Follow
Register for free to receive Fr. Patrick Mary Briscoe’s My Daily Visitor newsletter and unlock full access to the latest inspirational stories, news commentary, and spiritual resources from Our Sunday Visitor.
Newsletter Magazine Subscription

Breaking free from technocracy: How a revolution in learning can save our kids

Adobe Stock

This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.

If you’ve paid attention to the recent three popes, they have identified three crises related to education.

For Pope St. John Paul II, we exist in a culture of death, one where efficiency becomes the primary way that we measure human dignity. The implicit pedagogy of this culture of death is “if you are valuable to the economy, then you have value.”

Pope Benedict XVI spoke of an educational emergency where the search for meaning has been replaced by techne (craft, technique). What matters is what is practical, not the pursuit of truth.

Pope Francis has taken up this language, speaking of a technocratic paradigm where everything in the created order is approached through the logic of the machine. The real meaning of human life is discernible in technical solutions rather than the gift of creation unto itself.

Mechanized learning

This culture of technocratic efficiency can certainly infect the Catholic school. The young child is measured, the school determining through a battery of tests whether she is advanced, average or below grade level. The curriculum is chocked full of everything that a child must know if he is to be a good employee in the future. The sacrifice of teaching and learning is measured by the standardized test administered not in person but through a computer.

For the child who can succeed at the game, they sort of flourish. In my experience, such students break down by the time they reach college. Is this everything there is? Did I study for all these years so that I could get a job that I wish I didn’t need to take? Many of these young people have stopped wondering, no longer committed to the arduous search for truth. I’m always shocked when so many of my undergraduates at Notre Dame admit to me that they wish they could skip studying and get a job.

For the many children who do not flourish (and here, particularly, I include intellectually disabled young people), well, the game isn’t for you. The system won’t notice you. To be crass (in a way that no educator would admit publicly), you won’t have an Ivy League (or Ivy adjacent) pennant to add to your wall of collegiate institutions. The young person in this kind of technocratic education may just give up: “What’s the point of trying in the first place, if I’ll never succeed at the game?”

A time to wonder

The Catholic genius, I suspect, is that we can change the way that the game is played. The opposite of a technocratic education, one governed by efficiency, is a contemplative one.

Contemplation may sound heady, but it doesn’t need to be. The Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper once spoke of natural contemplation. You look. You wonder. You love.

A Catholic education should initiate the young person into a way of looking. Most of our educational institutions move too fast. I once heard an educator say that you should redirect the attention of a young person every seven minutes in the classroom to keep his attention. That’s fine if your goal is entertainment or the mere transferring of knowledge. But if you want to initiate the young person into meaning, he must notice the details. Of a poem. Of a mathematical equation. Of an artistic work. Of a science experiment. A contemplative education begins with this kind of looking.

But further questions arise. For the young child, the questions come at a quick clip. Why? Why? Why? For the junior high, high school or college student, the question is different. Not only why, but is it true? If it is true, why does it matter to me? This kind of wondering, of questioning, is integral to an education. It’s the true meaning of critical thinking: Having faced a proposal, one that may imply ultimate meaning, you need to discern whether the proposal is true. Whether it’s true for you.

Lifting hearts

Lastly, such a contemplative education is an initiation into love. To behold the mystery of existence, to ask questions about the world, to face the truth of reality is to fall in love. Love is no subjective affection. Rather, to love the world is to recognize the origin of this world as a gift. Worship is not ancillary to any education, especially a Catholic one, but at the heart of the educative act. If it’s so wondrous to behold, so true, then how can I not give thanks? Not only to the teacher but to the Giver of all gifts? Sursum corda, lift up your hearts.

This kind of contemplative education is a medicine for a culture of death, a technocratic education that denies the dignity of student and teacher alike. We are fellow beholders, questioners, and lovers of reality.

All of this necessitates a prophetic commitment to a non-hasty, inefficient education. The kind that recognizes the dignity of each student as a gift, rather than a future employee. Catholic education needs a contemplative revolution.