A Good Little Book About Catholic Education
Catholic From The Inside Out: Evangelizing the Culture of Our Parish School
The Core Group
Garden & Wall, NY 2003, 186 pp.
The authors of this book do not identify themselves, but they were a committee that "inaugurated a new era" in a Catholic elementary school. It is located in what is described as a blue-collar, German neighborhood where college ambitions are rare and "faulty speech patterns" are common. It's a good bet that the school is in Baltimore.
Learned in modern theories of education and Thomism and with a clear concept of what a Catholic School should be, the group's aims for the school included countering "Pelagiansim" and "subjectivism" in the culture at large. Calling it "Pelagianism," is unnecessarily academic, but what they mean is denial of the necessity of God. "Subjectivism" is the reduction of truth, particularly moral truth, to convention and opinion.
Their methods involve teaching by memorization and delivery of dogma in a form very similar to, if not actually from, The Baltimore Catechism. Memorization has been pooh-poohed by modern educators and as far as I can tell from the flabbiness and practical non-existence of folks' memories, is not done much in contemporary schools.
The group also had the rare insight that children do not have to immediately understand what they memorize. The important thing is to plant a seed that will germinate, perhaps years later.
Another of the "core group's" commendable visions is the necessity of creating a "culture" that furthers the aims of the school, something that many a Catholic outfit sorely lacks. Culture creation begins with making clear to all members of the community: students, parents, teachers, what behaviors and efforts are expected of them.There is testing to see that the effort is being made. For example, children are given collection-basket envelopes to indicate they are going to--or being taken to--weekly Mass. Parents of the students have to pledge that they will meet the Sunday/Holy Day obligations. Adults who do not go to Mass every week are not allowed to coach or otherwise serve as role-models to the kids.
The parish's lower socioeconomic status was probably an advantage. Had the group undertaken its imposition in a parish like those in Montgomery County, where the bourgoisie tend to be know-it-alls who second-guess the saints and file suit, it would have been in for an Iwo Jima of a struggle.
Copyright © 2004 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.