Bp. James Conley on the Catholic education tradition

My own education was deeply formed by my experience in the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. I learned to read there, critically and meaningfully. I learned to think clearly and logically about objective truth. I also learned to listen to music, to read poetry and to listen to people. My education taught me to marvel at the world, to appreciate how much I didn’t know, and how much more I could learn. And I’m still learning.

Most especially, I learned how to live justly, virtuously, and richly. Education should reveal the truths of history, and mathematics, and science, and literature in order to reveal the truths of our life in Jesus Christ. Education should draw from the wealth of our Christian and Catholic tradition: from Dante and Milton, from Mozart and Michelangelo, from G.K. Chesterton and from Christopher Dawson. Education should illuminate the truth of our existence.

The greatest hope for educators should be that their students live fully, richly, and eternally in Jesus Christ.

Today, education has often become preparation for earning, but not for living. We’re taught as consumers and producers, but not as creators or cultivators. We’re trained as taxpayers, but not as citizens. Our culture has lost the sense that education should form men and women who know what goodness is, and who can choose it.

Parents, who are the primary educators of their children, should want more for their children than training for a career, as important as that is. They should want training for living, and training for holiness.

full article at Diocese of Lincoln

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HT BN