Education: Moral and intellectual ‘under one roof’

I would like to pay particular tribute to his vision for education, which has done so much to shape the ethos that is the driving force behind Catholic schools and colleges today. Firmly opposed to any reductive or utilitarian approach, he sought to achieve an educational environment in which intellectual training, moral discipline and religious commitment would come together.^[1]

Pope Benedict XVI

 Newman clearly understood the importance of a both moral and intellectual formation of the human person. He had, and continues to have, a profound influence on modern approaches to education. As a tutor at Oxford University, Newman regarded himself as responsible not only for the academic progress of his students, but also for their moral formation. He regarded personal influence as fundamental. He stated that a university should be “an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one”.[2] The tutorial system he introduced to enable personal contact with his students was central to the moral and intellectual revival of universities in the nineteenth century. This emphasis would later be expressed in his motto as Cardinal, cor ad cor loquitur – heart speaks to heart.

In the decade after his conversion, Newman became the founding rector of the Catholic University of Ireland. He set out his vision for the institution in lectures published as the Idea of a University, in which he defended liberal education as an end in itself: “To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know … [is] an object as intelligible as the cultivation of virtue, while, at the same time, it is absolutely distinct from it.”[3] Later, Newman founded the Oratory School in Birmingham on the model of the English public schools to provide a liberal education to Catholic boys.

At a time when liberal (i.e., integral) education is under attack in favour of mere training for the workforce, Newman’s contributions to education reinforce the dignity of the human person, the importance of the heart, the role of the intellect and the need to cultivate it. To think and reason is as essential to us as it is to feel or breathe, because this faculty affords us the dignity of creatures capable of union with God. It must not be limited to mundane things, but should be lifted up and perfected: “We attain to heaven by using this world well, though it is to pass away; we perfect our nature, not by undoing it, but by adding to it what is more than nature, and directing it towards aims higher than its own.”[4]

[1] “Homily for the Mass with the Beatification of Venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman” (19 September 2010), in AAS, Vol. 102, no. 10 (2010), 620–623.

[2] John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905), 144–145.

[3] Newman, Idea, 122–123.

[4] Newman, Idea, 123.