In a speech (11 April) to a Delegation
of the International Catholic Office of Children, Pope Francis
gave one of the strongest critiques of some aspects of modern education that
we have heard from any Pope in living memory:
I
would like to express my rejection of all types of educational experiments with
children. One cannot experiment with children and young people. They are not
laboratory guinea-pigs. The horrors of educational manipulation that we
experienced in the great genocidal dictatorships of the 20th century have not
disappeared; they keep their currency under different clothing that, with the
pretension of modernity, force children and young people to walk on the
dictatorial path of the “single thought.” A great educator said to me just over
a week ago:“ Sometimes one doesn’t know if with these projects – he was
referring to concrete projects of education – you send a child to school or to
a camp of re-education.
It would be good to ponder these words and ask the question:
to which forms of education was he referring? Many teachers recognise the
ideological pressures on them to conform to (and indeed promote in the
classroom) the ‘new orthodoxy’ with regard to climate change, reproductive
rights and reform of marriage laws. Similar pressure comes from those who see
education in stark neo-liberal terms as a market-place where pupils are trained
in the skills necessary for a modern economy.
Those who thought that the papal interest in the
‘educational emergency’ had disappeared with Pope Benedict’s resignation better
think again. Pope Francis has shown once again that he is 'in continuity' with
Pope Benedict and the wider Catholic tradition: indeed, Pope Francis's use of language—and
we can be sure that these were carefully chosen words—suggests that he wishes
this debate to remain at the heart of the Catholic Church’s engagement with modern society.
Read the full speech here, courtesy of www.zenit.org: http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/pope-s-discourse-to-the-delegation-of-the-international-catholic-office-of-children
