Is the Aim to Teach Toward Heaven?

As the dawn of a new school year approaches, the inevitable convergence of parents, students, and teachers presents an educational opportunity that, from a Christian perspective, addresses the soul of the child in relation to the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Even amid the chaos of classroom preparation, curriculum planning, teacher in-services, addressing parental concerns, and the spiritual and academic anxiety of welcoming a harvest of new students, I argue that the salvation of a child’s soul should be at the forefront of our educational mission. If our primary responsibility as Catholic educators is to transmit the truth of the Catholic faith with joy, then our first order of instruction is to demonstrate our visible and coherent conviction in Jesus Christ and the Church he founded. This means our personal and educational behavior, our language, the classroom environment, and our witness should reveal a path toward heaven for our students regardless of the subject matter taught.

The first expression of Catholicism a student should receive and observe from their teacher is not a superficial expression of love that associates Christ as only a friend or a counselor. Instead, students should first be exposed to an active conviction of belief and assent that the Catholic faith is true, beautiful, and good because Jesus died and rose from the dead for our salvation. By conviction, I mean that the teacher expresses an undeniable certainty that God exists and that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that Jesus is truly present in the Holy Eucharist, that sin is real, heaven and hell are real, and that the aim of our ministry as Catholic educators is the salvation of souls. The famed Catholic educator Fr. Luigi Giussani describes the necessity of proposing Catholicism as follows,

To educate means to suggest a proposal, but the proposal must be in response to a lived question, or else it will simply be a load dumped on one’s shoulders. . . Therefore, if to educate means to offer a proposal, this proposal will reach the student’s heart and move him only if he is carried by an energy originating from the presence of the educator.[1]

The necessity of proposing the truth about Catholicism to students cannot be anchored in the religion textbook, memorization of terms, multiple-choice examinations, podcasts, or other forms of social media. None of these resources, I argue, adequately determine the disposition of the student's soul. Hence, the proposal Giussani speaks of is aimed to penetrate the heart of the student, initiating a response of faith, hence moving the student toward God. It is important to remember that the premise of education, whether it be secular or religious in nature, is to arrive at a knowledge of truth. It is to assist the student in discovering the truth in things and how they work and affect their life. Christopher Dawson wrote that primitive man is not concerned with abstract truth but with the reality and power of the forces on which life depends, and his religion finds expression in myths, rites, or sacred techniques. Our Christian anthropology directly reflects this formative process because it is part of God’s Divine pedagogy of how He teaches His children. It also reflects the simplicity by which God created us in His own image and likeness and how we can know Him by natural reason.[2]

Teach and urge these duties. If anyone teaches otherwise and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit, he knows nothing; he has a morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words, which produce envy dissension, slander, base suspicions, and wrangling among men who are depraved in mind and bereft of the truth, imagining the godliness is a means of gain.[3]

As the new school year arrives, I would urge that as Catholic educators, we provide a visible act of faith for our students, an act that is simply not remote, mundane, or disassociated from daily life. Anthropologically speaking, provide them with an opportunity to recognize and affirm their human dignity and identity as children of God. Perhaps at the start of each class we can begin with the recitation of the Act of Contrition, or a decade of the Divine Mercy Chaplet, or a meditation on the Saint of the day. These simple acts of faith, in fact, provide a Christ-centered focus to the entire day because it directs the students toward a docility of faith in Christ.

We must not forget that the entire drama of human existence involves a constant interaction between the human and divine, man with God. G.K. Chesterton poignantly describes this realization that as soon as he had clearly in his mind this conception of something solid in the solitary and unique character of the divine story, it struck him that there was the same strange and yet solid character in the human story that had led up to it, because that human story also had a root that was divine.^[4]