The Idea of a High School: Newman’s Case for a Catholic Classical High School
Dave Holman
A great high school should be like a traditional university: a school with the object of teaching Universal Knowledge, that is, all the essential arts and sciences. While we usually think of the university as the great turning point of a student’s intellectual formation, high school may be the more realistic opportunity for meaningful formation. It is a critical time for students’ formation. By high school graduation, most students have formed habits of mind and spirit that college itself is unlikely to change. If high school students’ intellectual capacity seems limited at times, those limits are often imposed by parents’ or schools’ lower expectations. High school students can be ready for, and often need, the best of what humanity has to offer.
If high school should be a small scale university, and thus a school of Universal Knowledge, can a complete education exclude God and religion, or relegate those studies to one class period?
St. John Henry Newman offers remarkably timely answers to that question in his collection of lectures, The Idea of a University. Newman occupies a special place in the history of Western and Christian education. As a Church of England (Anglican) minister and Oxford University don, Newman and the Oxford Movement tried to find an orthodox Christian path amid growing secularism in both the Anglican church and the academy. Upon his heroic conversion to Catholicism in 1845, Newman hoped to do similar work for the Catholic academy, as the late Martin J. Svaglic observed in his introduction to The Idea of a University: “Catholics had for two centuries been legally excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, and though their faith survived, their intellectual and social development had suffered accordingly. Certainly, apart from an occasional scholar . . . , they were in no position to make any impact on England’s cultural life or to cope intellectually with the new developments and theories affecting religious thought.”
The separation of religion from the rest of human knowledge has been a growing trend in English-speaking education systems for centuries now. Such separation has a certain superficial appeal, as Newman describes the attitude of his day: “Theology and human science are two things, not one, and have their respective provinces, contiguous it may be and cognate to each other, but not identical. When we are contemplating earth, we are not contemplating heaven; and when we are contemplating heaven, we are not contemplating earth.” If enough people want to study religion, the argument went, let them do so in private.
And where better to observe the fruits of this attitude than the bulk of the American education system? Public school students must study religion in private. While some charter schools may emphasize values education, civics and patriotism, these schools cannot connect those goods to their divine source. Even some Catholic schools have become accustomed to leaving "religion" in religion class, with little to no impact on other subjects.
Yet no subject exists in a vacuum. Newman uses the examples of a scientist who understands only the theory of gravitation and thus denies the phenomenon of capillary attraction—the attraction between a liquid and a solid in a capillary tube, apparently contrary to the laws of gravity—or the “mere chemist” who “den[ies] the influence of the mind upon bodily health.” When otherwise good scientists scorn “all principles and reported facts which do not belong to their own pursuit,” they “necessarily become bigots and quacks.”
Imagine that anthropology, or any other science considered a necessary part of the modern university, were regarded as a purely private matter in the academy. In Newman’s hypothetical, this subject is simply too sensitive for certain portions of the community, so the only way to avoid “constant quarreling” is to banish anthropology. Thus, “the agency of man in the material world cannot allowably be recognized, and may allowably be denied.” It then follows that every external act of man is attributed to the “innate force or soul of the physical universe,” and every notable work, deed, or creation are reduced to physical cause and effect. Secular education does the same thing with divine action.
But because knowledge is “one whole,” Newman says, erecting artificial boundaries around one subject necessarily handicaps the studies of both the whole and the other parts. While God is in a way separate from human knowledge, “yet He has so implicated Himself with it, and taken it into His very bosom, by His presence in it, His providence over it, His impressions upon it, and His influences through it, that we cannot truly contemplate it without in some main aspects contemplating Him.”
Newman's prescription is an education whose subjects are fully integrated, especially religion. Our Lady of Victory attempts to fill that role in partnering with families and the Church to form children into adults. Each day our faculty and students place God first, by beginning with Mass, where some of OLV’s young men assist as altar boys. As our ninth graders read Homer and re-live the tragic passions of his characters, they recognize that Aristotelian happiness isn’t possible without a friendship with Christ. In art, our students have contemplated the beauty of St. Paul on his back on the dusty road to Damascus, his riderless horse beside him, blinded by the Light. They also learn to appreciate beauty as they work through each proof in Euclid’s Elements, and see how perfect the laws of the created world can be. In earth science, students learn the constellations of the night sky and their related myths, weather patterns, and the natural order and beauty of God’s creation. In philosophy, they learn the history of philosophy as it arose through the pre-Socratics, recognizing the universal longing for truth and the power of reason to arrive at truth when they get to read their first Platonic dialogue. In Latin, they learn the principles of grammar: the order and beauty of how we communicate through the lingua franca of the Church. In short, an integrated curriculum seeks to introduce students to the story of God’s work through creation to reveal Himself in all things.
Our students’ growing knowledge of God does not detract from their other subjects, as some believe, but instead enriches the subjects, as well as the students’ knowledge and understanding of God. As Newman says, “All true principles run over with it, all phenomena converge to it; it is truly the First and the Last.”
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