As Catholic teachers, our attitude must be nothing less than one of grateful thanksgiving. If we are going to have any success in our schools, this is the disposition with which teachers have to learn to enter their classrooms.
What is the difference between what is being taught at your local Catholic school and what is being taught at the public school down the block?
Almost every year since 1989, I have been teaching the Arts and Letters Core Course at the University of Notre Dame, an introduction to the liberal arts curriculum that is required of all undergraduates in the College of Arts and Letters. What I have discovered suggests something pretty surprising: Although 85 percent of Notre Dame undergraduates identify themselves as Catholics, very few of them either know much about or understand even the most basic Catholic teachings.
Like travel books broaden the mind. They give us a bigger picture of the world and its inhabitants. One result is that we become better judges of character. By meeting certain character types in stories we are better prepared for the day when we will meet that type in person.
What do I want to say to teachers?
I modestly offer the following as a draft of the sort of exam that I think an eighth-grade Catholic student should have to pass before graduating from Catholic grammar school.
Concepts such as virtue, good example, and character have been out of fashion in our society for quite some time, and their absence is reflected in the available guidebooks to childrens literature. What is missing from these guides what seems to be avoided is any suggestion that certain books may help to develop character, and that others may not. The distinctive feature of this book, by contrast, is its focus on the moral dimension of reading.
As a result of being required to fight for their rights in so many contexts, home-schoolers both parents and children have become some of the most active political participants in the nation. Those who have to fight for the freedom of their own families are the most convinced of the need to limit government power.
Most cultures have recognized that morality, religion, story, and myth are bound together in some vital way, and that to sever the connections among them leaves us not with strong and independent ethical principles but with weak and unprotected ones.
