Toward an Authentic Understanding of Catholic School Identity
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| Title: | Toward an Authentic Understanding of Catholic School Identity |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Christopher Hurst |
| Source: | Educational Theory. 2024 74(4):473-491. |
| Availability: | Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 19 |
| Publication Date: | 2024 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Evaluative |
| Descriptors: | Catholic Schools, Institutional Characteristics, Educational Research, Attitudes, Self Concept, Traditionalism, Goal Orientation, Educational Practices |
| DOI: | 10.1111/edth.12654 |
| ISSN: | 0013-2004 1741-5446 |
| Abstract: | Researchers have studied Catholic schools for decades, often in an attempt to extrapolate from them lessons that may help public schools accomplish similar levels of academic achievement and other desirable goals, such as social mobility, social efficiency, and democratic equality. But research that attempts to understand Catholic education from a secular perspective inevitably misunderstands the purpose of education that Catholic schools themselves claim to pursue, i.e., beatitude. This unique purpose is the source of Catholic school identity. Here, Christopher Hurst argues that by considering Catholic education as the practice of a distinctly Catholic tradition, researchers can authentically assess how well Catholic schools are achieving their own stated goals, and whether their practices can be applied outside of a particular Catholic context. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 2024 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1441096 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwEqSpyZINxkzgADBAGY3OlkAAAA4jCB3wYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHRMIHOAgEAMIHIBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDN6ZEvEK9zFpLw-NPwIBEICBmsvbDbEnB6HcH4hM0M3LdJnofsuTLxWort6aFTwaF0VXrOHek_awXhioKyW9FuE0MrnKGKjEmCZHCV0Wo8_7Z7PQda3A4SEy7fjc6uO4yM2VvptWSXXzMnSerysvR87DYaWn8z5JVspDzabINGJYfReaJnbOrel7AX6AFQoxWDbDnERcwMFQ1d3O542jKy6zkAefUCzQVGO9iPk= Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0179878244;ety01aug.24;2024Sep27.07:08;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0179878244-1">Toward an Authentic Understanding of Catholic School Identity </title> <p>Researchers have studied Catholic schools for decades, often in an attempt to extrapolate from them lessons that may help public schools accomplish similar levels of academic achievement and other desirable goals, such as social mobility, social efficiency, and democratic equality. But research that attempts to understand Catholic education from a secular perspective inevitably misunderstands the purpose of education that Catholic schools themselves claim to pursue, i.e., beatitude. This unique purpose is the source of Catholic school identity. Here, Christopher Hurst argues that by considering Catholic education as the practice of a distinctly Catholic tradition, researchers can authentically assess how well Catholic schools are achieving their own stated goals, and whether their practices can be applied outside of a particular Catholic context.</p> <p>Keywords: Catholic school identity; practice; tradition; beatitude</p> <p>Scholarship on Catholic schools often understands Catholic school identity as a means for the school to achieve some greater end, such as elevating students' academic achievement, promoting students' ability to enter the workforce, or encouraging students to participate in the democratic process. But the Catholic tradition itself pursues an end that it claims is greater still: beatitude, a particular conception of human flourishing. In this paper, I argue that researchers, policymakers, and practitioners can only fully understand Catholic school identity from an authentically Catholic perspective.</p> <p>Authentic identity comes from the practice of a tradition. Communities of practice define a moral standard that is objective to the individual practitioner, who develops virtues through its pursuit of excellence. But these virtues, and the standards they help practitioners pursue, only make sense in light of a broader tradition. In the same way, claims of purpose operate within traditions, and assessments of these claims are incoherent when approached from an outside perspective. To understand Catholic school identity, then, one must view the school as a community of practice, rooted in tradition and oriented toward particular internal goods, rather than as an institution, focused on external goods that are applicable outside of its moral context.[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>] Below, I describe two prominent approaches to Catholic school identity, both of which imply that academic achievement, dropout prevention, student citizenship, and other such goals are the primary purpose of Catholic education. Because they do not claim beatitude as their ultimate purpose, however, these secular interpretations are inconsistent with authentic Catholic school identity.</p> <p>While Catholic schools offer a clear illustration of this point, they are hardly the only schools that derive identity from tradition. The same is true for any community of purpose, and this applies to a growing number of private, charter, magnet, and community schools. To craft policy for these schools or to gauge their effectiveness always presupposes particular purposes and values, which in turn derive from traditional moral frameworks. By attending to authentic identity, future research and policy can more closely align with the purposes schools themselves claim to pursue.</p> <hd id="AN0179878244-2">Academic Achievement in Catholic Schools</hd> <p>As part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Johnson administration tasked sociologist James Coleman with studying inequalities in American schooling. In the resulting report and subsequent studies, Coleman found that Catholic schools were more effective than other types of schools at raising student achievement, relative to the student's socioeconomic status.[<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref2">2</reflink>] Though Coleman's methods and conclusions were immediately controversial and drew significant criticism from both educators[<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref3">3</reflink>] and researchers,[<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref4">4</reflink>] his work initiated further studies of the effects Catholic education might have on key educational outcomes.</p> <p>Coleman saw the Catholic schools of 1960s America as extensions of the parish rather than as agents of either society in general or of the individual students' families. At that time, typical Catholic parishes were defined both by the geography of ethnically segregated neighborhoods and by commonly shared norms, expectations, and beliefs. Coleman identified these parishes as examples of "functional communities."[<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref5">5</reflink>] Because members shared both physical space and a common moral language, adults in the community felt empowered to enforce shared norms; thus, children could expect that both teachers and parents would generally hold them to the same expectations. Coleman described this sort of congruence as "closure," which he claimed was essential for a community to create social capital, allowing schools to raise achievement by demanding more effort from students.[<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref6">6</reflink>]</p> <p>Coleman's perspective on Catholic school identity depended on the geographic, social, and religious closure of the parish around the school, but by the time Anthony Bryk studied Catholic schools thirty years later, these patterns of closure had begun to fray. Students at the schools Bryk studied were less likely to live near the school, and were less likely to be Catholic than were Coleman's students.[<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref7">7</reflink>] Despite these demographic shifts, Bryk still found that students in Catholic schools achieved at higher levels than their peers, that Catholic schools exhibited smaller achievement gaps across racial and socioeconomic lines, and that all‐girl Catholic schools in particular were effective in protecting female students from negative gendered stereotypes. These results seemed to suggest that Catholic school success was not entirely attributable to closed functional communities.</p> <p>Instead, Bryk identified school culture, rather than the school's relationship with the neighborhood, as the primary driver of student achievement. Like Coleman, however, Bryk found that a strong school culture required unity, both of purpose and of means, embodied in practices common to all students. Schools with a strong culture maintain a high level of academic rigor for all students, for instance, by minimizing academic tracking. Common rituals encourage students to understand the school as a unit, and a clear school mission exposes "a broad, diverse cross section of students to a distinctive vision of active participation in humane society."[<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref8">8</reflink>] Because the Catholic schools Bryk studied taught a diverse population and provided these students common experiences that encouraged them to see the school as a community (even when they were not Catholic), they effectively pursued the "common school ideal."