A Mother and Child Looking at the Virgin and Child. Reginald Bottomley, c. 1856-1933.
I have four children. My oldest is almost 17 years old, and so I have many years of experience behind what I’m about to claim:
Mothers have to repeat the most important things over and over and over again.
“Repetitio Mater Memoriae,” the Latin phrase meaning “repetition is the mother of memory” proves both useful in education methodology and everyday parenting. Just as a mother nurtures her child, repetition nurtures the memory. Ultimately, as educators and as parents, we know that repetition is habit-forming.
My husband and I want our children to be humble and have gratitude in receiving, so I find myself saying multiple times a day, “Say ‘thank you’ nice and loud.”
My husband and I want our children to receive others in conversation with love, so I often find myself saying, “Please remember to look someone in the eye when they are talking to you.”
My husband and I want our children to have a posture of humility before God and a habit of worship, and so I find myself every Sunday saying, “No more goofing around with your sister during Mass. Please show reverence.”
I could go on. Any good mother repeats herself again and again.
And the Church, our Mother, has written dozens and dozens of documents on education. And in them, she repeats for us the most important things.
Abriana Chilelli, ICLE’s Diocesan Liaison and director of the Diocesan Leaders Academy
In these Church documents, particular or new details are sometimes written to address contemporary problems.
For the most part though, the Church repeats in nearly every document what’s most important. Notions like: parents have the duty to educate their children, Catholic education is a pursuit of truth, and education can only be complete when it coheres in Jesus Christ.
One of the reasons I most love receiving formation from the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE) is the same: the Institute is never calling for shiny educational fads or trends. Like a mother, ICLE repeats the most treasured and timeless ways to educate. As someone who now works for the Institute – but has been a recipient of this formation for the last 9 years – first as a parent and then as an educator – I never tire of it. It is always new to me in some way. Perhaps I hear it with a new nuance because I’m struggling with a new problem.
Still, the message is the same: educate for the formation of the human person, give students the most beautiful and good things to consider in the classroom, tend to cultivating the human faculties in pedagogy, ground education in the Church’s intellectual tradition and the seven liberal arts, and as a teacher be bowled over again and again by all there is to delight in coming to know and love both naturally and supernaturally. All this will be an education in the freedom of Jesus Christ Himself. That consistency in message has provided me hope as an educator, time and time again.
Similarly, Pope Leo XIV’s recent Apostolic Letter, Drawing New Maps of Hope, repeated some of the most important things the Church, as our mother, tells us about education. Praise God.
In the preamble of the letter, Pope Leo writes, “We live in a complex, fragmented, digitized educational environment. Precisely for this reason, it is wise to pause and refocus our gaze on the ‘cosmology of Christian paideia’…” (#1.2).
Pause and refocus our gaze on the ‘cosmology of Christian paideia’.
In the hurriedness of the life of someone in education, in the hurriedness of our modern lives, pause and gaze. Look up. Consider the cosmos.
I’m reminded of Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J., the recently retired director of the Vatican Observatory, who once said, “Most of us — myself included — tend to live in a world that is very small and flat, where I am at the center and the other important places around me are the refrigerator and my bed! But studying the universe — including just going outside at night and looking up at the stars, with the same wonder that we had as children — reminds us that the real universe is so much bigger than that. A universe full of stars is big enough to hold intangible things like Truth and Beauty. Looking out, and out, and out, eventually leads you to wonder why it all exists.”
We gaze up at the universe to find that which is eternal, lasting, and beyond ourselves.
So what is it in education that is more eternal and worth gazing upon, and perhaps worth repetition? Our own tradition of Christian paideia. Of course, paideia was the Greeks’ educational ideal through which they hoped to find excellence for their society. The Greeks’ intellectual and philosophical pursuits were, for all, a pursuit of the ordering laws and nature of the universe itself, which they called the logos, and they sought to find the way to live excellently. They realized they could find human excellence by educating towards the nature of the human person. This educational ideal was called paideia.
Upon encountering Greek paideia, the Church recognized in paideia that much of this educational ideal was true: that human beings have a nature, that it is worthwhile to educate toward human excellence, and that the seven liberal arts are the tools for understanding reality. But the Church also knew that the Greek notion of paideia was limited because the Greeks did not yet know that Jesus Christ is the Logos.
Christ gives meaning to every pursuit of the human person, and He is the incarnate definition of human excellence. And so, Christian paideia elevated Greek paideia and perfected it, because it takes an approach to education that pursues the perfection of human nature in our identity as human people. We draw closer to perfection by emulating Christ, but humanity has only ever been perfected in becoming Christ himself.
The Pope is inviting us to gaze on the “cosmology of Christian paideia”. It’s a reminder again to put aside the modern educator’s tendency toward “complex, fragmented, digitized [education]”. Like Br. Guy’s tendency to think first of his bed and his refrigerator, we too have a modern notion of education which educates toward the material or immediate only, toward success on banal standardized assessment scores, or toward completed criterion so kids can move along to the next grade, regardless of whether or not they are bored, apathetic, or despairing in this kind of schooling.
Pope Leo XIV says instead to gaze upon that which is more eternal. More lasting. Deeper. More human. More beautiful. Gaze upon our own educational tradition of educating toward freedom: the freedom found through reading and studying beautiful things worthy of being beheld; the freedom found through letting education be a study of truth; the freedom of measuring education by how well we help students delight in wonder. How well are we leading our students to a love of understanding and discovering their identity as children of God?
Like a good mother, the Apostolic Letter reminds us of the Church’s own tradition of education and why she educates at all. It’s nothing new, but a longstanding stronghold of our faith. In that way, it is a map of hope on which we can rely, despite modern challenges faced in education. The map of Christian paideia is the same if we let ourselves gaze upon it again and again.
Pope Leo’s letter includes much more instruction on how to encounter the difficulties of today through education, and more reflection on Catholic education. I encourage you to read the letter in its entirety. I hope, too, that when I see you at our next National Conference or School Spotlight visit, that we can discuss it all. But for now, I can’t shake the importance of his initial invitation and am convinced that gazing upon the cosmology of Christian paideia is the interpretive key to the rest of the document. Christian paideia pursues Jesus Christ as the ideal of human excellence and understanding of reality in and through Him. And in the tradition, it is often arrived at by repetition.
I realize that as I’m repeating myself as a mother, I’m asking my children to live excellently, in virtue, in love, and in freedom. In his letter, Pope Leo XIV repeats for us, as the Church, our Mother, so that in our educational efforts, we too can pass on an education in human excellence, in virtue, in love, and in the freedom found in Jesus Christ.