What is Education?

FOR ST AMBROSE COLLEGE SPEECH DAY

Bridgewater Hall, Manchester 

Monday 20th March 2000

Headmaster, Brother Sreenan, Governors of the College, honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen all, thank you for your kind invitation to join you here tonight, and for your welcome!  And warmest congratulations to all of you who have earned recognition of your academic, social and sporting labours. This is my first visit both to this splendid Hall and to St Ambrose College. I have long looked forward to visiting both - and I want to acknowledge that I consider it a privilege to be invited to address you tonight.  

What is education? And for whom?   

I imagine you'll be glad to know that I do not aim to answer the question definitively tonight! - for this is a question we will spend whole lifetimes asking - and sometimes answering. From birth until death. And maybe thereafter. But it's a good question, I think, to lead us on to some reflections at a school's Speech Day.

The seventeenth century poet John Dryden was sure he knew what education was, and sure, indeed, he knew what it was not: in The Hind and the Panther he wrote:   

 

By education most have been misled; so they believe, because they so were bred. The priest continues what the nurse began, and thus the child imposes on the man. ¹    

The august future bishop - to whom the fable was addressed - was not amused! And nor, for the most part, today, are we.  But as I've suggested already, I think we would do well, with Dryden, to stay with the question awhile. What is education? And for whom?    

Education is surely not simply the possession of a collection of facts. I put it to you that education is rather a method which enables us first to accept and then to deal with acquired responsibility.   

You and I are sisters and brothers bound by a shared calling to accept the gift of acquired responsibility for the highest and best in human life in the twenty-first century. You and I are a people called to strive, looking ever onwards and upwards. We are to seek out the best method for accepting and then living a shared responsibility. Indeed we are called to live and to BE instruments of the power of God now on earth.    

And there are many gifts. And to each is appointed a different gift. The Jesuit, Gerard Hughes, tells the story of a worker whose life was transformed by the gift of awe in the face of Creation. Walking his small dog, the man became suddenly aware of the enormity of the created order around him, and in awe of it knew himself as one with what he saw. He knew that he had within himself the capacity to grow and to change; he knew that he could aspire to metamorphosis - transfiguration, transformation. But maybe he was one of this world's luckier men? ...

By education most have been misled; so they believe, because they so were bred. The priest continues what the nurse began, and thus the child imposes on the man.

By now I hope that you’ll not find it strange that I, an Anglican priest, should say to you that I believe that this nation of ours needs good Catholics! And that it follows that good Catholics need good and rounded education. You see, the Catholic Christian, if he or she would take the Faith seriously, will honour the name by which Christ's Church is most fully recognised. It is a plain name. But a hope filled name. You bear a name given to you by the presence of Christ in our midst - the name ‘Catholic’. And I ask you to be sure always to be proud of that name.   

The person who is proud to be Catholic will be proud to belong to a Universal Church, within a universe that presents no known bounds. The Catholic - with his or her view of this vast universe - will be a person who recognises the dangers in forms of ‘education’ which mislead; education which advocates belief for no good reason of faith, or of intellect, or of order, other than that of the early circumstance in which we are bred.   

The Catholic who sets out from school to life’s adult adventures will not be believing only that which was believed in the nursery. The educated Catholic mind will have challenged and put to the test his or her ‘cradle Catholicism’ - and in the process will, hopefully, have come to adopt and to feel at one with the essential truths imparted to humankind by the Son of God himself. And at the very heart of that essential truth, that most essential education, is the great and glorious mystery of Love. For as St John puts it: God is love; and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. 1 John 4:16   

The best education then will have persuaded those who seek to receive its gifts that Love must be at the heart of the universe, and thus at the heart of every facet of human existence.  Where there is war and strife, where there is distrust and suspicion, where there are religious divides and ill thought out bigotries and lovelessness we may see a measure of truth in Dryden’s assertion that 

 

by education most have been misled; so they believe, because they so were bred ...

To say that we believe in anything is to own belief. To own belief is to be gifted with the responsibilities that belief lays upon each of us. To be Catholic then, and to be educated, and I am bound with you in striving to be both, is to acknowledge the primacy of the Love, which is God, in all things.   