</p> <p>Both Coleman and Bryk believed that there was some element of Catholic school identity that made these schools more likely to succeed. Though these two theorists conducted their studies in significantly different educational and social contexts, they each determined that identity requires some sense of unity among stakeholders and some sense of shared mission or purpose. But the differences between their views are as illuminating as their similarities. Coleman believed that unity came first, and that the closure of a Catholic parish and neighborhood created conditions the school could leverage for the development of social capital. Bryk believed that mission came first, and that in the foundations of Catholic teaching is a purpose whose clarity provided both the means and the motivation for the school's cultural unity.</p> <p>These mechanisms — unity and mission, social capital and school culture — connected Coleman and Bryk's conceptions of Catholic school identity and what they believed to be the purposes of school. For Coleman, schools were effective if they could "free the child from the constraints imposed by accident of birth."[<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref9">9</reflink>] Bryk considered schools to be effective if they encouraged "the full development of all students, both their minds and their hearts, [which] is education for democracy and advances the common good."[<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref10">10</reflink>] These goals animate many types of schools, not only Catholic schools; indeed, both Coleman and Bryk sought not to understand Catholic school identity in isolation, but rather to extrapolate the means of Catholic schooling to a broader population. But in their attempt to derive from Catholic schools lessons that other schools could follow, these theorists necessarily viewed Catholic schools through a secular lens.</p> <hd id="AN0179878244-3">The Purposes of School</hd> <p>Different theorists approach educational policy research in different ways, not only because they may prefer different methodologies or see value in different contexts, but also because they have different conceptions of the fundamental purpose of schools. Beneath all policy and research are moral assumptions about desirable outcomes and their justifications. For instance, Coleman and Bryk both believed that academic achievement was the mark of effective schooling. It is significant, however, that they disagreed as to why academic achievement is good, and that neither reason fully aligned with those of Catholic schools themselves. A brief historical analysis of the purposes of schooling explains why.</p> <p>David Labaree takes issue with public school critics who diagnose the "problems" with public schooling as either pedagogical (poor teachers and curricula), organizational (too tight or too loose governance), social (overcoming poverty and discrimination), or cultural (lack of "family values" and prominence of pop culture).[<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref11">11</reflink>] Instead, Labaree argues that "the central problems with American education are fundamentally political" because these issues are all consequences of competing goals.[<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref12">12</reflink>] Labaree distills the goals of public education into three categories: democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility. These goals each seem valid from the perspective of the citizen, taxpayer, and consumer, respectively, but they are incommensurate, so they have recurred in political debates throughout history.</p> <p>Widespread public schooling began, at least in the northern and western United States, as a project to train a citizenry for the rigors of nineteenth century democracy. Education existed prior to common school reforms, but earlier schools often broke along socioeconomic lines, with venture schools and academies serving middle class children and charity schools serving the children of the new urban working class.[<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref13">13</reflink>] In contrast, the common school reform movement saw schooling as a public good, a mechanism to create a common culture of pan‐Protestant, republican citizenship. Labaree identifies this robust tradition of state power and social leveling as democratic equality, in which public institutions seek to unite the citizenry.</p> <p>From the social efficiency perspective, taxpayers still see schooling as a public good, but less as a mechanism to create citizens. Instead, they understand school as a sorting agent to optimize skill distribution in the market. Advocates of this goal argue that "our economic well‐being depends on our ability to prepare the young to carry out useful economic roles with competence."[<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref14">14</reflink>] Similar to democratic equality, the efficiency perspective limits individual choice, but instead of requiring the kind of broad, liberal learning expected of politically active citizens, this perspective values targeted, applied learning that ensures that schools prepare workers for a highly stratified society. Achieving these goals makes public schooling a sound investment for taxpayers who see school primarily as preparation for the workplace.</p> <p>Though advocates of both democratic equality and social efficiency regard schooling as a public good, which sometimes requires students to learn in ways that they may not individually choose, the social mobility perspective centers the student herself. School systems that promote social mobility see education as "a commodity, the only purpose of which is to provide individual students with a competitive advantage in the struggle for desirable social positions."[<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref15">15</reflink>] The key feature of this kind of school is educational distinction, often in the form of credentials students use to signal achievement. Advocates of social mobility argue that schools should provide an even playing field to allow students with limited means to elevate their status through hard work — that is, they pursue an idealized meritocracy. But the credentialized signal can eventually become more important to the student than the learning the signal intends to communicate.[<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref16">16</reflink>]</p> <p>Not all theorists share Labaree's pessimism about the social mobility perspective or about education as a private good. As I described above, Coleman saw the primary benefit of Catholic schools situated in parish communities as an increase in social mobility; he believed that it was the very "publicness" of the closed functional community that created the conditions for individual student achievement. In the two decades since Labaree's paper, several kinds of schools — public, charter, and private — have intentionally built school communities of various types and fostered distinct school identities.[<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref17">17</reflink>] But many of these schools have described their purpose not as a service to the community per se, but rather as a particularly effective way of raising test scores, graduation rates, or other more complex metrics of private success.[<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref18">18</reflink>] The key concept that unites these conceptions of social mobility is the belief that students respond well, both in their commitment to common purpose and in their individual ambitions, when participating in a healthy, consistent group. But even these theorists consider community to be simply a means, rather than the ultimate purpose of the school.</p> <p>Labaree's analysis demonstrates the deep connection between the purpose of schooling and the development of school identities, and even the more optimistic theorists would agree that a school that pursued social mobility through stratification and direct competition for scarce honors would be a school with a weak collective identity. Such a school would not be able to understand itself as a unified group, but rather as a service for a collection of individuals, much like a market that is public in access but private in purpose.[<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref19">19</reflink>] Such a school allows each individual student to define their own purpose, their own goals, their own criteria for successful schooling. In contrast, I describe below a theory of practice in which the purposes of schooling are defined collectively but objectively by the group of practitioners themselves. Schools that understand themselves in this way are more likely to have shared values, and therefore strong school identity.</p> <hd id="AN0179878244-4">Schooling in the Theory of Practice</hd> <p>Labaree's framework allows us to interpret Coleman and Bryk's work through the reciprocal interaction between unity and mission. In the theory of practice described by Alasdair MacIntyre, it is common purpose that distinguishes the <emph>practice</emph> of schooling from the <emph>institution</emph> of the school.[<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref20">20</reflink>] MacIntyre argues that practices accomplish their purposes by inculcating virtues and distributing intrinsic rewards that students cannot accumulate at institutions as such. Finally, MacIntyre shows how these virtues gain meaning insofar as they cause students to understand their lives as <emph>narratives</emph>, and that these narratives are necessarily intertwined with <emph>tradition</emph>. Catholicism is only one of several traditions that can grant meaning to personal narrative and thereby ground the virtues of practice — others include Protestantism, secular liberalism, and Marxism — but it creates school identity precisely because it is a historically rooted tradition that provides students with coherent, teleological answers to important and difficult questions.