EDUCATION: Catholics Want to ‘Revolutionise’ Their Teaching

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 18 2002 (IPS) - The education provided by Catholic schools, which teach 40 million students worldwide, must be transformed to face up to the challenges raised by the globalisation process and to meet their own goal of inculcating the concept of social justice as well as humanistic values.

That is the focus of the 16th World Congress on Catholic Education, which has drawn some 1,000 church leaders, school principals and religious and lay educators from 75 countries to Brasilia Monday through Saturday.

The secretary-general of the Catholic International Education Office (OIEC), Andrés Delgado Hernández, told IPS that the Catholic Church’s educational system must undergo “a revolution.”

The theme of this week’s congress, “A New Person for a New World”, sums up the goal of the OIEC, which is commemorating its 50th anniversary this week. The construction of a new society requires a novel kind of teaching in today’s world, said Delgado, a Mexican priest.

“The new educational models must not be limited to small changes,” but must be truly “new,” because “the world has undergone profound changes with the globalisation process, whose principles are not those of humanism or the gospel,” he stressed.

Moreover, globalisation has led to a rise in poverty, and seeks to impose “a single culture on a multicultural and multi- religious world,” he added.

The Brussels-based OIEC coordinates a global network of 225,000 schools representing a total of 40 million pupils, 2.3 million of whom are in Brazil.

But Catholic education goes beyond the traditional institutions, which range from primary schools to universities.

The concept of “popular education” in community settings like neighbourhood associations is increasingly gaining strength, said Ricardo Spíndola Mariz, an advisor to the Brazilian Association of Catholic Education (AEC).

Formal education on its own cannot combat social injustice, since it does not adequately reach the enormous numbers of people who are marginalised by society, Mariz told IPS.

Mariz heads the AEC’s section on popular education, whose efforts range from literacy training for adults to skills training for groups of women seeking alternative sources of income.

Around 60,000 people have already taken the popular education courses offered by the AEC. However, the effect is multiplied, because most of those who have taken the courses become community leaders themselves in poor communities, such as the 15,000 adult literacy teachers who have been trained by AEC.

Popular education in Brazil focuses on four overlying objectives, said Mariz, one of which is to expand “access to culture and to schooling on the outskirts of large cities,” where slumdwellers live in a kind of “exile” within their own country, barred in practice from the city’s shopping and cultural centres.

Another goal is for people “to understand the game – that their situation is not the result of fate or God’s plan,” but has its roots in existing social structures.

A third objective, “education with the people and not for the people,” promotes community organisation, the creation of assemblies and meetings where local residents can discuss their shared problems – a form of “political interaction” that strengthens the people’s participation in the decisions that affect them, said Mariz.

The OIEC holds its World Congress every four years, to outline the orientations to be applied by each continent, region and country, in accordance with local realities.

The AEC, which was created 16 years ago, holds a national meeting every two years, while the national Catholic education secretariats from the Americas meet every three years to evaluate where they are heading.

How to teach while respecting cultural and religious diversity and at the same time maintaining one’s own identity is one of the big challenges today, according to Mariz. He pointed out that in Buddhist areas in Asia, for example, many families send their children to Catholic schools due to the quality of the education offered.

At the Brasilia congress, several issues have been raised by regional delegations. Europe, for instance, is especially concerned about the contradiction between the values taught by the gospel and the exacerbated competition arising from economic globalisation.

Africa presents the most severe examples of teaching in the midst of war, which gives rise to the need for schools that contribute to overcoming ethnic hatred.

But the issue also worries countries with “undeclared wars” like Brazil, where urban violence claims the lives of thousands of young people every month, Mariz noted.

In Mariz’s view, the global challenge facing Catholic education today is promoting social justice in a world of growing inequalities.