Part 3: Education Leadership and Religious Institutions
Final Essay: Destiny and Understanding the Conditions
We can expect religious schools to adopt a form of education consonant with their anthropological understanding. If a religion holds a particular understanding of the destiny of each human being, it ought to employ a form of education in service of that anthropology. But it is not the anthropology alone that governs the educational form. It is also the condition of the student.
For example, if we think of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt (truly an e-ducare: from the Latin roots of the word “educate” meaning to lead out) their destiny is important as it represents where they are going. But also important is their condition as an enslaved people. The form of their journey is somewhat different because they are escaping slave-masters rather than simply migrating from one field to a greener pasture. Their destination combined with their context (destiny + condition) creates the environment in which Moses must lead them out (e-ducare).
So too with human educational efforts of any age. The great religions have great anthropological visions. Whether they can lead the people toward their destiny successfully or not depends to a large degree on the integrity of their anthropological vision and their understanding of the condition of the people. A religious education that lacks true understanding of either of these points is bound to fail in its purpose.
Let us assume for a moment that the great religions operating at an institutional level in the industrialized world maintain intact their anthropological vision—a true vision of their destiny. Of course, this is not generally the case, but for the sake of argument, let us assume.
In what condition is modern man? From what environment are religious educators set to lead their people?
On this point, Ernst Junger, the German veteran of back to back World Wars, describes the condition of industrial modern man in his book The Forest Passage.
"A man stands before them who has emptied his chalice of suffering and doubt. A man formed more by nihilism than by the church, ignoring for the moment how much nihilism is concealed in the church itself. Typically, this person will be little developed ethically or spiritually, however eloquent he may be in convincing platitudes, he will be alert, intelligent, active, skeptical, and artistic. A natural-born debaser of higher types and ideas. An insurance fanatic. Someone set on his own advantage and easily manipulated by the catchphrases of propaganda, who's often abrupt turnabouts he will hardly perceive. He will gush with humanitarian theory, yet be equally inclined to awful violence beyond all legal limits or international law whenever a neighbor or fellow human being does not fit into it's system. At the same time, he will feel haunted by malevolent forces which penetrate even into his dreams, have a low capacity to enjoy himself, and have forgotten the meaning of a real festival. On the other hand, it must be added that he enjoys the advantages of a peaceful age of technological comfort."
If this figure that Junger describes represents most of us, represents the norm that religious educators might expect to see in their schools, or the norm the religious leaders might expect to see in their flocks, what is their plan for ameliorating our condition? Can the integrity of our destiny overcome the condition in which we exist? Does the mere existence of a destined land of milk and honey imply that the journey there will be identical whether we start from our own home fields or from a prison or work-camp? Does not e-ducare, leading out, depend to some degree on answering the question: out of what?
I don’t know that large religious institutions in the industrial world have, or can, ask themselves the question. Generally, the current practice involves a close imitation of secular schooling and its approaches: curricular, pedagogical, and cultural, with the one exception that religious schools often layer on top of an already pre-built edifice of secular education a veneer of religious practice either in the form of service projects or sacraments.
Educational leadership in religious institutions is typically drawn from the state institutions of education and relies on the secular credentialing those institutions exist to propagate. And while the secular schools of education are not known for their friendliness to religion and religious institutions, nevertheless, hapless bishops and prelates turn to them for leaders, credentials, accreditation, training, and even curricula.
Religious leaders at the head of large institutions operate under enormous bureaucratic pressures, chiefly the pressure of self-propagation, and as is common in bureaucratic environments, depend on external measures of expertise to mitigate exposure to criticism and liability. This has resulted in a situation in which religious organizations search for superintendents among educational institutions who have for a very long time held implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, anti-religious purposes. Recruiting diocesan superintendents with EdDs from state schools or from secular school systems is the perfect way to ensure that the religious education remains an afterthought or a veneer at best.
Do the religious institutions which still preserve their anthropological integrity understand the conditions in which they exist? It seems to me that most do not. A recent book from the University of Mary frames two distinct conditions that relate in particular to the Catholic Church, though many religions will see themselves in this mirror.1 One is the condition of Christendom in which most of the institutions and political structures are informed by and friendly to the Church. It is in something like this condition that most current religious educational institutions appear to think they can operate. The authors frame the other condition as one of Apostolic Mission, a condition in which the religious operate in an irreligious and sometimes hostile cultural environment, missionary ground, if you will. Success in this latter condition requires wildly different approaches which do not lend themselves conveniently to the inertia toward self-preservation of large bureaucratic religious institutions.
While religious schools might have enjoyed a temporary bump in enrollment due to being the only option open during pandemic closures, it would be dangerous to misunderstand this as a validation of their current approach. Many religious families who tithe to support their religious institutions also have to homeschool in order to provide their children with an acceptable religious education. Many will stop tithing when the churches cease providing meaningful religious service which includes education. Many already have. Capital campaigns to fund a new football stadium and buy more common core textbooks will fail as wealthy alumni of those schools die off and they confront the reality of child-raising parents who truly believe the tenets of their religion.
Whether religious institutions can reform their educational efforts or not seems to me to be an open question. In order to do so they must preserve their integrity regarding the destiny of each human—their anthropological vision—and also to cultivate a clear understanding of the conditions in which their people exist. I expect that given the entrenchment of bureaucratic forms, achieving this will be difficult.
On the other hand, individual members of the great religions have always achieved more and better than the institutions as a whole. Don Bosco and Rabindranath Tagore founded and operated not in opposition to their religions, but without waiting for the institution to solve the educational problem for them. It strikes me of one of the signal opportunities of our moment for strong individuals to seize the initiative and assume the role of leading religious education.
From Christendom to Apostolic Mission. University of Mary Press, 2023.
Our local catholic school is "school district lite with mass". Other than making kids wear uniforms, I don't see the value in it. Especially at the cost. I think your insight here is an important one, which is why I have been saying that public schools need to be abolished. They are a blight on humanity; they empower the ignorant to imagine that they are not ignorant; they give money to a power that hates life and children; and they poison everything they touch. Everything. They are evil.