</p> <p>MacIntyre has denied that education itself is a practice, but I agree with Joseph Dunne that it is because education is complex, social, and moral in nature.[<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref21">21</reflink>] MacIntyre's argument is that education is a tool used by all practitioners in order to recruit and train the next generation; in this conception, math teachers are participating in the practice of mathematics, not the practice of schooling.[<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref22">22</reflink>] But particularly in K‐12 schooling, teaching mathematics is more closely related to teaching history than to practicing mathematics; teaching itself has hard‐earned skill sets and socially defined standards of excellence independent of those of the subject. The excellence of teaching is an excellence of human judgment, and recent scholarship has argued that the practice of education relies on these human judgments as a necessary bulwark against a growing push for instrumentalism, such as justifications for education in terms of social efficiency.[<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref23">23</reflink>]</p> <p>If education is a practice, then teaching cannot consist entirely of a collection of pedagogical competencies.[<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref24">24</reflink>] Instead, the practice of education must connect the teacher, the subject matter, and the student into a coherent community. Universities and other sites of higher education often exacerbate the divide that practice‐oriented education can bridge by separating "research" faculty from "teaching" faculty; indeed many research‐oriented professors participate in the practice of their field (rather than the practice of education), and teach as a means for apprenticing novices into the field.[<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref25">25</reflink>] But because K‐12 education is rarely divided in this way, and because most teachers in these schools do not consider themselves to be practicing mathematicians or practicing historians, I claim not only that school‐based education is a practice in a MacIntyrean sense, but also that the school is the primary social space in which education is practiced.</p> <p>Practices orient participants toward virtue by extolling internal goods and demanding excellence. Consider, for example, an elite teacher with deep mastery of their material and effortless command of the classroom. This teacher meets with the new hires in August and tells story after story with an obvious sense of satisfaction and contentment. The new teachers want nothing more than to emulate him in their own classrooms, but when they try his techniques, they fall short. Precisely then, the veteran teacher reminds these novices that he earned his stories through years of diligence, reflection, humility, and courage. To earn the joy they desire, they must first acquire virtue, through practice.</p> <p>This story does not describe every school, but it does exemplify the practice of education, with a socially defined goal that is objective to the practitioner and that requires excellence to obtain. Note that not only teachers but students and families can also be practitioners of education, participating in the complex social and moral activity of classroom learning with the common purpose of satisfaction in a lesson well taught and well learned, of human flourishing as defined in the social space of the school. Common purpose is therefore what distinguishes the practice of education from the institution of the school. Without common purpose, individual teachers, students, and families can of course feel satisfaction at a job well done. But they necessarily must be defining what that means for themselves, subjectively. Instead, practices call the individual practitioner to participate in a larger tradition.</p> <p>One of MacIntyre's central theses is that by fully participating in a tradition, schools can help create an "educated public" within which real, meaningful debate can flourish.[<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref26">26</reflink>] If participants in an educated public share standards of rationality — that is, a sense of what counts as sufficient evidence to defend a claim — then diverse viewpoints within a tradition can disagree and make sense of their disagreement. However, modern universities typically recruit and elevate many diverse traditions, each with their own standards of rationality.[<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref27">27</reflink>] As a result, meaningful debate often cannot occur and attempts at rational exchange often devolve into assertions of power and coercion. To prevent this fate, MacIntyre argues that students who participate in distinct traditions ought to be educated separately, allowing them to develop habits of debate and rationality that can only occur within shared norms, before using these habits as tools for understanding and interacting with a diverse world. This particular point has come in for predictable criticism within MacIntyrean scholarship, as intellectual diversity remains an important bulwark against devolution into unhealthy solipsism.[<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref28">28</reflink>]</p> <p>Clearly MacIntyre understands that sharing a common tradition is not enough to ensure that the community is healthy and just, so he further stipulates that virtue must contribute to the narrative conception of human lives and must situate those narratives within historically rooted traditions. Narratives require integrity, a holistic sense of self that extrapolates the moral excellences learned in practice into other situations. For example, a truly honest teacher must also be an honest father and friend. These narratives grant intelligibility to our actions by centering intention. Ask a teacher what she is doing, and she might answer either "assigning homework problems," or "preparing students to succeed in collegiate math," or "sharing the unique joys of mathematical creativity." Determining which of these is the "correct" answer is precisely the role of the practice, which draws individual practitioners' intentions toward a common purpose. The practice attracts these narratives to this particular common purpose because it uses a moral framework that is called tradition.</p> <hd id="AN0179878244-5">Rationality and Justice Within a Tradition</hd> <p>A tradition is a coherent collection of narratives that a community tells itself about itself. Traditions thereby provide communities with a shared language that creates unity and purpose, but MacIntyre argues that they serve another, more fundamental role: to grant meaning to questions of truth and justice.[<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref29">29</reflink>] Stories have characters who make decisions and face the consequences for those decisions; whether those decisions were right or wrong, whether those consequences were desirable or not, is entirely up to the story. MacIntyre argues that when a community agrees on a set of shared stories that coherently define these kinds of moral claims, the set of stories becomes a tradition. This tradition then sets the basic foundational definitions for justice and rationality, such that any argument about what is true and what is good occurs within, not between, traditions.</p> <p>This interpretation of traditions controversially defines modern liberalism as a tradition, despite the fact that its adherents often describe their thought as antitraditional or neutral on questions of justice and rationality. Prominent liberal thinker Stephen Macedo claims that debate on such questions must begin with certain shared first principles, such as freedom of conscience and the scientific method.[<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref30">30</reflink>] Though Macedo's ground rules seem reasonable or even neutral at first, two problems arise. First, these first principles exclude all forms of knowledge that cannot be understood scientifically, particularly those produced through revelation and faith. And second, these principles themselves have a long history, which undermines their claims to neutrality. Hence, by MacIntyre's lights, Macedo's liberalism is itself a tradition.[<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref31">31</reflink>]</p> <p>MacIntyre describes four considerations that he claims are essential to understanding the nature of traditions and traditional moral inquiry. First, rational justification is essentially historical: "What justifies the first principles themselves...is the rational superiority of that particular structure to all previous attempts within that particular tradition."[<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref32">32</reflink>] He goes on to claim that even a successful argument for the rationality of one set of first principles over another only convinces those within the same tradition. So Christians can have an argument over whether scientific evidence of evolution contradicts or confirms the Genesis creation narrative, but secular liberals cannot because that is not an argument within their tradition. The resolution of this argument will then update the tradition's first principles; indeed, their different answers on this question help distinguish Catholic and Evangelical epistemologies.