A Catholic Philosophy of Education: The Church and Two Philosophers by Mario O. D'Souza (review)

Mario D'Souza's book is shaped by two Roman Catholic influences: the Second Vatican Council and Thomistic philosophy. The former makes the book a distinctly post-conciliar text, sensitive to the contemporary Catholic Church. The latter justifies its extended treatment of the thought of Jacques Maritain and Bernard Lonergan. D'Souza also sharply distinguishes the universal from the particular, opting for a Catholic philosophy of education instead of a philosophy of Catholic education.

As important as the aforementioned distinction is for the book's development, there are two illuminating exceptions to the otherwise consistent application of the philosophical notion of education. In the final lines of the book, D'Souza writes movingly of the capacity of Catholic education to provide "a vision of ordering and unifying one's life, personally and communally, by loving wisely and well." While the book's focus on education is primarily philosophical, D'Souza shows that Catholic philosophy cannot be detached entirely from an educational commitment to Catholic education and Catholic schools. This is the first revealing digression from the clear focus of the book. The second is found in D'Souza's frequent sharing from his personal experience of Catholic schooling in Pakistan – a Muslim majority country that nonetheless strongly supports Catholic schools – and his pastoral concerns about Catholic education as a Catholic priest. These refreshing autobiographical disclosures are folded into the book's philosophical content, adding context and personality. The result is an elegantly attuned text that avoids both philosophical and theological over-determination or under-determination. In plainer terms, this is a book that can be gainfully studied by Catholic school teachers and administrators for the sake of their mission in a formal Catholic environment or by philosophers of education and other philosophers and educationalists working in predominantly secular academic fields. After all, in today's malaise of technocratic education, who can argue with claims like this one: "A great disservice to the student is when education and knowledge are shrunken to the demands of relevance" (emphasis in original).

I should moderate my note about "predominantly secular academic fields" with D'Souza's elegant claim that what "the [Catholic Church] documents, Maritain, and Lonergan offer is a much wider understanding of the secular nature of society, as distinct from a society marked by secularism" (emphasis in original). This nuanced approach is the norm for the entire text. Especially helpful is the careful way in which D'Souza treats Lonergan in relation to educational thinkers who easily descend into cliches. Both John Dewey and Paulo Freire, for instance, are treated with sensitivity. In the case of Dewey, we are able to appreciate how Lonergan was influenced by Dewey's thoughts on education and also where and how the two radically differed. In the case of Freire, D'Souza mentions him as an example of the sort of broadening beyond neo-Thomism that was possible within Catholic philosophy of education after the Second Vatican Council. This treatment of Freire is significant for many reasons. One is that the Marxist tradition of critical pedagogy often claims Freire as its own, secularizing him in spite of the overtly Catholic character of his work. D'Souza's almost casual inclusion of Freire among the Catholic philosophers of education invites us to correct his secularization and to imagine other Catholic philosophers of education as well. (One who comes immediately to my mind, not mentioned by D'Souza, is Ivan Illich, who studied theology under Maritain.)

Like the corrective treatment of Freire, D'Souza's expository analysis of Catholic Church documents and Lonergan and Maritain's primary and secondary literature on education deserves the full attention of the contemporary field of philosophy of education that all too often ignores the Catholic intellectual tradition in toto. For me, however, the real impact of this book was D'Souza's call to reimagine a Catholic philosophy of education in a time when it truly...