Ad Majorem Mundi Gloriam

A passerby might be surprised to turn the cor- ner and come upon this 19th-century architectural landmark with its wrought iron railings and columned entryway. The impressive structure stands in sharp contrast to the surrounding neighborhood of shabby public housing units, and what one finds upon entering it is even more exceptional.

This historic building is the setting for a rare educational gem - an inner-city Catholic high school offering a classical education to bright, hardworking students from a wide range of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. They teach Latin and Greek here, and there are three daily Masses in the chapel. It's a school where the students ask for more homework and mean it. The 400-year tradition of Jesuit pedagogy and curriculum has guided the school to this success.

In the teachers' lounge, hope should abound. Instead there is anxiety, as accomplished teachers find themselves battling a horde of barbarians with doctorates in Education, state-certified professionals and "experts" who have come to tear down a classic curriculum and discard proven teaching methods. They are here to bring to a traditional Catholic school the same modem pedagogy that has worked its wonders in our public schools. Such is the school in which I recently taught.

I am the product of 13 years of Jesuit education, and when I went looking for a high school teaching job I set my heart on teaching in a Jesuit school. Interviewing here and there, I found that initial enthusiasm for my qualifications was dampened by the discovery that none of my degrees was in education and my portfolio contained no state-issued teaching license.

The schools, I came to learn, had to answer to a higher authority - to the regional accreditation agency. Catholic schools associate themselves with such an agency in order to enhance their professional profile. They then find themselves having to satisfy its external requirements, such as being allowed to have only a tiny number of non-state-certified teachers on staff. One fine school wanted to hire me but first had to find a way to make the hire without risking its accreditation. The vice principal assured me that I wasn't the only difficult case: A Jesuit was scheduled to come and teach at this Jesuit school, but he too had no state license and the harried administrator was not sure how they were going to get him onto the faculty.

Eventually a loophole let me into the system. Religion, the subject I would teach, is one of the few the state doesn't certify - yet. But the interview process left me thinking that something has gone terribly wrong when the Jesuits need permission from anyone to teach in their own schools. Maybe this should have been a sign to me that the age of the great teaching orders has come and gone. In Catholic schools most administrative positions are now occupied by lay people. According to the National Catholic Educational Association, 87 percent of secondary school teachers are lay persons.

The problem I'm addressing here, however, is not the decline in religious vocations, for there has been a concomitant rise in educational vocations on the part of dedicated lay people engaged in teaching as an apostolic work. The more ominous change is one of pedagogical philosophy: Call it the professionalization of Catholic schools. Outside forces such as the state bureaucracy and the regional accreditation boards impose certain regulations on Catholic schools, but there is also an internal dynamic - perhaps a desire to appear more legitimate in the eyes of secular society? Whatever the cause, Catholic schools are looking outward for direction, and the education professionals are eager to oblige.

And why not? Isn't it good, you may ask, to bring in experts and consultants? Aren't these trained professionals the authorities? What's the problem?

Well, the schools of education that produce the Masters and Doctors of Education are notorious for their low standards. Even at the most selective university, the Ed school is likely to be the faculty that attracts the least gifted students (1997 SAT statistics show that students intending to major in education have verbal and math scores so low that they are surpassed by almost all other applicants). The curricula in these schools are infamous for their lack of rigor and for a content dominated by political correctness. (The educational establishment turns a neat rhetorical trick by calling teachers who lack its certificates "unqualified teachers." But there are, of course, many highly qualified persons who simply haven't been through the notoriously bad education programs that initiate one into the establishment.)

And when they come as teachers, administrators, or consultants to our Catholic secondary schools, what do these experts bring with them? They bring the rhetoric of Ed Speak, a babble so nebulous that many outsiders require a translation. It quickly becomes clear, however, that there are good words and bad ones. The good words include co-operative learning, student-centered curriculum, open classroom, creativity, and diversity. Suspect words and phrases include memorization, mastery of material, transmission of knowledge, objective truth, debate, competition, and teaching. Yes, teaching. Teachers don't teach, we are told. What they do is to "facilitate opportunities for student-generated learning."

Verbs proliferate in this language and there is a paucity of nouns, reflecting a preference for process over content. But that's because we have been too focused on content, the experts tell us. Teachers should not turn students into knowers or thinkers, but into learners - although with all the emphasis on "teaming to learn, " as it's called, it is not clear just when the students are to get down to learning something of substance. One can also grasp rather quickly the educational establishment's axiomatic principle that everything new is good and everything old is Eurocentric, patriarchal, and elitist. (Those - if you didn't know - mean "bad.") The old things that remain must, of course, be given new names: A test is an "assessment tool," a teacher is a "facilitator," students are "learners," and extracurricular activities are "cocurriculars."

