What Catholic Education is For: Part I

Dr. Matthew Minerd

Most debates about Catholic education begin in the wrong place. We argue about curriculum, pedagogy, and outcomes—without first asking what education is for. I am well aware that many have written to define “Catholic liberal education.” It is a rather crowded shelf. My own background is a homeschooling Byzantine Catholic who also happens to be a Thomist. If nothing else, this perhaps provides a vantage point that will provide some reframing, or perhaps a deepening, of the question itself.

The best place to begin is with the normative case. Just as a biologist seeks out the healthiest specimen of a species in order to understand what that species is truly meant to be, so too we should ask: where does education appear in its most natural, most fully realized form? The answer, perhaps surprising in our institutional age, is the family—and specifically the family understood as the domestic Church.

The Family as the First School

The work of leading human beings from ignorance to knowledge is not, in the first instance, a task belonging to the state, nor to any political or social institution. It belongs to family life. It is a duty that falls upon spouses, and according to traditional Catholic doctrine, this duty is constitutive of marriage itself: the procreation and education of children is the first and central end of the conjugal union.

This education of the human person is, from the outset, an education of the whole person—and not merely as a human whole. We are speaking of persons who are called to be divinized through the grace that comes to us in Christ. This is a lifelong task. Long after formal schooling has ended, parents remain a living source of wisdom about how to live the life of grace. And this work is, in the deepest sense, more than human: the family united by the sacrament of matrimony is the domestic locus of the Church herself. Therefore, to educate a child is to initiate a person into the fullscope of human life—which is, for Catholics, nothing less than the life of those called to participate in the divine life, as members of what the tradition calls the Whole Christ, the Church.

A sound Catholic approach to education—whether at the level of individual schools or broader institutional policy—must reflect this unified vision of human formation. It cannot treat education as essentially an intellectual or economic undertaking, with character formation and spirituality added on as an optional enrichment. That compartmentalization, in a single stroke, represents the failure both of secular schooling and of many approaches that call themselves “liberal.”

The Failure of Secular Education

The secular failure is the more obvious one, and it requires little elaboration. No educational system is truly “valueless.” We can always ask: which values are being transmitted, and how deliberately? In a real sense, this is the same as asking: how are we being taught to inhabit reality itself? The American educational context is shaped by a somewhat haphazard intersection of nationalized curricula and localized school governance, filtered through contemporary pedagogical assumptions that are, to put it gently, not integrally Catholic. The result is a formation of the human person that proceeds as though the most important things about human life—its origin and end in the Triune God, its dignity as being made in His image and likeness, the wounds of sin that afflict us—were irrelevant for eight hours of the day.

Therefore, it is entirely understandable that many Catholic parents have turned toward models of liberal education. The term is loose enough to cover considerable variety, but it generally signals a rejection of contemporary pedagogy in favor of older models of human cultivation. The curricula of liberal education organize themselves around the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric, the arts of language and reasoning—and sometimes the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. To this framework, varying degrees of engagement with the Greco-Roman and Christian literary canon are added: Homer and Virgil, Augustine’s Confessions, selected scholastic texts, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare…

To the extent that these curricula transmit the long wisdom of our civilization, they do real good. They form minds and hearts more acutely aware of the cultural inheritance we carry—the confluence of Athens and Jerusalem, of classical antiquity and the Christian message. This is genuinely valuable, and it ought not be dismissed wholesale.

The Danger of Dilettantism

But, one should plainly state a real risk: a kind of Catholicized intellectual dilettantism. The most ambitious curricula of liberal education introduce students to major works of philosophy and theology without always reckoning with how awkwardly these texts fit the trivium-and-quadrivium framework, or with what kind of engagement with such works is truly formative at a given age. The result can be a student who is culturally fluent in a kind of sophomoric way and intellectually overconfident, proud of his or her participation in the “great conversation” of Western thought. To be conversant in this “conversation” is a real, but secondary, good. When it functions as the organizing principle of Catholic education, it quietly displaces something more fundamental: education as members of the Whole Christ.

One is sometimes told, at this point, not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Only so much is possible in a school day; if a Catholic curriculum can avoid the worst distortions of secular schooling and give students some genuine rootedness in the Christian intellectual tradition, that is an achievement worth celebrating.

Perhaps. But this objection assumes that “Catholic liberal education,” properly executed, is already aiming at the right thing and simply falling short of it. What I want to suggest is that the target must be very carefully considered.

Rather than debating what makes a liberal education sufficiently Catholic, we would do better to define what an integrally Catholic education looks like—and then ask how various curricula serve or fail that vision. The distinction matters. An integrally Catholic education is not a secular education with Mass added several times a month (and it is a sadness that too many Catholic schools remain essentially this). Nor is it a liberal education with a Catholic flair, organized around academic excellence and competency in the European inheritance of Athens and Jerusalem. Rather, it is an education whose ultimate end is the fulfillment of the graced task entrusted to parents: the formation of persons who are members of the domestic Church, destined for divine union as members of the Whole Christ, the Church.

The Church Has Already Defined the End

This is not merely a pious aspiration. It is, in fact, the legal framework the Church herself has established. The Western Code of Canon Law is unambiguous. The duty of Catholic education falls first to parents, who possess both the right and the obligation to choose the institutional means for such formation (CIC 793.1)—and who have a corresponding right to civil assistance in securing it (CIC 793.2). The Church’s own role in education flows directly from her mission of “assisting persons so that they are able to reach the fullness of the Christian life” (CIC 794.1). And, as the Code insists, that education is not merely catechetical instruction added on to a secular education. It is “a complete formation of the human person” oriented toward both our final end and the common good of society, encompassing physical, moral, and intellectual development (CIC 795).

The Church, in other words, has already told us what Catholic education is for. Our task is to take her at her word.

In the next article, we will examine what this fully integral Catholic formation actually requires.