</p> <p>Because there are diverse, historically rooted understandings of rationality, there must also be diverse theories of justice; arguing about what is true is deeply related to arguing about what is good. Catholics might subscribe to Thomistic theories of virtue, while the moral framework of the Enlightenment has led to multiple coherent theories of justice, such as Kant's categorical imperative, Mill's principle of utility, and Nietzsche's primacy of the will. Each of these theories are at the root of a different tradition that tells stories in order to understand the consequences of its own first principles. When contradictions inevitably arise, as they do for any theory of justice, the tradition uses these stories to argue within itself. If the resulting updated theory is more internally consistent and coherent, then the tradition is strengthened — but if not, the tradition may split or fade.</p> <p>MacIntyre's third consideration is that traditions are incommensurate; that is, if each tradition holds its own rationality and its own theory of justice, then productive moral argument between traditions is impossible.[<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref33">33</reflink>] Irresolvable debate is exactly what caused Macedo most concern, since he believed that different theories of justice would make republican government impossible, and not without reason. Drawing from the political philosopher John Rawls, Macedo called for a shared public reason in which all debate uses one set of "neutral" first principles. But if these principles are themselves historically rooted and subject to a tradition, then such principles reflect the priority of one tradition over others. Instead, MacIntyre argues that productive moral argument is possible, but only within the traditions themselves. Therefore, if a secular liberal wants to convince a Catholic or an Evangelical or a Marxist that she is right, she must make arguments from within the moral tradition she is arguing against.</p> <p>Finally, MacIntyre argues that because traditions are sets of coherent stories, their theories of rationality and justice are deeply contextual. Most adherents of a tradition do not reflect on the abstractions of first principles, but rather know what is true and what is good by an instinct that has been molded and shaped by stories. These stories can be shared literature, or they can be lived interactions with others and the stories people tell themselves to make sense of those interactions. Much like MacIntyre's theory of practice, a context‐dependent traditional understanding of morality is not relativist — there is a <emph>right</emph> answer within each tradition — but it is also not fully objective or naturalistic. Instead, answers are developed over time by the members of the traditions themselves. Hence, we can only understand a theory of reason or justice in application to a context; seeing how members of a tradition answer moral questions is the best way to understand the nature of the tradition itself.</p> <p>Education policy is (among other things) a collection of answers to moral questions, and therefore depends on a certain rationality and a certain theory of justice, applied to the educational context. What curriculum ought to be taught? Who decides on methods of pedagogy? What kinds of assessment should be used, and how should we interpret their findings? What distinguishes good teachers from bad, and how do we hire and keep good teachers while removing bad ones? Who has final say on contentious policy decisions, and what impact should other stakeholders have on their decisions? These questions and many others define education policy, but because they are value‐based, their answers depend on first principles. That is, different policies can be "right" from the perspectives of different traditions.</p> <p>Therefore, education policy can only be understood as the product of a prevailing tradition. School boards in a liberal polity are likely to write different policies from those in more critical jurisdictions. Most significant for my purposes, independent and religious schools design policies using their own distinct moral language and epistemological principles. Contrary to Macedo, these policies cannot be understood independent of tradition. Therefore, an authentic understanding of Catholic school identity must take Catholic tradition and its internally consistent answers to moral questions as its starting point.</p> <hd id="AN0179878244-6">Thomism and the Catholic Tradition</hd> <p>The philosophical system St. Thomas Aquinas developed in the thirteenth century was at the intersection between Augustinian orthodox theology and the then‐recently rediscovered works of Aristotle. Though not all Catholic thought is Thomistic, this system has become the common center of the Catholic intellectual tradition since Leo XIII's promulgation of <emph>Aeterni Patris</emph> in 1879. Since then, neo‐Thomists such as Jacques Maritain have applied St. Thomas's theology and philosophy to the challenges of the modern world, including to those of education. Below, I briefly describe the core elements that distinguish Thomistic thought from most modern secular philosophy, and which are necessary to understand the virtue ethics central to Catholic education.</p> <p>The bedrock of Thomistic metaphysics is common sense, based on the alignment between the world, sensory perceptions, and human reason. The paradigmatic break from Thomism began when René Descartes intentionally rejected common sense for the certainty of rational first principles. Descartes argued that senses sometimes deceive us, such as when a straight stick seems crooked when halfway immersed in water; therefore no sensory experience can be trusted, and we can make no defensible objective claim that the stick is straight or crooked. The Thomist instead accepts that sensory experience is perfectly legitimate as a tool for understanding the world (just as most scientists would agree that observation is central to their practice) and accepts sense data as a starting point for a qualitative understanding of the nature of being.</p> <p>From these data, we can use the rational processes of analysis and synthesis to define a being's nature, i.e., what it is about the being that distinguishes it from other beings. A being's nature is therefore determined by several of its aspects: what it is made of (material causation), how it is organized (formal causation), who made it this way (efficient causation), and for what purpose it was made (final causation). Consider, for example, a chair. A chair is a chair because it is made of material hard enough to support my weight, because it has a flat seat supported by legs, because it was made by a chairmaker, and because it was made to be sat on. Change these aspects, and it is no longer a chair.</p> <p>Thomas, like Aristotle before him, argues that humans themselves can and should be understood in this way. Specifically, we are who we are because we are animals (material) who are endowed with the capacity for reason (formal) and who have been made in the image and likeness of God (efficient) for the purpose of that lasting happiness known to Aristotle as <emph>eudaimonia</emph> and to Thomas as <emph>beatitude</emph> (final). Happiness, or as it is often alternatively translated, "human flourishing," is a state of being rather than a fleeting emotion, not defined in subjective terms of satisfaction of desire, or even as an analogy to the "flourishing" of nonhuman living things, but rather as the excellence of what is particularly human.[<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref34">34</reflink>] Aristotle writes that <emph>eudaimonia</emph> arises from the pursuit of "noble and serious things" rather than joys or pleasures in play. Although pleasure and play are good, he identifies those who set them as the goal of their life as "foolish and excessively childish."[<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref35">35</reflink>] The beatific goal of education, then, is to encourage children to prefer virtue over self‐gratifying pleasure.[<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref36">36</reflink>] And if beatitude is the goal of education, then the purpose of the school is to cause the student to encounter the art, literature, and science that enchants their world and causes them to ask questions about ultimate meaning.[<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref37">37</reflink>]</p> <p>Since all humans share the four causal elements above, we can conclude that flourishing is an objective standard, and that the distinction between good and bad actions is not merely the result of subjective choice. For Thomas, morality is not about upholding rights or self‐sacrifice for the good of the many, but rather is about choosing actions that lead to human flourishing. Central to this choice is desire for the good, which he believed was inherent in all humans to a greater or lesser degree based on disposition and training. A <emph>virtue</emph> in this system, such as prudence, justice, courage, or temperance, is defined as a habit for effortlessly choosing those actions that lead one closer to beatitude.</p> <p>Perhaps the most influential critique of Thomistic metaphysics comes from David Hume's "is‐ought fallacy." Hume, like other empiricists, agrees with Thomas that we can use observation and common sense in an attempt to understand the world. The problem is that what "is" says nothing about what we "ought" to do, that human nature is morally neutral rather than teleological. The Thomist might respond that is‐ought claims are central to our common moral reasoning. Consider a knife: it is irrelevant whether the knife is silver or purple, but I can reasonably claim the knife is a <emph>bad</emph> knife if it fails to cut the tomato on my cutting board. Stated another way, because the object <emph>is</emph> a knife, it <emph>ought</emph> to cut. Thomistic thought is distinct from most modern philosophy on exactly this point: humans have a purpose, Thomists argue, and human morality depends on acting out that purpose. These fundamental philosophical ideas are central to education because virtues are learned dispositions. Therefore, the Thomist believes that it is the central purpose of the school (indeed, of all education) to promote virtue in order for students to be happy in a deep and lasting way.