From a series of newsletters during the first year of our new school: Head teacher John Boyce explores his vision of Catholic education.
If each of us is a unique creation of God, then there are all sorts of things that follow from that belief.
For a start, it means that each person is essentially good. It also means that Catholic schools celebrate the whole person – all the gifts and talents and abilities of each person. We also believe that each person has – because of our divine origin – certain rights.
But as so many wise people from Gandhi to Pope John XXIII have insisted, each right has a corresponding responsibility. And Catholic schools are also about the responsibilities we have as people created by God, and about taking responsibility for our own actions.
Teachers in a Catholic school will not accept the final responsibility for the development of the gifts of the whole person. We believe that each one of us has the major responsibility for our own development and salvation: and so we try to help our young people to do things for themselves: to take responsibility for their own success and happiness.
Genesis tells us God got us started with a “breath” of life. In a Catholic school, we work to foster that act of creation and help each member of the community become fully alive.
And what is a fully alive person? For me it is a fully balanced person – an energetic and positive blend of the intellectual, the physical, the creative, the moral, and the spiritual. Excellence is important. When it comes to the gifts of our Creator only the best is good enough. So, we expect excellence in academic results. We expect those with physical skills to use them and produce excellent results. And each week you see some of these in our newsletters.
The creative side of being human is also crucially important to us. We have academic subjects to develop the brains God gave us. We have sports to develop our bodies.
But human beings are so much more than bodies and minds. Through our imaginations and our creativity, we can see into the life of the world. The insights, sensitivity and sense of beauty and wonder we gain through music and art, through speech, drama and dance give us the senses to glimpse the magic of creation – what the Pope calls “the extraordinary side of the ordinary”.
Through debate – in the auditorium or in the classroom – and through writing and defending a point of view, we come to learn what is true to us.
So for me, the creative arts are a very important feature of a Catholic school.
Through all of these aspects of our schooling, we help each student develop the mind, body, spirit and strength, the sensitivities and insights, and the ability to see the people and the world around us as part of God’s Creation. As St Iraneus said, “The glory of God is the human person fully alive!”
That life – and the whole of creation – is a gift from God. In the modern world, we have come to take it for granted – to be careless in the way we treat the people and the world around us. In a Catholic school, we have the reason to treasure and prize that gift-and to see, in the world and in the people around us, the wonder of creation.