The Catholic educator – the one outside – must recognise the divine capacity of students to be active learners and deliberately craft the teaching/learning dynamic to engage their souls, Thomas Groome explains.
A spiritual foundation invites educators consciously to put their faith to work within their vocation; often they may do so without a lot of explicit God-talk. I’m thinking of a history teacher I had during my secondary school years here in Ireland at Belcamp College, Fr Paul Byrne – we called him ‘Muscles’. He rarely mentioned God when teaching history, and yet he likely taught us more than the religion teachers about living our faith, about being good and honest people, caring for others. A lot of it he did simply by how he related with us; you just knew that Muscles cared about you and about the world, and about how we were going to live in it. Without ever sounding preachy, we had no doubt about his values and commitments; we knew intuitively what mattered most to Muscles, how he made sense out of life, found purpose and meaning. In a word, he shared his soul with us. Every good teacher does as much.
And his teaching style was crafted to engage our souls in that he drew us in as active learners about the stuff that matters most in life. His questioning was rarely simple recall of what he’d taught, but invited what we thought and felt and were coming to see for ourselves. Nigh forty years later, I still remember a class on the Irish rebellion of Easter 1916 that he crafted around a poem by W B. Yeats -‘The Rose Tree’. I sensed even then that the poetry was a way of drawing us in. By the time we got through, we knew much more than the data of that event; we had grappled with some of the great questions of life, had argued about values and meaning; far more than learning about ‘the Rebellion’, we had learned from it for our own lives. Muscles had gotten into our souls – and the bit of poetry helped.
Years ago, St Augustine wrote about ‘the teacher within’ each person, proposing that when we learn something, the ‘real’ teacher is not the teacher on the outside but inside. And Augustine explained that the ‘teacher within’ is the divine presence at the core of the person, our own souls. He insisted that the teacher – the one outside – must recognise this divine capacity of students to be active learners and deliberately craft the teaching/learning dynamic to engage their souls. This he contrasted to treating students as passive receptacles of what the teacher already knows – what Freire called ‘banking education’. With rhetorical flourish, Augustine mused, ‘for what parents would be. so ridiculous as to send their child to school to learn what the teacher ‘thinks’?. In other words, send them to learn to think for themselves; education should honour their own souls….
Let us imagine what such an understanding of the person might mean as Catholic teachers and administrators take this perspective, make it their own, and put it to work in their educating. First, pause and recognise an obvious point: teachers’ attitudes toward students are most significant for how and what they teach. If I walk into my classroom at the beginning of a year presuming that ‘these kids are trouble’ – last year’s teacher warned me – then I will surely treat them that way, and, be assured, they won’t disappoint my low expectations.
On the other hand, if I enter into any teaching/learning event with a positive anthropology – something like the one just outlined and proposed by the deep structures of Catholic faith – then the pedagogy that ensues will surely be more for life. Even the social sciences assure us that students are more likely to live up to high expectations, and to live down to low ones. Think of all the great movies we’ve seen about teachers – Dead Poet’s Society, Mr Holland’s Opus, Blackboard Jungle, To Sir With Love (I’m dating myself now). All, in one way or another, portray an educator who refused to accept the negative anthropology they found in place and insisted on practising a positive one instead. It can make a world of difference to education.
So, imagine for yourself some import for your pedagogy if you accept something akin to a Catholic anthropology; what would it mean to put such faith to work – as your spirituality? To stimulate your imagining, let me make a few suggestions:
St Irenaeus, writing circa 175, proposed that ‘the glory of God is the human person fully alive’. He was echoing the sentiment of Jesus; ‘I came that you might have: life, and have it to the full’ (John 10:10). In other words, the more people grow and develop into their full potential, the more God is glorified. Surely Catholic educators should hold out to all the hope of such fullness of life, and mentor that hope into realisation. If we do, then our work takes on a priestly hue, for indeed it gives glory to God.
This article first appeared in a Veritas book entitled Reimaging the Catholic School, pp. 41-45. Edd. Ned Prendergast and Luke Monahan. The book was the record of a conference with a rich gathering of speakers held in Ireland in March 2002. Subsequently published in Pastoral Renewal Exchange (December 2004).