</p> <p>For Maritain, the most important metaphysical distinction that Thomism creates is between the <emph>person</emph> and the <emph>individual</emph>. Each and every human is both of these, and therefore experiences tension between an animalistic individual nature, driven by instinct, and a divine personal nature, driven by reason. This distinction is essential for education, because "education is not animal training. The education of man is a human awakening."[<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref38">38</reflink>] In this system, educating a student so that they may eventually earn more money or social status is no better than training an animal for the sake of pleasure, with only a few extra steps in between. Instead, true education is education for freedom, rightly oriented to the good using St. John Paul II's definition: "Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the ability to do what we ought."[<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref39">39</reflink>] Freedom, then, requires discipline and self‐transcendence.</p> <p>These concepts of virtue, personhood, and freedom are all connected to beatitude; Thomism is a tradition in the MacIntyrean sense because it provides a coherent and interconnected framework for understanding both rational and moral issues. As MacIntyre suggests, there have been fierce debates within the Thomist tradition over the nature of these ideas and how they interact with lived reality. And Thomism itself, often through the institution of the Church, maintains an enduring, sometimes tense conversation with its secular peers that cannot be resolved in some neutral arena. Instead, MacIntyre asserts that debates can only be won or lost within a tradition, using only shared moral and epistemological first principles. Both Bryk and Coleman fail to engage <emph>these</emph> issues because they use the secular language of achievement, efficiency, and citizenship to frame their arguments about flourishing, freedom, and purpose. Because these frames come from outside the Thomist tradition, they fall short of fully describing the nature of Catholic school identity.</p> <hd id="AN0179878244-7">Assessing Policy within Traditions</hd> <p>Any researcher who studies schools must by necessity make choices that indicate a particular perspective, lens, or framework; there can never be an entirely neutral science. Choosing quantitative or qualitative methods grows out of an epistemological stance connecting evidence to conclusions. Choosing which variables to manipulate and measure implies a theory not only of what can change in schools, but what ought to change. For example, an author who conducts a quantitative study investigating connections between community closure and reduced dropout rates very likely believes at least three foundational ideas: (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref40">1</reflink>) reducing dropout rates is a good goal for schools to pursue, (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref41">2</reflink>) quantitative methods can at least somewhat accurately suggest a causal connection that leads to this result, and (<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref42">3</reflink>) the conclusion can be that community closure is, therefore, also beneficial. The first and third claims are claims about justice, and the second is a claim about truth.</p> <p>Few researchers would argue that reducing dropouts is a bad or even an irrelevant goal for schools to pursue. But as MacIntyre argues, all such moral and epistemological claims are made from within traditions; grounding claims in traditions in this way allows us to understand the claims of good and bad, or true and false, as compared to other priorities and as oriented to a final purpose. As a hyperbolic example, consider a school that implemented a policy to employ secret police to investigate and arrest any student attempting to drop out of school. Certainly, dropout rates would decrease! But such a policy would run counter to purposes of the school that run far deeper than preventing dropouts. This example illustrates that different schools and different teachers who adhere to different traditions may often choose the same policies (e.g., not arresting students for dropping out) despite their different teleological goals. But more realistic decisions — such as whether to require four mathematics credits to graduate high school or three, or whether to prioritize statistics or calculus — can distinguish one tradition from another.</p> <p>People who participate in distinct traditions certainly can understand and appreciate the goals that others pursue and even perhaps the means they use to accomplish those goals. But accepting whether some idea is true or some action is right are too firmly connected to separate as an outside observer.[<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref43">40</reflink>] A secular math teacher may look at a Catholic math teacher and appreciate or even understand the objectives he is trying to accomplish; indeed, there is much these teachers can learn from each other across the many commonalities between their traditions' moral and epistemological convictions. But unless she accepts these goals as the <emph>right</emph> ones, she can never fully accept the ideas behind them as <emph>true</emph>; and unless she accepts the foundational ideas as <emph>true</emph>, she can never fully accept the goals as <emph>right</emph>.[<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref44">41</reflink>] The two teachers could recognize each other's excellence as math teachers, but they would still make different decisions based on their different goals, and these decisions would lead to differences in what each teacher considers as having done a "good" job of teaching. Schools that set policy inevitably favor one set of goals over another; any attempt by a school to avoid favoritism by focusing on the neutral aspects that both of these teachers have in common is itself a preference for a pragmatic set of goals, and therefore a rejection of the transcendence intrinsic to the Catholic tradition.</p> <p>Recognizing that different traditions have different final purposes is essential both for productive policy debate and for authentic understanding of key concepts, such as school identity. Two schools might have contradictory policies that each can defend as rational from within their own traditions. For example, in <emph>Summerhill</emph>, A. S. Neill describes policies that do not require student attendance at class and that settle school‐wide decisions through majority votes in which first graders have equal voice with adults. Most schools would find these policies to be irrational, but to Neill they are necessary as a consequence of his worldview in which maximizing student agency is the primary foundational goal.[<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref45">42</reflink>] The goals of Summerhill (as with the goals of Catholic education) are not mysterious, and outside observers can describe them and perhaps even understand them on their own terms.[<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref46">43</reflink>] But if such an observer does not believe these goals are the right ones, then any assessment she makes will necessarily be pragmatic, missing something important by separating policy from its telos. Rather than seeking shared agreement and common principles, the recognition of the depth of others' beliefs can instead engender a mutual respect amid a pluralist landscape.</p> <p>The claims I have made about Catholic education and its foundational goal of beatitude are normative claims; clearly, many Catholic schools and teachers instead orient themselves to the goals of social mobility, social efficiency, or democratic equality, and the adoption of such secular purposes seems to be accelerating.[<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref47">44</reflink>] Nevertheless, whether or not the individual has analyzed their actions to this extent, every action is rooted in a fundamental goal and theories about the nature of the world. There remain significant overlaps between traditions, and many points of agreement; indeed, the common roots of most Western traditions in Aristotelian and Christian thought imply that secular and Catholic traditions have more in common than apart. But the differences matter, particularly as policymakers allocate resources and as researchers assess whether policy decisions are effective in yielding certain outcomes. Such assessments can be made from an outside, etic perspective, but these are necessarily a translation of the decisions made from the inside, emic perspective of those within the tradition.