Person-Centered: Catholic Liberal Education at Assumption

BY MOLLY BRIGID M c GRATH, PH.D. ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY; DIRECTOR OF THE HONORS PROGRAM; DIRECTOR OF THE D’AMOUR CENTER FOR TEACHING EXCELLENCE

THE GLOBAL NETWORK OF CATHOLIC SCHOOLS, INCLUDING COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES, CONSTITUTES THE LARGEST nongovernmental educational system in the history of the world. Have you ever wondered: what’s with Catholics and education?

When Catholic immigrants started settling in the United States, everywhere they went they founded parishes, of course. They also founded schools and hospitals, and these served not only their own communities, but all, regardless of faith or no faith. Thus, thousands of Catholic churches, schools, and hospitals were seeded across the American landscape, dedicated to care of the human person in full — soul, indeed, but also body and mind.

American Catholic colleges were largely founded for working-class, ethnic immigrant communities, serving students interested in gaining a foothold in the country’s civic and economic sphere. For example, Assumption was founded to serve French immigrants in the Worcester area. The students were mostly interested in being successful citizens, church members, and professionals. There is a lot going on here, with professional, civic, and religious goals all stewing together. What draws these various aims into a coherent whole? What makes the American Catholic educational tradition we are part of not only distinctive but also rich and worth continuing?

The various professional, civic, and confessional aims are important aspects of our mission, but they are not placed at the center. Indeed, remarkably, not even the religious hopes for students are at the center of the Catholic educational tradition. (After all, Catholics planted liberal arts colleges, not Bible colleges, across the country.) Rather, what’s characteristic of Catholic higher education is its orientation toward liberal education.

The catch phrase of Catholic education is that we educate “the whole person.” If not to become an empty cliché, this must mean that what animates Catholic education essentially is the insight that the human being is a person in the first place: an individual-butrelational intellectual being. That is, each person is a transcendent and communal being, a being capable of and fulfilled in transcending self by seeking the true and the good in friendship with others. This personhood is what is most important about each of us, regardless of all the details that distinguish or divide us.

The upshot is that, in this tradition, the educator must view each student as a person having a destiny and vocation to see and seek the truth and to serve the good in community.

Now it is important to note that this destiny/vocation is not easily or automatically achieved, and that we all fail at it to some extent. This fact of our universally shared inadequacy should inspire us to work harder to learn with and from each other.

The various professional, confessional, and civic aims of Assumption make sense only as parts of this context. Outside of this personalist context, political, religious, and career goals would threaten to become distorted: partisan, intolerant, short-term, and superficial. This is why Catholic education must be liberal. It puts each student’s inner orientation to and liberation through truth at the center.

One need not be a believer in order to get on board with the core values of Catholic liberal education, but sometimes some work is needed for people to see this, especially for people without deep prior experience with the tradition. Thus, some might hear talk of “mission” and think “religious stuff.” Instead, our mission is personcentered education, because that’s what is demanded by the “religious stuff,” i.e., the Catholic view of the human being.

What does this mean concretely for teaching and learning at Assumption? My fellow teachers and I need to understand ourselves as involved in a common task. While each of us, and each discipline and class, contributes in different ways, we are motivated by a shared professional commitment to help students fulfill their duty and destiny as human persons. And if we do our jobs right, students should experience Assumption as a place of friendship where that destiny is recognized, honored, and served.