The great educator and cultural historian Walter Ong, S.J., wrote an essay for America in 1990 in which he suggested the metaphor of yeast can serve as a powerful model for Catholic education. Yeast, he wrote, is an agent of infusion, of integration and penetration that transforms the flour into which it is introduced. He compared this with the integrating quality of faith.
Father Ong had good authority for the metaphor. Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God as being like leaven.
I would like to contrast this metaphor of yeast with a metaphor of “frosting,” as applied to Catholic education. Rather than infusing a cake the way yeast does, frosting does not permeate the cake, but only layers itself upon it. These two metaphors capture in a simple, but I believe accurate way, two competing visions of Catholic education, from preschool to university.
Yeast
Father Ong explained that the function of yeast has parallels in the etymology of the word “catholic,” which comes from the Greek katholikos, from kath or kata (“throughout”) and holos (“whole”): “throughout-the-whole.”
Like yeast in a loaf, faith, in a genuinely Catholic education, interacts with all other disciplines, such as the humanities, sciences, social sciences and the professions. Faith does not replace disciplines or transform them into itself; rather, when faith encounters reason, it reveals and orders reason’s deeper realities of truth and goodness. Like yeast, faith expands throughout the whole educational enterprise because there are no limits to its borders. Faith, not a mere emotion but a divine illumination, is the theological virtue that expands the mind and soul, enabling us to see more deeply and more broadly.
When faith views a human being, it sees everything the natural eye sees, but it pierces more deeply into the depths of human reality. It does not fall prey to the reductive sight that sees only a biological organism whose value can be measured in strictly economic terms. Instead, the eyes of faith perceive a unique and unrepeatable immortal soul, made in the image of God and intended for the kingdom.
Faith sees the invisible in the visible, the spirit in matter, the immeasurable in the measurable. Faith is a habit of mind whereby eternal life begins in us, where we see the end in our beginnings. Closer to home, it is with vision leavened by faith that I can see the image of God in that student in the back row with the baseball cap, whose bored look signals that I cannot teach him a thing.
Faith and other disciplines
Examples of bringing faith into contact with other disciplines abound in the Catholic educational tradition. A few examples among many include the early church fathers, who built upon the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, bringing out the intrinsic complementarity of faith and reason. Another classic example is that of the scholar/saints like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, who performed a similar yeast-like operation when a flood of ancient writings (often filtered through Muslim thinkers), especially of Plato and Aristotle, swept through European societies and were integrated into the work of universities.
More recently, Catholic social teaching has engaged with business theory and practice, exploring the relationship between the social nature of property and capital, applying a Christian view of justice and its implications for wages and prices and wealth distribution, as well as contributing to an understanding of the nobility of the vocation and the work of business leaders.
Another recent example might be found in the current dialogue among scientists, theologians and philosophers on some of the most momentous scientific questions facing us, such as the theory of the Big Bang, the origin of the universe and evolutionary thought.
These conversations and insights of integration enrich both the various disciplines and faith itself. The disciplines become more nourishing and less reductionist, and faith is purified by seeing more concretely what the legal scholar Helen Alvaré calls the “inbreaking of the Kingdom.”
Tension and debate will no doubt arise in the interaction of faith and reason, but this is nothing new in the Catholic educational tradition. The medieval university’s pedagogical approach was structured on such questions and debates. Its pedagogy was dialectical, including both lecture and disputation. The lecture was not given to evoke mere assent, but as a prologue to disputation. The Socratic method—the art of the question—was incorporated into Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, proposing questions and articulating both sides of an argument in search of a deeper synthesis.
Yet students are increasingly afraid to disagree with others, often out of fear of being labeled or of simply being wrong. This is a debilitating condition for education. A Catholic education should hone the art of the question that is “questing” not for slogans or political correctness (whether left or right), but what the Rev. Luigi Giussani called the “religious sense,” an ultimate meaning that is discoverable but never exhaustible.
The metaphor of yeast and the meaning of the word catholic point us to two key integrating principles of Catholic education: the unity of knowledge and the complementarity of faith and reason. The ability to integrate knowledge is the highest activity of the human mind, and it is these two leavening principles that move the mind to wisdom. If Catholic schools cease engaging such principles, they will no longer operate as yeast. Instead, they are likely to merit the second metaphor mentioned above: Catholic education as frosting.
Frosting
“Catholic frosting on a secular cake.” This apt description refers to an all-too-common situation in many of our Catholic schools and universities. The intellectual content being taught by the schools can be simply secular, little different, if at all, from avowedly secular institutions. In such places, the difference that supposedly makes the school Catholic is found in a layer of “frosting” applied externally to an educational secular cake. The ingredients of the frosting are such things as a religion requirement, liturgies, the presence of religious symbols, service programs, perhaps an occasional visit from a bishop and a generic, if sometimes dubious claim that people are “nicer” to each other than they are in secular schools.
We like frosting: It is good in itself, it looks nice and it improves the taste; but it cannot alter the main body of the cake. This is a far cry from the yeast-like transformative quality that has characterized the long Catholic educational tradition.
How did we get to this frosting model of Catholic education? Most would agree that an important purpose of education is to cultivate, sharpen, discipline and make more precise and active the human mind. Education does this by specializing in particular subjects. The great strength of modern education, and particularly the modern university, is in its specialization. This strength also feeds into its most significant weakness.