[<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref48">45</reflink>]</p> <p>Policies can only be effective or ineffective, good or bad, from the perspective of a tradition. Outside analysts can assess policies based on their own perspectives, as many might criticize the freedom given to students at Summerhill, but in doing so they assume that a neutral purpose and language exist that can allow for universal debate. MacIntyre insists that no such neutral purpose exists, that all moral claims are grounded in the language or idiom of a tradition, and that the only way to argue about policies is to do so from within the tradition that designed them. Critics could claim that Summerhill's policies lead to poor test scores or increased dropouts. Neill's school prioritizes students' long‐term happiness and moral agency, and any analyst who seeks to criticize its policies must either claim that they do not achieve their own stated goals, or that the goals are internally inconsistent. In the same way, analysts must take this approach if they are to assess policies enacted by Catholic schools, rather than assess them from the perspectives of social efficiency, social mobility, or democratic equality.</p> <p>The Catholic tradition transparently cares about democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility, but the Catholic tradition cares most about beatitude, so any policy Catholic schools enact must be assessed on its ability to inspire or detract from virtue. Policies that give students skills for an efficient workforce are good insofar as they allow those students to unlock their natural talents, rather than to shuttle them to wherever society wishes them to be. Policies that free students from poverty and the accidents of birth are good insofar as they promote the infinite worth of all human persons, rather than perpetuate a system that assesses value based only on credentials. And policies that give students access to democratic decision‐making are good insofar as they serve the common good, rather than giving equal voice to those who might use their power for selfish reasons. These purposes are means, but not the end that beatitude is for Catholic schools. We can only understand these policies authentically by comparing them to the goal they were designed to accomplish, that is, from within the Catholic tradition.</p> <hd id="AN0179878244-8">Catholic School Identity from a Thomist Perspective</hd> <p>Thomistic theorists have approached the question of Catholic school identity from within the Catholic tradition, and so their insights often differ significantly from those of Coleman or Bryk. For a Thomist, a school, like any institution, is good insofar as it promotes beatitude. And since virtues are learned habits that lead to beatitude, Thomists understand good schools as those that intentionally, consistently, and effectively promote virtue: both the individual virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance for students, and the institutional virtues of respect for human dignity, care for the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity for the school itself.</p> <p>Maritain once wrote, "In the flesh and bones of man there exists a soul which is a spirit and which has a greater value than the whole physical universe,"[<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref49">46</reflink>] summarizing the Christian anthropology that leads Catholic institutions to respect human dignity. Schools that respect the dignity of the human person treat each student as infinitely valuable, as an end to themselves and not as a means for some greater goal such as institutional prestige. Policies and school norms respect this fundamental principle of Catholic social teaching if they consistently elevate the value of the person despite the difficulty and cost of doing so. For example, teachers and school programs respect human dignity when they sacrifice time, effort, and energy to provide extra academic and moral support to the students most in need. But schools that consistently practice "cream skimming," teachers who consistently "counsel out" difficult students, and policies that benefit the whole at the expense of the individual ignore students' essential human dignity.[<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref50">47</reflink>]</p> <p>In contrast to respect for human dignity, respect for the common good centers the good of the whole: both the good of the whole classroom and the good of the whole school. From the first articulations of Catholic social teaching, the Church has described the common good in terms of citizenship, in which every member of the group prioritizes the needs of the many exactly because these group members have a common purpose, a shared tradition, and a commitment to resolving disputes through deliberation.[<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref51">48</reflink>] Schools respect this common citizenship by minimizing tracking and electives, both of which fracture the student body into sub‐units. Schools also promote the common good by hosting all‐school rituals and community events; no group is a community unless it consistently meets as a whole community. Teachers can promote common good citizenship by encouraging in‐class democratic decision‐making; this deliberative governance process allows individual students to see themselves as part of a coherent community, as sharing a common purpose.</p> <p>Creating this common purpose in the classroom is an example not only of student citizenship, but also of student power. According to Catholic social teaching, the just distribution of power follows the principle of subsidiarity, which delegates decision‐making to the lowest competent level. From a Thomistic perspective, districts and schools should not make decisions on matters of curriculum, pedagogy, or assessment if the teacher is capable of making these decisions herself, and districts should not make decisions on matters of policy and governance that instead are the school's domain. Subsidiarity is not in tension with the common good because only small, tight‐knit communities are capable of self‐governance through consensus and deliberative democracy; the citizenship that serves the common good requires goodwill and a mutually respectful friendship that can only occur in the small groups that subsidiarity demands.[<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref52">49</reflink>]</p> <p>The principle of solidarity is closely related to a respect for the common good, but solidarity is a consistent habit of charity extended to the broader human family: "[solidarity] requires you to look at another and give yourself to another with love."[<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref53">50</reflink>] I interpret solidarity as a familial connection to others outside the school and across the world, so schools and classrooms show solidarity by prioritizing a respect for others in a diverse and multicultural world. Solidarity does not demand that the school itself practice multiculturalism; instead, the school would participate on the diverse world stage as a Catholic player. Such a pluralist world stage would allow each school to root itself in a coherent tradition, but the commitment to ecumenical dialogue would prevent these schools from becoming dangerously isolated or insular.[<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref54">51</reflink>] To this end, schools that practice solidarity would be welcoming spaces for all students who are willing to uphold these principles of Catholic social teaching.</p> <p>Maritain defines education for freedom in humanistic terms: literature, history, languages, and philosophy train the intellect and orient the will in order to elevate the dignity of the human person. These subjects initiate the student into a tradition, not as part of a conservative ossification of the past, but rather to grant the student the foundations necessary for him to participate in and eventually to direct the community toward the common good. Learning the necessary skills for a trade and career is an essential part of education, but always defers to a more general, liberal arts education, particularly in schools; students with robust humanistic training can easily learn skills in apprenticeships or on the job. Thomistic education is therefore opposed to the social efficiency and social mobility perspectives, and shares much in common with Labaree's democratic equality. The key distinction between the two is that the purpose of Thomistic education is not to create equal citizens, but rather to promote human flourishing. For Maritain, democratic citizenship is good not as the goal of schooling, but as a means to a larger end.</p> <p>This distinction between means and ends in education is central for Maritain, indeed as it is central for all Thomistic thought. In schooling, means of this sort often manifest as technocratic pedagogies that teachers work tirelessly to perfect, but which cannot have any meaning independent of the students themselves: "The surprising weakness of education today proceeds from our attachment to the very perfection of our modern educational means and methods and our failure to bend them toward the end."[<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref55">52</reflink>] Thomistic education is therefore a deeply human, complex, and imperfect practice in which a teacher, knowledgeable in a subject, encounters a student and inflames in her a desire to be a better version of herself. In this example, the better version of the student is beatitude, the teacher is engaging in the meaningful practice of his subject, and the desire he inculcates drives her virtue. For MacIntyre, this sort of coherent moral practice can only happen within the context of a tradition.