A Meta-Rational Approach to Education

“Thanks for your response. Thomas Aquinas actually points out that on a fundamental level, we are given Faith in the form of what he calls operative Grace. In particular, this is Faith in the form of God simply "Loving us into creation". The fact that we exist (and the fact that we have Free Will), for example, tells us that we are Loved regardless of our Free Will. In this way, Faith is a gift from God separate from our action. You are right in your description, though, of how Faith is our action in pursuit of a deeper relationship with God; Faith is our response to the Truth that we are first Loved by God. As a teacher, many of my students seem unaware they are invited to be in a relationship with God; this mindset makes it impossible, then, for them to even act on Faith. If I am lucky enough to witness them "knowing" they are Loved, then my mission is to help them discover how God is calling them to extend the invitation to even more. All teachers in Catholic schools are called to this mission. We are blessed.”

When I wrote this to one of my online classmates, we were discussing the topic of Faith as gift and action. The idea of God “Loving us into creation” seems to go unnoticed or unexamined in the classroom. This is a metaphysical topic that, to be completely honest, I do not do a good enough job addressing in my classroom. I do have a lesson that focuses on the statistical impossibility of spontaneous existence based on cosmological constants and the universal timeline, but, for the most part, I gloss over the concept that we can rationally conclude that existence, itself, is a gift. And like any gift, existence is an invitation to be in relationship with the gift-giver. And in that relationship we discover our Truest worth. This seems so rational to me. I need to do a better job of discussing this with my students. We all do.

The Word of Life mural at the University of Notre Dame is a statement that Creation flows from God, "Loving us into Creation" (P. Smith)

So what do we do in the classroom to help our students grow in relationship with God and discover their Authentic Self? If we aren’t using rational thinking on a regular basis, the default seems to be a sort of pathos-driven emotional appeal to Catholic education. We either try to make our students “feel good” about what they are doing or how their relationship with God is going, or we try to make them feel bad about how poorly we are doing in class or how much we are “letting God down”. We use pathos to train our students to judge their worth. I used to have some lessons on rhetoric in class and my whole thesis was that pathos was effective for getting attention, but rarely successful in making a sustained, convincing argument. I have come to view any kind of emotional-appeal argument to be shallow and often lacking in lasting effect. The same kind of emotional appeal we use to “evangelize” is also used to motivate in an academic sense. Our students are judging their worth based on how well they “know” Jesus or on how well they score on tests.

St. Pius X Catholic High School in Atlanta, Georgia is where I began my own realization that Catholic education was much more than just grades (P. Smith)

My seniors just finished their exams this last week, and, well, if I may make this claim, they have been trained to push themselves to prove their worth in the form of grades and performance. They apply this same logic to their Faith. If they are not perfect Christians, they are not worthy of God’s Love. Their Catholic education has been more like a test of skill and adherence to academic standards than it has been an encounter with Love. Their fear of failure has driven some of them to severe self-doubt and lack of confidence in their worth. In some cases, the health effects have been devastating. All of this, based on an argument that their worth is based on how well they do in the classroom or how perfectly they follow the Commandments. As teachers, we don’t mean to do this,. This is not the goal of Catholic education, but this seems to be what our culture calls us to do. The superficial image of grades and test scores and what colleges we get into seems to feed the pedagogical theory that forms our lessons. But this is only rational to the extent that it prepares our students for college.  Maybe we need to base all our pedagogical theory on the meta-rational concept that we are made to Love and to be Loved….that we are made to be in relationship with the one who “Loved us into creation”. This seems far more rational a theory than to say we teach so our students can get into college. If our reason for teaching is to help our students to Love and to be Loved, isn’t this a greater goal than just helping them do well on tests or get into college?