On the Role of the School in Children's Moral Formation

Early Christian Criticism of Liberal Education

The Church has a long tradition of criticism of liberal education. We would be wise to heed the warnings.

At the very beginning of the Church, theologians questioned the role of Greek thought in Christian theology. Tertullian summarizes this criticism in the 3rd century by his famous question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” For Tertullian, theologians were increasingly grounding their thought in human wisdom rather than the wisdom of the Christ.

St. Augustine’s Concern

St. Augustine was likewise concerned about the liberal education of his own day. Reflecting on his own formation, he claimed that his education had only misled him. His teachers fed him lies about his proper end, about the gods, and about how one should live the good life. He did not learn virtue, but how to play the “game” of power. In The Confessions, he writes,

“What did it profit me, O God, my true life, that my speech was acclaimed above those of many peers? Was it not all smoke and wind?”

Plato’s Warning About False Learning

Even prior to Christianity, Plato complained about much of the liberal education of his own day. Throughout his dialogues, Plato voices the concern that immoral and ignorant men manipulate the youth with their pretend learning. One of the primary aims of the Socratic dialogues is to show how hard it is to arrive at real knowledge and how destructive false knowledge can be for both society and the person. For Plato, the greatest danger to the social order was a false learning that that spoke compellingly but blindly.

The Danger of Liberal Learning

The point for both Plato and St. Augustine is not that liberal learning is bad but that it is dangerous. Because the human heart is twisted and deformed, we abuse language and language for our mistaken aims. The man who is educated has a powerful tool for deception and control at his disposal.

The Primacy of Moral Formation

This is why for both Plato and Augustine, moral formation must precede intellectual formation and why Catholic schools have always taken care to attend to the moral life. Though it is not the primary responsibility of the school to form morals (that is the task of the parent), the school cannot fulfill its proper function without it.

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