Max, center, at school with his siblings.
In my 17 years working in schools, a few children have profoundly altered the way I understand education. One such child is my nephew, Max.
Max is a beautiful person: he has a twinkle in his eye and a warm half-smile which fills his entire face when he sees someone he loves. He adores babies, plays baseball, loves snuggling and ironically also wrestling, looks for ways to serve others, and idolizes his group of school buddies and my teenage son, Giovanni. Max plays fascinating imaginative games — sometimes mimicking movie characters or making up imaginary worlds in which his siblings and cousins are asked to take roles. Max loves listening to adult conversation around a dinner table, figuring out when to laugh and when to be serious, according to the tones and responses of the people he’s with. Max is 12 years old and in 7th grade. He has Down syndrome and a complicated bunch of other diagnoses. I have had the joy of loving him deeply since he was only a handful of days old, in a hospital’s NICU.
As Max gets older, it becomes clear to me, and to his parents, that because of his diagnoses, Max will not go to college. He also probably will not ever live by himself. He may hold a job, but it would be substantially accommodated to what he is able to do, which can change daily. So what does that mean for Max’s education, especially for the Catholic school he attends? Thinking about Max’s education in the Church has led me to this truth: education ordered toward utilitarian outcomes falls desperately short for the formation of the human person.
Some people probably cringe at my idea of Max’s likely future. Some are likely to respond, “But maybe if we try more/do more/give more, he can do anything!”
All of us live in a culture that wants us to believe that we are meant to be useful, that we are meant to be self-sustaining and independent, we are to never burden anyone else with our needs.
But all of us have limitations. Many of us won’t make millions of dollars; some of us will live lives of poverty. Some of us won’t be alive next month; all of us will eventually die.
All of us, like Max, want to love and to be loved. All of us, like Max, want to encounter other people in real relationships.
All of us, like Max, want to know about the things which there are to know.
Ordering education toward some future material success simply ignores the reality of the human condition. On the contrary, and in good news, ordering education toward consideration of things which are beautiful, good, and true can transform the heart and mind, to encounter Truth Himself.
Max is an incredibly hard worker, and I have seen him spend hours learning reading, writing, and how to form sounds into intelligible words. But if any of us measure the success of Max’s life on whether or not he is able to get a job or live on his own, we are selling him desperately short of what’s possible for him: encountering his Lord and the Creator of the Universe through his studies, and helping his peers to encounter the Lord through him.
In his 1986 pastoral visit to Australia, Pope John Paul II gave his “Address to the Sick and the Handicapped,” and said, “To speak of disability, handicaps and illness is to speak of the weakness of our human condition. No one born into this world is free from human frailty — whether it be physical, emotional or spiritual […] in the providence of God a different life does not mean a less important life. It does not mean a life with less potential for holiness or for contributing to the well-being of the world.”
Max is called to a life of holiness. God wants him to be a saint. To help him follow that call, Max attends his parish Catholic school, run by the Disciples of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, who follow an educational covenant with the families they serve. In that educational covenant, the Disciples describe education as that which reveals the human person, invites the student to order their life beyond their limited mortality, and ultimately forms the student to seek God Himself in that which he comes to know about reality, both naturally and supernaturally. In short, their covenant articulates Catholic liberal education.
The Disciples’ covenant makes it obvious that a kid like Max belongs at their school. Catholic liberal education is an education for everybody, because Catholic liberal education takes the anthropology of the human person seriously. The life of a person with disabilities “does not mean a life with less potential for holiness or for contributing to the well-being of the world.”
Max’s teachers, taking both their sense of education and their anthropology from the teachings of the Church, are an example for all of us. Just last year, Max read The Hobbit with his sixth-grade classmates. Many people would say that someone like Max would not be able to read Tolkien. But, Max’s teacher, Ms. Haniszewski, has been formed in Catholic liberal education through the Disciples’ covenant. She knows Max is called to a great adventure — in part because of the journey and bravery a life with a disability will require of him. The literature teacher had carefully selected Tolkien to form the sacramental imagination of the sixth-grade class. Knowing that Max also deserved to wonder about a journey, to consider Bilbo’s bravery, and to delight in the call to adventure, Ms. Haniszewski modified The Hobbit, then later modified The Fellowship of the Ring, with words Max can read. Max loves imitating fascinating stories, and I trust the Lord spoke to him through Bilbo’s journeys, like countless children who’ve wondered about Bilbo before Max. You see, Ms. Haniszewski had the right ends of education in mind — Max’s formation in his potential for holiness and his contributions to the world through that holiness — and so she knew to give him truly good things to consider.
An educator’s sacred task is to always lead his students to the most they are capable of coming to know, with discernment towards giving students that which are the most beautiful, good, and true things to behold. We seek first holiness, the pursuit of understanding Christ the Logos, as our Creator and Savior, and know that everything else we need will be given to us from the Father. We see the gifts that the Lord has bestowed on all children, including children like Max — a beautiful ability for relationship, a love of that which is tender in this world, a desire for virtue — and we deepen those loves through that which we ask students to behold.
By including more children with disabilities in our schools of Catholic liberal education, we show the world the good of education for human flourishing. Those of us working to renew Catholic schools, through the inclusion of students with disabilities, show the world the profundity of what teaching is really for — assisting parents in forming students to be holy, first, before considering what else they might become.