Issue 025: Education Issue: Catholic and Modern Education
Newsletter
Greetings Readers,
January 29- February 4 this year marked Catholic Schools week. Catholic Schools in the New World have a long history, even predating the founding of the United States. Anti-Catholicism in public schools led to the call to establish a Catholic school in every parish. Still today, modern education is often anti-Catholic, or else promotes beliefs and ideologies that no Catholic can support. Catholic schools are still needed, and yet they are struggling. Our issue this week focuses on education, the flaws of modern education, and the struggles of Catholic schools.
In the Church, this past Sunday marked “Septuagesima Sunday,” signalling the approach of Ash Wednesday and the Lenten Season. In the older rite, the liturgical colors turn to violet, and the Gloria and Alleluia are put away until Easter. The time to prepare for and think about Lent are now at hand.
Happy Reading!
— The Editors
Call for articles!
Gaudium is always seeking thoughtful articles that fit our magazine’s mission and style. Please write to us at submissions@gaudiummag.com with inquiries, requests, and submissions!
The Suicide of Catholic Education
With Catholic schools across the country closing at record rates, one can hardly deny the existence of a major crisis in Catholic education. Ultimately, one cannot help but think just how much those closures are self-inflicted. The slow decline of Catholic schools is not death from an outside force, but rather, a death by suicide. Society seems to have lost its faith. Rather than resist those trends and try to convert the world, too often Catholic schools have let themselves be converted by the world. Read more about the decline of Catholic education and what we can do here.
Why Modern Education Fails
Modern education fails because its philosophy of education is so wrong. Secular public and private schools tend to see the purpose of education as to bring about liberal social change or to prepare students for the workforce. On the contrary, Students must be formed, developed by the curriculum, not into agents of social change or workers in the economy, but into morally good people with minds made to know and love goodness, truth, and beauty.
Read more here.
The Teacher-Martyr: St. Cassian of Imola
From the little we know, St. Cassian lived in the 4th century AD and was martyred in what would have been one of the last Roman persecutions against Christians under Julian the Apostate. Killed for refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods, Cassian was murdered by being stabbed to death by his students with their styli. He died because he lived the truth too much to lie and in this, he in this, his faith, and his perseverance, he is a model for teachers (and students) today. Read more here.