</p> <hd id="AN0179878244-9">Conclusions</hd> <p>Prior research has attempted to understand Catholic schools from perspectives outside the Catholic tradition. But because traditions provide the moral framework through which practitioners make sense of which goals take precedence over others, I argue that only a perspective within the Catholic tradition can authentically understand Catholic school identity. This is not to claim that traditions cannot learn from each other; indeed, they can and frequently do. Often, traditions overlap in such a way that practitioners can share effective means that accomplish multiple goals. But if these means are pointed at divergent ends, then an assessment of whether or not the school or teacher is effective can only assess whether they are effective at accomplishing a certain goal. Outside, etic observers can make insightful connections between these schools' means and their own stated ends, but only inside, emic practitioners actually share these ends as their own. As MacIntyre argued, questions of truth (whether the school is effective) and justice (whether the goals are the right goals) are too interrelated to separate, thus creating some limits on cross‐traditional educational understanding.</p> <p>MacIntyre's observations apply to any coherent tradition, not only to Catholic schools. Certainly, other religious traditions operate schools according to their own fundamental purposes, so a similar analysis could apply to Jewish day schools, Evangelical schools, and Muslim madrasas. Indeed, insofar as secular liberalism is itself a tradition, a similar analysis can apply to public schools as well. Researchers such as Coleman and Bryk provide valuable insights when they connect the practices and policies of Catholic education to desirable goals like social mobility, social efficiency, and democratic equality. Catholic schools demonstrably care about these goals, and any assessment of whether Catholic schools are effective at reaching them is meaningful. But an authentic assessment of Catholic schools can only come from within the Catholic tradition, assessing whether Catholic schools are successful at achieving their own stated goals. The identity of any school is rooted not only in goals that are broadly shared, but especially in those that are distinct. Hence the fairest assessment of how well real schools live up to these normative commitments and uphold their particular identities comes from the perspective of an observer who shares these commitments, goals, identity, and tradition.</p> <ref id="AN0179878244-10"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> The terms "practice," "tradition," and "internal goods" are as defined in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, with particular reference to <emph>After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory</emph> (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), and <emph>Whose Justice? Which Rationality?</emph> (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref2" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> James Coleman, <emph>Equality of Educational Opportunity</emph> (Washington, DC: National Center for Educational Statistics, 1966); James Coleman, Thomas Hoffer, and Sally Kilgore, "Cognitive Outcomes in Public and Private Schools," <emph>Sociology of Education</emph> 55, no. 2 (1982): 65–76; and James Coleman and Thomas Hoffer, <emph>Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Community</emph> (New York: Basic Books, 1987).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref3" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Diane Ravitch, "The Meaning of the New Coleman Report," <emph>Phi Delta Kappan</emph> 62, no. 10 (1981); and James Towers, "Twenty‐Five Years after the Coleman Report: What Should We Have Learned?," <emph>Contemporary Education</emph> 63, no. 2 (1992): 93–95.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref4" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Glen Cain and Harold Watts, "Problems in Making Policy Inferences from the Coleman Report," <emph>American Sociological Review</emph> 35, no. 2 (1970): 228–242; and Jee‐Seon Kim and Edward Frees, "Omitted Variables in Multilevel Models," <emph>Psychometrika</emph> 71, no. 4 (2006): 659–690.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref5" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Coleman and Hoffer, <emph>Public and Private High Schools</emph>, 7.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref6" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Ibid., 222.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" idref="ref7" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> Anthony Bryk, Valerie Lee, and Peter Holland, <emph>Catholic Schools and the Common Good</emph> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 56–59, 69–78.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib8" idref="ref8" type="bt">8</bibl> <bibtext> Ibid., 11.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib9" idref="ref9" type="bt">9</bibl> <bibtext> Coleman and Hoffer, <emph>Public and Private High Schools</emph>, xxvi.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Bryk, Lee, and Holland, <emph>Catholic Schools and the Common Good</emph>, xii.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> David Labaree, "Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals," <emph>American Educational Research Journal</emph> 34, no. 1 (1997): 40.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Carl Kaestle, <emph>Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860</emph> (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Labaree, "Public Goods, Private Goods," 42.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 56.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Kenneth Strike, <emph>Small Schools and Strong Communities: A Third Way of School Reform</emph> (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010); and Ashley Rogers Berner, <emph>No One Way to School: Pluralism and American Public Education</emph> (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Jack Schneider, <emph>Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality</emph> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Paul Starr, "The Meaning of Privatization," <emph>Yale Law &amp; Policy Review</emph> 6, no. 1 (1988): 6–41.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> MacIntyre, <emph>After Virtue</emph>, 194–195.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Alasdair MacIntyre and Joseph Dunne, "Alasdair MacIntyre on Education: In Dialogue with Joseph Dunne," <emph>Journal of Philosophy of Education</emph> 36, no. 1 (2002).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> James Bernard Murphy, "The Teacher as the Forlorn Hope of Modernity: Macintyre on Education and Schooling," <emph>International Philosophy Review</emph> 264 (2013): 183–199; and Terence H. McLaughlin, "Teaching as a Practice and a Community of Practice: The Limits of Commonality and the Demands of Diversity," <emph>Journal of Philosophy of Education</emph> 37, no. 2 (2003): 399–352.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Chris Higgins, "The Possibility of Public Education in an Instrumentalist Age," <emph>Educational Theory</emph> 61, no. 4 (2011): 451–466; and Steven Stolz, "MacIntyre, Rival Traditions, and Education," <emph>Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education</emph> 37, no. 3 (2016): 358–368.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Marian Fitzmaurice, "Considering Teaching in Higher Education as a Practice," <emph>Teaching in Higher Education</emph> 15, no. 1 (2010): 45–55.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Murphy, "The Teacher as the Forlorn Hope of Modernity."</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Alasdair MacIntyre, "The Idea of an Educated Public," in <emph>Education and Values: The Richard Peters Lectures</emph>, ed. Graham Haydon (London: University of London, 1987).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Daniel Vokey, "Pursuing the Idea/l of an Educated Public: Philosophy's Contributions to Radical School Reform," <emph>Journal of Philosophy of Education</emph> 37, no. 2 (2003): 267–278.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> James MacAllister, "MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelian Philosophy and His Idea of an Educated Public Revisited," <emph>Journal of Philosophy of Education</emph> 50, no. 4 (2016): 524–537.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> MacIntyre, <emph>Whose Justice? Which Rationality?</emph></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Stephen Macedo, <emph>Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy</emph> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> MacIntyre, <emph>Whose Justice? Which Rationality?</emph>, 326.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 8.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Stolz, "MacIntyre, Rival Traditions, and Education."</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Rosalind Hursthouse, <emph>On Virtue Ethics</emph> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 9–10; and David McPherson, <emph>Virtue and Meaning: A Neo‐Aristotelian Perspective</emph> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 45.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Aristotle, <emph>Nicomachean Ethics</emph>, trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 10.6.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Jacques Maritain, <emph>Education at the Crossroads</emph> (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1943).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Kristján Kristjánsson, <emph>Flourishing as the Aim of Education: A Neo‐Aristotelian View</emph> (London: Routledge, 2020).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Maritain, <emph>Education at the Crossroads</emph>, 9.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Pope St. John Paul II, Homily given in Baltimore, Maryland, October 8, 1995 (Libreria Editrice Vaticana).