"The Art of Helping Young People to Completeness"


“The greatest mistake we can commit in Christianity (or humanity, for that matter,) is to think we can "know" the transcendent by our own means. This is not possible, epistemologically. We rely on One who is Transcendent to give to us Truth beyond human understanding. This is one of the first things I teach students; it is necessary to acquiesce to greater Truths in order to know those Truths. We cannot "climb to the top of the mountain" on our own.”
I was reading the other day and came across a great quote about education. Blessed Basile Moreau, the founder of the congregation of the Holy Cross, wrote that education (pedagogy) is “the art of helping young people to completeness.” He continues: “For the Christian, this means that education is helping the young person be more like Christ.” To summarize his points, Moreau tells us that the most important thing is for teachers to re-learn how to teach. Our objective is not simply to give information to our students so they can move on to a higher level of education; our objective is to reform the way our students think.
The Main Building at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Notre Dame is run by the Congregation of the Holy Cross, an order founded by Bl. Basile Moreau (photo P. Smith)

In the quote at the beginning of this blog, I told this teacher that we needed to help our students let go of the illusion that education (or life) is just about personal accomplishment, like climbing a mountain. Education is about allowing someone to guide us so we can become more than what we can be on our own. This is what Moreau tells us. Our “brokenness” as humans leads us to think that we must rely on autonomy and individual will to drive us in our goal of becoming more. But Christian pedagogy is rooted more in an acquiescence… a humility of spirit so we can be Loved into becoming something more.  Moreau echoes so many other educators when he tells his congregation of teachers that their goal should be to form virtue first in their students so the knowledge they gain in class can have some rational and positive direction. Knowledge gained in a vacuum void of virtue is self-oriented and egoistic. This is why I teach that relationship with God and our True image and likeness must be the underpinning of all education. It is within a relationship with God that we gain bearings and with those bearings all knowledge becomes useful, not in and of itself, but as it helps ourselves, others, and the world to become more than what we can make it on our own.

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