Education in the twentieth century, and in the dawn of this twenty-first, has brought humankind a long, long way along life’s road. Each of us can hardly fail to be excited by the advances in technology that have brought us computers, communication and the means to look upon the world as but a small community - and travel to its furthest reaches in comfort and in style. But danger lurks behind the attractive - and indisputably useful - facade of these advances, for with the advance comes more responsibility. We can entertain ourselves for hours on end, perhaps indeed for life, by looking into, even participating in an electronic ‘virtual world’. But the problem with ‘virtual worlds’ will prove, in time, to have been that they are not ‘real worlds’. Virtual worlds are not possessed of the dynamic of God within them. They have no heart. And so, at the very moment when Mozambique comes nearer our reach than ever before, at the very moment when she cries out for our help, we run the danger of having forgotten how to communicate with real people, and real problems, and real wars, and real human barriers. We become ostriches. And in the end, the ostrich, with his or her head in the sand, winds up with a kicked backside and a bad temper.   

What is education? And who is education for? I suggest that education is the life-long gifting of transforming method. Ever changing and ever developing method which enables our understanding, and our acceptance of responsibility, - and provides the tools we need to deal with real as opposed to ‘virtual’ life.   

Education is for all whom God created in His own likeness. Education will properly be the badge of the redeemed - the human community which is reconciled with God and with itself. Real education then will demand courage, prophetic vision and perseverance. Real education will raise up giants among men to walk upon the face of the earth; great and gentle giants like the beloved Pope John Paul II. This very day the aged and weary Pope travels to the heart of the world’s Faith -  to Jerusalem, whose name, in Hebrew, might be translated ‘Vision of Peace’. The Pope, of all men, knows that in the ‘Vision of Peace’, at this time, there is but precious little peace. And so the great, Catholic, man of God aspires, strives, still, to be educated, to stand at the heart and in the heat of it ... a frail, weak and trembling metaphor of Christ’s own Truth: the truth that real education produces those who know that out of weakness God ordains strength. From frail men shall come forth mighty prophecies. From the proclamation of truth - by word, by deed, by travel and example shall come forth the New Jerusalem. And we’re to be the travellers. Today’s pilgrims.   

Yes, real education will involve humanity in its entirety learning a new method for working and hoping and travelling together. The fullest education will recognise the significance and the necessity to life of the prize-winning scholar who seeks to measure the span of the stars, and, just as much, of the person who cleans the windows through which the scholar seeks to gaze upon the world. Real education must ultimately unite the world’s religious faiths in a common quest for a common home and for growing understanding within its walls.

 

Peace be within thy walls: and plenteousness within thy palaces. For my brethren and companions’ sakes: I will wish thee prosperity. Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God: I will seek to do thee good.  Psalm 122:7-9   

Real education will inspire us to love. And to be real Catholics!  If we’re ‘educated’ beyond the capacity to stand in awe as we look upon creation - and know ourselves at one with and for it, then we have been misled: the priest has continued only what the nurse began, the child imposes upon the man. We have become, or will, ere long become, Les Miserables - the miserable ones.  And then we’ll need to remember their school song - and very quickly learn from it …   

 

Do you hear the people sing / Lost in the valley of the night? / It is the music of a people who are / Climbing to the light / For the wretched of the earth / There is a flame that never dies. / Even the darkest night will end / And the sun will rise. / They will live again in freedom / In the garden of the Lord. / They will walk behind the ploughshare / They will put away the sword. / The chain will be broken / And all men will have their reward. / Will you join in our crusade? / Who will be strong and stand with me? / Somewhere beyond the barricade / Is there a world you long to see? / Do you hear the people sing? / Say, do you hear the distant drums? / It is the future that they bring / When tomorrow comes! ²    

Brothers under the banner of St Ambrose: thank God, through Jesus Christ, for real education. And never cease, through all of life, to aspire to it.  

Fr Simon Marsh

Ringway Vicarage, 20 March 2000

Notes

¹ John Dryden 1631-1700 The Hind and the Panther l.389

'Anne Barbeau Gardiner provides a detailed explanation of Dryden’s poem and its use of scriptural and literary sources, as well as its contribution to the campaign — whose realization in his lifetime was the principal goal of King James II — to repeal the Test Acts. Dryden’s poem, Gardiner states, has generally been considered a failure as poetry and satire: profane in tone and overladen with animal imagery (the Catholic Church as a hind, or female deer; the Church of England as a panther; and aggressive Puritan nonconformity as a wolf). The aim of Gardiner’s book is to overturn that judgment, and to instead “show that Dryden’s poem has a grand and unified design that has hitherto gone unnoticed.”'- William J Tighe: New Oxford Book Review

see Ancient Faith and Modern Freedom in John Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther  by Anne Barbeau Gardiner.

² From Les Miserables: English lyrics © 1985, Alain Boublil Music Ltd