Commentary on the Gospel of
Educating the Inside
Atheist Alain de Botton believes that “Christianity is focused on helping a part of us that secular language struggles even to name, […] the soul. It has been the essential task of the Christian pedagogic machine to nurture, reassure, comfort and guide our souls.” But, do our present-day educational institutions live up to this expectation? Here is an exercise: Visit the websites of a few catholic educational institutions in your country. Look through the curriculum of the courses offered. I am afraid that, using the gospel language of the day, our curricula are about cleaning the outside while neglecting the inside, by design or default. We need to recapture the object of education which is “to make capable and cultivated human beings” (John Stuart Mill) who will have “a love of our neighbor, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human misery” (Matthew Arnold) and love of God, to top it all.
