But first a note from Robert Royal: Many people may be unaware that we're in the middle of Catholic Schools Week. As a remedy, we're offering something special today: two columns, one making a strong case for what Catholic education is, and another about how it is equipped to confront a new challenger. Enjoy and be aware.
Now for The Great Abdication by Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg
If you send your children to a Catholic school, you should ask the principal or a teacher if they can answer two questions: "What is a human person?" and "What is the purpose of an education?"
You'll likely hear about "21st century skills," "socialization," or "preparing students for jobs that don't exist yet." So, despite the crucifixes on the walls and religion classes, your principals and teachers generally can't tell you what a student is or what education is ultimately for.
This is not individual failure. It's the inevitable result of what is properly named the Great Abdication: the systematic elimination of formal and final causes from modern education's theoretical framework.
Following a scheme that goes all the way back to Aristotle and was adopted by St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Intellectual Tradition has recognized four explanatory factors or principles necessary to understand anything fully:
Material Cause: What is a thing made of?
Efficient Cause: How is it made?
Formal Cause: What is it? (What is its nature?)
Final Cause: What is it for? (What is its ultimate end or perfection?)
Modern education has eliminated the last two in schools and colleges. It denies fixed human nature (no formal cause) and refuses to name a transcendent purpose (no final cause). This makes authentic Catholic education impossible.
Without formal cause, Catholic schools cannot articulate – and therefore do not even know – what their students are. Instead of affirming that each child is a rational soul created in God's image (Genesis 1:27), such institutions have been conditioned to treat children as if they are self-creating beings whose self-esteem is of the highest importance.
St. Augustine wrote: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." Education that ignores this primary orientation toward God as our final cause cannot form human persons; it can only deform them. Public schools aim at secular metrics like test scores, college admissions, and career goals. Sadly, most Catholic schools do the same. As St. Paul warned, we have "conformed to this world." (Romans 12:2)
A Catholic school must acknowledge the crucial truth that all human beings have a soul that survives bodily death. An eternal soul requires eternal ends. Without true final causes, both natural and supernatural, Catholic schools cannot answer a simple question: "What is the purpose of Catholic education?"
The natural ends of a Catholic education are to acquire the intellectual and moral virtues. The ultimate end (as Josef Pieper reminds us, can be found in St. Thomas Aquinas) is the state in which "our powers are fully realized and fully at rest face to face with God for all eternity."
It may seem impossibly abstract, but True Catholic education aims at the Beatific Vision.
Pope Pius XI wrote in Divini Illius Magistri that Christian education must form "the true and perfect Christian. . .the supernatural man who thinks, judges, and acts constantly in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of Christ."
Can a school form the "true Christian" if it fails to define what a human person is or what human perfection means? While some Catholic schools are recovering the classical tradition, the vast majority have succumbed to the Great Abdication promoted by secular humanist education.
You don't need a philosophy degree to see this abdication. Walk into any Catholic school and observe: When a student misbehaves, do teachers correct the objective disorder in the child's will and guide him toward virtue? (Proverbs 22:6) Or do th...