Faculty trained in the liberal arts must undergo reeducation at the hands of the new specialists. At the high school where I taught, a highpriced consultant gave a daylong faculty training seminar. The consultant, who also sold the school several dozen copies of her handbook, introduced us to games we could play with students to increase their social skills, and to emptyheaded activities that would unleash student creativity. The English and Latin and Greek teachers were informed that they no longer teach literature and classics but rather "language arts." The traditional curriculum should be replaced, we heard, with a more relevant "curriculum of life." After a whole day of being bathed in drivel, we shuffled soddenly out of the room, not inspired but insulted.

What does all this educational theory look like in practice in a high school classroom? First, the old classroom arrangement has to go. Neatly ordered rows bespeak conservative and narrow thinking. We need small group circles where the students can work on projects together supervised lightly by a roaming teacher - oops, facilitator. Visual aids of various sorts are a must, and the essential facilitating tool is a large supply of video tapes. The video player sits in a hallowed position in the modem classroom, its blank screen dominating the space like some secular tabernacle. Entertainments and stage props are considered so crucial that one wonders how the Ursulines, Dominicans, Salesians, and Jesuits in days past did such a good job with the children of immigrants in poor Catholic schools. A well-supplied school is a good thing, of course, and multimedia tools can make certain aspects of a lesson come alive. But videos are not books, and watching is neither reading nor thinking. Entertaining the kids is a poor substitute for engaging them intellectually.

Should they memorize a poem? Or learn to conjugate a verb? "Student-centered" education frowns upon what it calls didactic teaching and rote learning. Rather than being assigned material to be mastered, students should be given projects to work on together. Linguistic skill and mathematical proficiency? Well, to call a student - oops, a learner - strong here and weak there is to be judgmental. The new theory (that conveniently absolves teachers of the sin of judgmentalism) is that there are "multiple intelligences," a diversity of gifts. Some "learners" may not be good at "assessments" in math or at writing papers. Instead of giving them a quiz, let them make a collage. Instead of a research paper, let them submit a personal journal. Best of all, assign a group project instead of a final exam. In fact, let them grade themselves (do a "self-assessment").

It was in this unquiet environment, with the waves of educational fad beating at the monumental structure of Jesuit education, that I had the privilege of teaching religion. I say privilege, because of the exceptional group of kids with which I was blessed. Sharp, disciplined, and curious, they came ready each day to make their way through the Scriptures. Together we followed the sweep of biblical history from Genesis to Revelation, with lively, high-level debates along the way on such things as the role of politics and religion in theocratic Israel.

But still I was uneasy, for our in-house expert was coming to observe. This Doctor of Education was brought on board to supervise the faculty and make sure they were falling into line. Early in September she had sent out a memo with a chart listing the characteristics of good and bad classrooms. Good classrooms were described as having chairs

Obviously, there's a need to keep up with the times and to prepare students for the 21st century. Our schools should be equipped with computers, of course, and should be open to new scholarship and new ideas. But some things have stood the test of time because they work. Old-style Jesuit education, even when it involved that most disparaged of mental activities, memorization, was never a matter of dully getting by heart bundles of facts. It always assumed a thinking mind engaging important material. Jesuit pedagogy has continually adapted, finding new ways to foster intellectual growth, moral development, and spiritual insight. But openness and adaptability do not mean being swept away by fads. The consistent elements of Jesuit pedagogy - high academic standards, discipline lovingly dealt out, and cura personalis (personal care, a deep concern for each student's worth regardless of academic ability) have transformed generations of young people into adults who think critically, act responsibly, and believe deeply.

When Catholic schools were operated by religious they were considered an apostolic work of the order or the diocese. Now many are in other hands. (In the Jesuit school where I taught Jesuits now make up less than 4 percent of the faculty.) Maybe in the old days it was easier to ensure the continuity of charism. With the decline in religious vocations, it is now up to lay people to recognize and safeguard the estimable heritage of the Catholic school system. Self-proclaimed pedagogical experts are being invited to alter the mission and standards of Catholic schools, and the apostolic vision of the great teaching orders is in danger of giving way to the hegemony of the secular educational establishment.

Today there is talk of how Catholic schools serve the common good by providing the only affordable and dependable good-quality education for the poor. The possibility of state-issued vouchers that students may spend on their school of choice is very much alive. But the voucher question will become moot if Catholic schools deteriorate to the level of their public counterparts. State licensing and certification give an ostensible legitimacy to the expertise of the education establishment, but, as the Teacher from Nazareth remarked, by their fruits ye shall know them. Their ideology needs to be debunked and denounced. In some places this may mean a protracted fight between faculty in the classic tradition and proponents of the new pedagogy. But unless they are stopped, the education experts will continue to tinker, tamper, and renovate, fixing a long-standing academic tradition that isn't broken.

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