Towards a contemporary philosophy of Catholic education: moving the debate forward

Abstract

This article returns to the debate that Carmody initiated in this journal in 2011 when he proposed that Bernard Lonergan's account of self-transcendence could provide the framework for a contemporary philosophy of Catholic education. Here the advantages and disadvantages of this proposal are scrutinised. Carmody's treatment brings into focus the need to clarify the relationship between theology and education. A taxonomy of this relationship is presented before moving onto consider the ways in which another leading Jesuit, Karl Rahner, is better able to frame and inspire a robust theory or philosophy of Catholic education.

Keywords:

• Lonergan
• Karl Rahner
• theology and education
• Catholic education

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the referees of this journal for helpful comments on the first draft of this article.

Notes on contributor

Sean Whittle is a secondary school teacher with over 20 years’ experience of teaching Religious Education in a range of Catholic schools in London. He completed a theoretical doctorate in the philosophy of Catholic education at the Institute of Education in 2013.

Notes

1. Lonergan's use of this concept reflects the shift in orientation in modern thought that is rooted in Kant's Copernican revolution. According to Lonergan ‘In contemporary philosophy there is a great emphasis on the subject, and this emphasis may easily be traced to the influence of Hegel, Kiekegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber’ (1996, 69).

2. In God, philosophy and universities (2009), MacIntyre argues that it is only with 1998 papal encyclical Fides et Ratio that the Catholic philosophical tradition is more clearly defined. He explains that this encyclical demonstrates that the ‘summons to participate in the project of Catholic philosophical enquiry is a summons to situate oneself in an ongoing set of conflicts, conflicts that we inherited from an extended history’ (2009, 169). At the outset of this text, MacIntyre explained that ‘Catholic philosophy is best understood historically, as a continuing conversation through the centuries, in which we turn and return to dialogue with the most important voices from our past, in order to carry forward that conversation in our own time’ (2009, 1).

3. In White's 2004 assessment of the curriculum, concerns are raised about way that the current provision of Religious Education in the UK is overstated. He argues that there is ‘a case for reducing the amount of compulsion that children face’ (2004, 188) in terms having to study religious education. In addition, he contends that the time has come to think more explicitly of an ethical/civic area of the curriculum, ‘If so, a question mark would hang over RE’ (2004, 189).

4. Cross-curricular themes are a feature of the National Curriculum for England and Wales (first introduced with Education Reform Act in 1988). They refer to a number of broader topics, such as environmental education or spirituality that are not simply discrete subjects or topics confined to just one or two subjects on the curriculum. These themes form part of the whole curriculum in schools and all teachers should take responsibility for implementing them.

5. The complexity surrounding the concept of ‘framework’ has been clarified by Severn (2007).

6. Hirst argues in this 1972 article that Christian education is a contradiction in terms because it reflected a primitive, rather than sophisticated, concept of education. He points out ‘The central thesis in this paper is that there has already emerged in our society a view of education, a concept of education, which makes the whole idea of Christian education a kind of nonsense and the search for a Christian approach to, or philosophy of education a huge mistake. From this point of view the idea that there is a characteristically or distinctively Christian form of education seems just as much a mistake as the idea that there is a distinctively Christian form of mathematics, engineering or farming.’

7. This case is made in Whittle (2013).

8. The modernist crisis refers to concerns over various theological opinions expressed during the early part of the twentieth century. Pope Pius X's 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis expressed grave concern about modernist ideas that sought to break with the past. Concerns about new ideas entering Catholic theology did not really wane until the start of Vatican II in 1962.

9. The meaning of transcendental Thomism is best understood as a development within the traditional use of the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas. Transcendental Thomism seeks to reconcile this tradition with Kantian epistemology. Both Rahner and Lonergan can be classified as transcendental Thomists.