Catholic and Loving it!

Three weeks ago the website administrator for Cardinal Newman's Canonisation at Birmingham Oratory sent me an email asking me to draw attention to an article on the Newman Cause website. I meant to blog about it, but unfortunately it got buried in my email and was forgotten.

Ella reminded me about it today and it occurs to me that this is quite relevant right now what with the whole government forcing sex education on fifteen year olds thing...

Without intellectual integrity, education will degenerate into social engineering. Without conscience and the Faith, in Professor MacIntyre’s words, ‘even the best university education may result in a peculiarly dangerous form of bad character, that in which the cultivation of the mind, independently of religion’ makes conscience degenerate into ‘mere self-respect’.

These twin dangers have an obvious bearing on contemporary educational dogmas, especially perhaps on the State’s vision of education in human relationships and sexuality. Both intellectually and morally the Church’s vocation in education is to oppose such distortions.

Intellectually, as MacIntyre shows, Newman’s understanding of education departs radically from the politically-motivated model currently in vogue. For Newman, MacIntyre explains, ‘the aim of … education is not to fit students for this or that particular profession or career, to equip them with theory that will later on find useful applications to this or that form of practice. It is to transform their minds, so that the student becomes a different kind of individual, one able to engage fruitfully in conversation and debate, one who has a capacity for exercising judgement, for bringing insights and arguments from a variety of disciplines to bear on particular complex issues’ (pp. 147-48). Independence of mind, rather than compliance with socio-economic expectations, is the goal of education.

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