Pope Francis on Education

While living  in Argentina then Cardinal Bergoglio and Rabbi Abraham Skorka engaged in religious dialogue with one another. Their conversations on many current issues are recorded in a very relevant book, on Heaven and Earth. In these remarks on Education,  Pope Francis was speaking mainly from his experience of how schooling took place in Argentina. but it is fascinating to see how pertinent his remarks are when applied to schooling and education in the United States.

Bergoglio: In the Bible, God shows himself as an educator: "I carried you over my shoulders, I taught you how to walk", he says. The obligation of the believer is to raise their young. each man and each woman has the right to educate their children in religious values. The effect of the State in taking away this right can lead to cases like Nazism, in which the children were indoctrinated with values different from those of their parents. Totalitarians tend to add water to their own mill.

Bergoglio: Schools educate toward the transcendent, just like religion. Not opening the doors to a religious worldview in the academic environment cripples the harmonious development of children, because this concerns their identity, the transmission of the same values their parents have, which are projected onto the child. They are deprived of a cultural and religious inheritance. If in education you take away  the tradition of the parents, only ideology remains.  Life is seen with biased eyes, there is no unbiased hermeneutic even in education. Words are full of history, of experiences of life. When someone leaves a void, it is filled with different ideas from the family tradition; that is how ideologies are born...

 Bergoglio: There is a difference between a professor and a teacher. The professor presents his material in a detached manner, while the teacher involves others; it is profoundly testimonial. There is also a coherence between his conduct and his life. He is not merely a transmitter of science, as is a professor. We need to help men and women to become teachers, so that  they can be witnesses; that is essential to education.

on Heaven and Earth, Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Abraham Skorka  pp.128 - 132