Why I am a Catholic School Educator
Reflections from Principal Erin Heule for Catholic Schools Week 2023
As a college senior and recent School of Education drop-out, I climbed the creaky stairs of College Hall to the third-floor Registrar’s Office. There, I removed the education degree from my record and dedicated the final credits of my spring semester to earning a Catholic Studies minor. I signed up for “Catholic Culture in the Modern World,” “Pagans and Christians,” “Faith & Reason”, and “The Iliad & the Odyssey” among others. If that isn’t a course list to make you salivate, I don’t know what is!
By a strange – read, providential – twist, this delightful, final detour into the richness of the Catholic tradition taught me more about my vocation to teaching than my 30-odd education credits could! While I certainly learned practical skills – differentiation, unit planning, classroom management – in my education courses, my experience was that they fundamentally lacked an organizing principle to give such practices meaning and significance. I will not soon forget an assignment for one class that yielded a 14-page lesson plan for a 40-minute class period. While such a fact is alarming in itself, it was most distressing to feel genuine doubt about whether or not those minute-by-minute plans culminated in any real encounter with truth. So I fled, with my completed English major in hand, and a heart for teaching still confused in my chest, and I hid out for a while with the great thinkers of my Catholic Studies minor.
What that semester taught me was simple, and simply striking: I was reminded what it was like to seek truth for its own sake. I enjoyed and thrived in my classes simply because they allowed me to engage deeply with the questions and ideas that really matter. Our beloved patron, Saint John Paul the Great, once said that: “Jesus Christ is the answer to which every human life is the question.” My semester of seeking him in the great stories, philosophy, and history of his Church confirmed for me that the only education worth having, or handing on to students, is one that is fundamentally oriented towards the deep questions, which in turn find both their origin and completion in Jesus Christ. This is Catholic education.
In an age of tweet-sized information, where anchorless agendas predominate, and civil discourse devolves into uncivil discord, we need, more than ever, what Catholic education provides: formation in truth, charity in community, and freedom in Christ. Each day that I had the privilege of leading a Catholic middle school classroom, I drew confidence and inspiration from the wisdom of the Incarnate Logos, Jesus. Practically each hour as a school leader, I invite the Holy Spirit to transform the urgent, practical needs of school life into eternal works of glory for God’s kingdom. I thank him each day for the gift of working in an environment that encourages me to emulate The Great Teacher in all things, and enthrones him in the very heart of the school itself.
Blessed Catholic Schools Week to all our fellow schools!