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> MacIntyre, <emph>Whose Justice? Which Rationality?</emph>, 2.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Ibid., 389.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> A. S. Neill, <emph>Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing</emph> (New York: Hart, 1960).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Consider the successful ethnographic work about an Evangelical school by Alan Peshkin, who is Jewish, or the more recent study of both Christian and Muslim schools by Jeffrey Guhin.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Richard Rymarz, "Permeation of Catholic Identity: Some Challenges for Canadian Catholic Schools," <emph>Journal of Religious Education</emph> 61, no. 2 (2013); and Colleen Fitzpatrick, "It's More Than Just Religion: Teaching History in a Catholic School," <emph>Journal of Catholic Education</emph> 22, no. 1 (2019).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> MacIntyre, <emph>Whose Justice? Which Rationality?</emph>, 370–371.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Maritain, <emph>Education at the Crossroads</emph>, 8.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Huriya Jabbar, "The Visible Hand: Markets, Politics, and Regulation in Post‐Katrina New Orleans," <emph>Harvard Educational Review</emph> 86, no. 1 (2016): 1–26.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Pope Leo XIII, <emph>Rerum Novarum</emph> (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1891).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Elisabeth Hansot, "Civic Friendship: An Aristotelian Perspective," in <emph>Reconstructing the Common Good in Education: Coping with Intractable American Dilemmas</emph>, ed. Larry Cuban and Dorothy Shipps (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Pope Francis, <emph>Evangelii Gaudium</emph> (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2013).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Strike, <emph>Small Schools and Strong Communities</emph>, 31–33.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Maritain, <emph>Education at the Crossroads</emph>, 3.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Christopher Hurst</p> <p>Reported by Author</p> <p></p> <p>CHRISTOPHER HURST is a Doctoral Student in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park; email. His primary areas of scholarship are education policy, particularly regarding teacher retention, and religious education, particularly regarding Catholic schools. He also serves as the assistant principal for DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland.</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref10"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref14"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref15"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref16"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref17"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref18"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref19"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref20"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib21" firstref="ref21"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib22" firstref="ref22"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref23"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref24"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref25"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref26"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl18" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref27"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl19" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref28"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl20" bibid="bib29" firstref="ref29"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl21" bibid="bib30" firstref="ref30"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl22" bibid="bib31" firstref="ref31"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl23" bibid="bib32" firstref="ref32"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl24" bibid="bib33" firstref="ref33"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl25" bibid="bib34" firstref="ref34"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl26" bibid="bib35" firstref="ref35"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl27" bibid="bib36" firstref="ref36"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl28" bibid="bib37" firstref="ref37"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl29" bibid="bib38" firstref="ref38"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl30" bibid="bib39" firstref="ref39"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl31" bibid="bib40" firstref="ref43"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl32" bibid="bib41" firstref="ref44"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl33" bibid="bib42" firstref="ref45"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl34" bibid="bib43" firstref="ref46"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl35" bibid="bib44" firstref="ref47"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl36" bibid="bib45" firstref="ref48"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl37" bibid="bib46" firstref="ref49"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl38" bibid="bib47" firstref="ref50"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl39" bibid="bib48" firstref="ref51"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl40" bibid="bib49" firstref="ref52"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl41" bibid="bib50" firstref="ref53"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl42" bibid="bib51" firstref="ref54"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl43" bibid="bib52" firstref="ref55"></nolink> |
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| Header | DbId: eric DbLabel: ERIC An: EJ1441096 AccessLevel: 3 PubType: Academic Journal PubTypeId: academicJournal PreciseRelevancyScore: 0 |
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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: Toward an Authentic Understanding of Catholic School Identity – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Christopher+Hurst%22">Christopher Hurst</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Educational+Theory%22"><i>Educational Theory</i></searchLink>. 2024 74(4):473-491. – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 19 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2024 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Evaluative – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Catholic+Schools%22">Catholic Schools</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Institutional+Characteristics%22">Institutional Characteristics</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Research%22">Educational Research</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Attitudes%22">Attitudes</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Self+Concept%22">Self Concept</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Traditionalism%22">Traditionalism</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Goal+Orientation%22">Goal Orientation</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Practices%22">Educational Practices</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1111/edth.12654 – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 0013-2004<br />1741-5446 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: Researchers have studied Catholic schools for decades, often in an attempt to extrapolate from them lessons that may help public schools accomplish similar levels of academic achievement and other desirable goals, such as social mobility, social efficiency, and democratic equality. But research that attempts to understand Catholic education from a secular perspective inevitably misunderstands the purpose of education that Catholic schools themselves claim to pursue, i.e., beatitude. This unique purpose is the source of Catholic school identity. Here, Christopher Hurst argues that by considering Catholic education as the practice of a distinctly Catholic tradition, researchers can authentically assess how well Catholic schools are achieving their own stated goals, and whether their practices can be applied outside of a particular Catholic context. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2024 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1441096 |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Identifiers: – Type: doi Value: 10.1111/edth.12654 Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 19 StartPage: 473 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Catholic Schools Type: general – SubjectFull: Institutional Characteristics Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Research Type: general – SubjectFull: Attitudes Type: general – SubjectFull: Self Concept Type: general – SubjectFull: Traditionalism Type: general – SubjectFull: Goal Orientation Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Practices Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: Toward an Authentic Understanding of Catholic School Identity Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Christopher Hurst IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 08 Type: published Y: 2024 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0013-2004 – Type: issn-electronic Value: 1741-5446 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 74 – Type: issue Value: 4 Titles: – TitleFull: Educational Theory Type: main |
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