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Sister Monica, PhD

True Education Mind, Heart, and Soul

True Education Mind, Heart, and Soul

From the earliest period of its history, the Church founded by Christ and commissioned to teach all nations has been a teaching and a learning society. The whole plenitude of religious authority and teaching was vested in the Apostolic College. Wherever converts were gained, provision was made for their instruction in the doctrine of Christ and the observance of the Christian life. Catechumenal schools were established. They were often limited in scope and crude in method, but they were important agencies in the formation of Christian society and Christian civilization. Next came the Catechetical schools with more advanced studies and a curriculum that was steadily extended until it included courses in literature, history, philosophy, theology, mathematics, and other sciences. The educational movements of Christianity advanced from age to age, with the conquests of the Church over paganism and barbarism. Episcopal, Cathedral, parish, and cloistral schools arose wherever Christian centers were organized and finally reached their culmination in the universities, the great educational achievement of the Middle Ages (700-1500). From these schools the sacred heritage of Christian education has come down to us.

THE IDEAL AND END OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION IS TO FORM CHRIST IN THE HEART OF MAN

To educate means to train a human being to live unto God and to reach his final destiny by walking in the way of God’s commandments. It means to develop the whole personality according to the nature and dignity of a being created in the image and likeness of his Creator. The ideal and end of Christian education is to form Christ in the heart of man, and to do this the teacher must first be formed after the Divine Model, for the teacher is the school. True education is the symmetrical development of body and soul, mind, heart, and will, and their right guidance in the way of truth and duty, with the view of leading man to the completeness of life. To educate man as man is to draw forth, cultivate, strengthen, train, and direct all the powers and faculties with which God has endowed him. The process takes into account the present and the future, the temporal and the eternal, and no process of human development that fails to include the whole being and existence of man can claim to be philosophical, complete, or desirable.

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Man’s life and nature are physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual. The body must be nourished, exercised and strengthened. The powers of intellect must be evoked, cultivated and disciplined. The passions must be restrained and purified, and the whole moral nature must be trained to conform to the dictates of conscience and respect the eternal distinction between right and wrong. Most important of all, the spiritual sense is to be developed, refined, and perfected; for complete living is to live unto God and eternal life. Now this is eternal life that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom You have sent. (John 27:3)

KNOWLEDGE IS ONE THING, CHRISTIAN VIRTUE IS ANOTHER.

To shut out definite dogmatic instruction and practices of piety from the school is to shut out the light of heaven from the soul. Fancy systems of non-sectarian ethical culture, or vague moral teaching will not sustain frail human nature in the storms of temptation, hold men and women secure in honesty, purity and truth; or save homes and nations from moral corruption and degradation. Knowledge is one thing, Christian virtue is another. Non-religious instruction of the intellect may produce a mathematician or a chemist, it cannot form a Christian. “Quarry the granite rock with razors or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may we hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passions and the pride of man.” (Cardinal J. H. Newman) Hence all science and all duties of personal, domestic, social and political morality depend upon religion and religion is inculcated and fostered by education. Religious education is the ground and pillar of the kingdom of God on earth, it is also the foundation and stability of the home and the state. A nation that will not recognize and worship God in its schools undermines its own vitality and endurance.

“A good school provides a rounded education for the whole person. And a good Catholic school, over and above this, should help all its students to become saints.”