Protestantism: PRINTING, NEWSPAPERS, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

11 Friday Sep 2015

Posted by in Bible, Church/State, Faith

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decree-ad-gentes-on-the-missionary-activity-of-the-church-10-638There are many claims by scholars that printing and capitalism created the public sphere and that the public sphere enabled democracy. I don’t think that wrong, but they didn’t spring full blown from Pallas Athena’s brow either, they came from somewhere. So where did they come from?

One way in which CPs dispersed power was by a massive expansion of access to printed material. There are several reasons for this.

  1. CPs changed the idea of whom books were for. The CPs believed (and still do) that everyone needed access to God’s Word, not just elites. That meant that universal literacy was required, including the poor and women. Books also had to be inexpensive and available in languages that all the people could read. In the vernacular, not in a foreign language or in a classical language no longer in everyday use.
  2. CPs expected people to make their own choices in religion because they believed that people were saved by true faith in God, not by membership in a group or by sacraments, important though both are. Therefore, each individual had to decide which faith to follow for himself.

Printed materials were used extensively in this work, which forced other, competing groups to also use printed materials. This competition is one of the reasons for the rise in mass printing. That this had a catalytic effect may be shown by the movement of Europe’s printing centers. Before the Reformation, most printing was done in Italy, obviously Protestantism made little headway there, neither did mass literacy nor did an early public sphere arise. In England, however, before the Reformation, there was little printing, but CPs used printing to mobilize ordinary people, and the elites responded in kind. Thus came newspapers, printed debates, and an early public sphere.  Also rooted in that is the modern world’s adoption of English as our lingua franca, I think, with all the advantages that gives to those of us for whom it is our native language. Even in continental Europe with all the damage from the religious wars, Protestant areas produce more books and export more printed material, both per capita.

And this:

In the West, the development of CP movements also predicted many of the major advancements in the quantity and techniques of printing. For example, CP Bible and tract societies helped spark a nineteenth century printing explosion. Their drive to print mass quantities of inexpensive texts preceded major technological innovations and helped spur technological and organizational transformations in printing, binding, and distribution that created markets and facilitated later adoption by commercial printers. Before this printing explosion, commercial publishers generally fought mass printing to keep prices high, even in Great Britain. Thus although markets and technology are important, they are not sufficient to explain the timing or locations of major increases in printing.

This becomes even clearer outside Europe.

First, religion influenced whether elites valued printing. Christians, Jews, and Mahayana Buddhists adopted printing without CP competition (none were primarily monastic, and all had long, nonpoetic religious texts that are difficult to memorize). However, Muslim, Hindu, Theravada Buddhist, and other societies in Asia and North Africa were exposed to printed books and printing presses by Chinese, Mongols, Jews, Asian Christians, Catholic missionaries, and European trading companies for hundreds of years before they printed any books.

By 1700, Europeans had created fonts for most major Asian languages, and in fact, the Portuguese had even given the Moghul Emperor a press and fonts in the early 1600s. It went unused. Although the major Asian economies were as big, or bigger than the European ones. We can see from this that there were no intrinsic factors holding them back, it was purely a choice they made.

To most elites, printing seemed ugly, it spread books to those “not qualified to interpret them,” and it undermined elite status/control. Jews, Eastern Christians, and trade companies only printed materials for their own consumption (mostly in “foreign” languages), and Catholics printed few texts (not mass propaganda). This limited printing activity did not threaten local elites’ ability to control public discourse or overwhelm their ability to respond orally or with manuscripts. Thus, Muslim, Hindu, and Theravada Buddhist elites resisted change.

[…] CPs printed so many vernacular texts that it forced elite response. For example, within 32 years of importing a press to India in 1800, three British missionaries printed more than 212,000 copies of books in 40 languages and, along with other missionaries, created the fonts and paper that dominated South Asian printing for much of the nineteenth century.

Conversionary Protestants also had much to do with the consequences of printing. If the availability of printing was enough to cause mass literacy, newspapers, and the public sphere, they should have developed in Asia as much as 600 years before they did in Europe. However, they didn’t, they remained dormant until the CPs arrived in the nineteenth century.

It’s important, I think, to note that CPs are not necessary to sustain a print revolution. That is a function of a market. But they were a crucial catalyst in developing that market.

Next: Education

Source: The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy

Educating for ignorance

12 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in Faith

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The parlous situation described in my last few posts is underpinned by the most serious assault on our civilzation since the Barbarians. When I was being taught, and indeed, when I started teaching, the idea was straightforward: we were taught the best that had been written and thought, we were taught to read and write and do arithmetic; it would fit us for work and for more; we would be employable, and we would be civilized. These simple maxims I took into my own career as a teacher; I was fortunate enough to be able to teach in the private sector, which, being English, we call ‘public schools’, because it confuses foreigners. In my day you could go from Oxford straight into teaching, and if, as I did, you had a doctorate, you could go straight into a decent public school. There was no nonsense about ‘educationists’ or theory. I watched what men who’d been teaching since before the war did, I imitated the good stuff, tried not to imitate the bad, and learned by trying. Being large and possessing a Yorkshire accent marked me down in the eyes of the boys as someone not to be ‘ragged’ (messed around) and in nearly forty years I had no trouble, even from the, shall we say, less bright end of the spectrum. They were here to work, I told them, and I was there to teach them; we’d get along fine if everyone fulfilled the contract; that was the Sales theory of education, as had from better men than me.

Occasionally, from the late sixties, I would talk with colleagues elsewhere, and stand aghast at what was coming out of ‘education’ departments. It is astonishing, still, that the shallow nonsense took any root. Teachers were to ‘facilitate’ some rubbish called ‘self-directed learning’. All of this descends (and that is their right word) from the Enlightenment belief that man is born intrinsically good, and therefore all that is needed is for him to be guided in the right direction all all will be well. Nonsense. Anyone who has taught young boys knows that Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ is spot on; they are little savages who will revert to savagery if not civilized. St Paul was right – they do not that which they will, but that they know is wrong. Christianity has been a key part of our education system for many good reasons, the most basic of which is that it is right about original sin. We all tend toward what is bad for us if offered the choice and unless educated otherwise.

Now, you will say, if I am right about the damage done by child-centred learning, why do we not see evidence of it in ‘outcomes’ – there are more children going to university and better grades all round. Of course there are, it is the one area where inflation has run unchecked. Our universities emphasise ‘relevance’ and ‘accessibility’, not rigour – and then adjust the grading scales accordingly. I simply do not believe that so many of our young are fit for university, or that so few are ready for good apprenticeships and practical work; anyone trying to get a good plumber in parts of the UK could point to a good, and well-paid, career path.

The latest OECD report shows that the UK has dropped down into the twenties in terms of world ranking for maths, science, and, wait for it – English! We cannot even lead the world in teaching our own language and literature! As it points out, school-leavers know less about subjects than their grandparents did. No doubt they can find it all on Google – if they know how to spell it and if they can read for more than three minutes without being distracted. When immigration is discussed, we never hear how many well-educated immigrants we need to fill the jobs our education system has failed to produce folk to do. I’ve no doubt that in the chains of their ignorance the ‘kids’ are happy, and I’ve equally no doubt as to why it is increasingly the case that lads and lasses from UK public schools get the best jobs in the country. There, we still insist on rigour, as do parents who are paying tens of thousands a year.