Specialized training advances the disciplines; but if it is not properly contextualized, it is in danger of deforming the mind, because it ignores the supreme act of the mind—the integration of knowledge. When the stuff of education is a smorgasbord of different subjects taught in no clear relation to each other, a form of cold and calculating rationalism is often the result.
St. John Henry Newman wrote that “although the art [discipline] itself is advanced by this concentration of mind in its service, the individual who is confined to it goes back.” Specialized learning, if pursued apart from an integrated intellectual vision that takes in the whole of reality, stunts the growth of genuine knowledge and often proves deeply dissatisfying to young and energetic minds.
It is natural for the young mind to seek an integrated way of understanding the world. When it is not forthcoming, students eventually lose their love of learning and subside into studying for instrumental reasons only: for grades, a career and personal prestige. A theology course or two and an occasional Mass layered on top of such an education will not prove effective in countering its fragmenting effects. When this touches on the concern for justice—a worthy aspect of education—it often fails to understand the rich, comprehensive character of justice found in the Catholic tradition and either remains extrinsic to learning or becomes disordered by prevailing ideologies.
Fragmentation
Many of us in Catholic schools have been formed in a largely modern, pragmatic model of education. The point here is not to blame anyone, but rather to take seriously not only the fragmenting effects of modern education but also the dire consequences of the separation of faith from reason that results from such fragmentation. Modern secular education assumes that reason has nothing to learn from faith. Reason is seen as an autonomous reality and the only genuine source of “real” knowledge. Only what is either experimentally verifiable or instrumentally useful can be considered true or can be investigated by the use of reason.
When knowledge is reduced to verification and utility alone, the result is a world dominated by what might be called pragmaticism. Its danger lies in the marginalization of metaphysics and theology, those disciplines that seek the deepest order of reality. Instead, it insists that the only important questions are: What works? What is useful? And how do I fit into that utilitarian system? Pragmaticism views reality from a functional point of view; contemplation and wonder are replaced by markers of effectiveness and the tyranny of the metric. As this reductionist attitude annihilates wonder, it deflates the love of learning, ignores the mysterious and marginalizes our desire for God.
An education informed by pragmaticism moves quickly to forms of careerism (my doing takes precedence over my being) or consumerism (what I have takes precedence over what I have become). It feeds a posture of instrumental rationality that undermines moral and spiritual reasoning. As Jesus warned of the leaven of the Pharisees and Herod, we should take heed of the leaven of a pragmaticism that has seeped into the educational cake we offer to students.
The ultimate danger of a frosting model for Catholic schools is that it conceals the often-unintended consequence of marginalizing faith’s gift of Logos, of divine reason, and our dialogical power with that divine reason. If the church had understood its education mission as mere frosting it would have instituted Bible study and seminaries only for the clergy. Instead, the church has given birth to the university, and to schools of every kind, engaging every possible aspect of the life of the mind.
At the end of the day, a school operating according to the frosting model cannot help but do damage to the faith. It places faith on the margins of what is human, which, as St. John Paul II put it, is a “faith unfaithful to the fullness of what the Word of God manifests and reveals, a decapitated faith, worse still, a faith in the process of self-annihilation.”
Keys to renewal
The Catholic Church has been at the work of education for more than 2,000 years. Its ability to renew itself through God’s grace is surely why we have globally approximately 95,000 primary schools, 43,000 secondary schools, and 1,500 institutions of higher learning. Yet, despite these numbers, there is no guarantee of their future existence. Catholic primary and secondary schools in the United States, for example, have plummeted from their height of 12,000 in the 1960s to fewer than 6,000 today.
What is key to the renewal of Catholic education in our age? Simply put, we need more yeast and less frosting. Admittedly, to be educational yeast is a lot harder than to be frosting, given our increasingly modern technocratic culture. It will require serious energy and clarity of vision among our educational leaders and readiness to break new ground.
So what forms do the yeast model of Catholic education take? The possibilities are many, but let me highlight three promising forms of renewal that span the educational spectrum.
First, starting in the 1950s, the work of Sophia Cavalletti and Gianna Gobbi in developing the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd serves to foster a profound religious formation for children ages 3 to 12. More recent psychological and neurological research confirms their holistic and integrative approach to early childhood education and faith formation.
Second, The Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, which was founded in 1999, sponsors certificate programs, conferences, retreats and publications for primary and secondary Catholic school teachers. Their programs focus on the virtues, wonder, wisdom and faith in relation to the liberal arts. What makes this institute particularly valuable is its ability to address pedagogical practices and curricular content.
Finally, the idea of a formal program in Catholic Studies, which became popular in the early 1990s, has sparked the founding of more than 60 similar interdisciplinary initiatives in universities across the country and around the world. Its potency comes from its vision, ecclesial commitment and collegiate community at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
There are of course many other programs and institutions that are fostering yeast-like education, and every program and institution will have its insights and limitations. But if our faith does not infuse like yeast, but is only layered on like frosting, we will fail in our mission to educate our young. The renewal of Catholic education has always been premised on deeper forms of integration creating a more excellent education in a time of turmoil and decline.
