(How) has the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church toward education changed since the Reformation?

by ggchappell

I'm having trouble reconciling a couple of observations about the Roman Catholic Church and education.

First Observation. During the latter part of the period in which the Catholic Church dominated much of Europe, the great cities of the Islamic world were where people went to study under world-class scholars. The western world's preeminence in higher education seems to date from the Protestant Reformation. The serious intellectual advancement of western culture seems to have begun around that time as well.

A reasonable tentative conclusion would be that catholicism is a poor foundation for excellence in education and other intellectual endeavors.

Second Observation. The Catholic Church, as we know it today, is heavily into education, and seems to be quite good at it. For example, any number of Jesuit-run universities are highly regarded. And I have heard from residents of more than one third-world country that, where they come from, you go to the local schools if you're in favor of whatever sectarian bias they have, but if you just want a good education, then the catholic schools are the place to be.

So, how do I reconcile these two? Is my analysis of history off-base? If not, has there been some significant change in the way the Catholic Church approaches education since the Reformation? And if so, what kind of change was this, and what drove it?

Let me elaborate on 8BallTiger whose reply, with which I agree, I missed while I was writing mine.

So, great question, but let me adjust your premise.

First, western education owes an enormous debt to Muslim scholarship with which Christian scholars came into contact especially from the 12th century in places like Toledo and Cordoba in Spain (both of which had flourishing cosmopolitan cultures and great libraries) and Sicily. This contact re-introduced them to Greek scientific thought, which had been mostly lost in the West as the Roman education system decayed in late antiquity. Aristotle was the key thinker they rediscovered. His logical works became foundational for western universities, which were themselves developing from smaller schools in the larger towns of late 12th and early 13th-century Europe. The towns themselves were growing as the result of the commercial revival that spurred an urban revival where such schools could flourish.

By the thirteenth century there were universities in pretty much all the major cities of Europe. Western higher education, though limited to a small minority, had developed teaching and learning techniques that in many ways laid the foundation for subsequent western thought. Specifically, western schools had developed the method of [scholasticism] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism): the rigorous application of questions to all kinds of basic issues, esp. in theology and philosophy, and the attempt to answer these questions through the application of Aristotle’s logic fused with Christian revelation. Medieval universities were driven by incredible curiosity about all sorts of issues which they could investigate through scholastic logic. In fact, western education in the later Middle Ages could rival anything in the Islamic world by this point; [Islam’s Golden Age was near its end by then] (http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science).

The intellectual explorations grew even bolder in the Italian Renaissance, where scholars scoured Europe’s monastic libraries for copies of classical works in Latin (and later Greek), which were not that attractive to the scholastic method. The spread of these texts among humanist scholars, the editing of them into standard editions, and the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century meant that humanist education in the liberal arts was available throughout most of Europe. (The word “humanist” comes from the slang “umanista” which is what students called their professors who taught the new discipline of “the humanities,” a subject foreign to medieval universities.)

So let’s reject your tentative conclusion that “catholicism is a poor foundation for excellence in education and other intellectual endeavors.” With its tools of logic (which arguably created the questioning of reality and putting it to logical test which is the hallmark of western thinking and western science) and its interest in recovering and applying classical Greek and Roman knowledge to the study of self, medieval and Renaissance education were excellent foundations.

Come the Reformation. The reality is that, for all its innovation at the upper end of society, the Catholic church had never devised any universal system of education for either its priests or for ordinary people until the 16th century spurred by the Reformation. The Protestant progress in the Reformation made the church realize that it needed to better educate its priests and its people if it were to compete with Protestants. Defend Catholicism by better educating its members so that they understood church doctrine. The Jesuits were founded in 1534 early in the Reformation as a movement in part to better educate priests who in turn could educate ordinary Catholics. There were others too that I’m going to skip due to time. Jesuits opened their first primary schools in the mid-1550s and they snowballed, combining as they did rigorous training in Catholic doctrine and humanist-oriented interest in the development of individual potential.

To answer your second question about how the Jesuits became excellent educators, I’m sending you to Jesuit historian John W. O’Malley’s very thorough article on [“How the First Jesuits Became Involved in Education”] (https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/top/church21/pdf/HowtheFirstJesuitsBecameInvolvedinEducation.pdf) that goes into much greater detail than I have time for right now.