The Future of Catholic Education

In a recent address to the John Carroll Society of Washington, DC on the future of Catholic education, Fordham University President, Joseph McShane, SJ articulated five theses:


1. The challenges that Catholic education has faced and overcome in the past fifty years will pale in comparison to the challenges that it will face in the next fifty years.


2. The American Catholic School System will thrive only if the Church recognizes that it is a community of communities – and that the needs of the various communities that it is called to serve are different.


3. The American Catholic School System will survive and thrive only if it is able to believe in, nurture and build community-based schools in which ownership is shared by the parish community, the school faculty and the parents.


4. Students will come in the door expecting one thing (namely, an entree to a successful professional life) and they will discover something entirely far richer: they will discover the faith.


5. The American Catholic School System will thrive only if it is seen as … a great, transcendent and transforming instrument of both grace and personal enrichment.


The context for Father McShane’s address is the startling shift in the number of Catholic schools from a high of over 12,000 in the 1960s to just over 7,000 in 2009. The vast majority of the closed schools have been located in the nation’s inner cities. This trend mirrors the demographic shift that Father McShane describes as the “suburbanization of American culture” in which the expansion of Catholic education followed the move from urban to exurban locations. This informs McShane’s first point: that the challenges facing Catholic education in the next fifty years are expected to be far more dramatic than anything experienced in the last fifty. Why? Because, as McShane notes, the success of the first 100 years of Catholic schools in the United States “reflected the ethnic villages (neighborhoods) in which the Catholic people lived. This was a brilliant strategy: the bishops sought to keep the Church together by catering to the very different needs of their diverse flock. (They sought unity through diversity.) This meant that schools reflected linguistically and culturally the neighborhoods in which they were located.” This isn’t the case in suburbia, where schools like La Salle, located on the edge of an urban center, serve a majority/minority population. Moreover, the population served by a Catholic school tends to become more homogenous the farther out it is from the urban core. Ironically, therefore, the social network that sustained Catholic schools for the first hundred years (local, ethnically based institutions staffed by “inexpensive” labor – religious men and women – united in the values and traditions of the Catholic faith) – will be largely absent in the next fifty. La Salle is a case in point. In 1960 there were fifteen Christian Brothers staffing a school of 400 boys. Today there is one Brother on staff (doing the work of three!) serving 740 young men and women. Our students come from 33 different communities and, while two-thirds of them identify as Catholic, we are proud to serve students who identify with each of the major world religions. We are equally proud of the ethnic diversity that they represent. I would argue that this is precisely why La Salle enjoys a robust admissions profile. Our success as a Catholic high school in the early years of a new millennium is due, in no small part, to our ability to adapt to the needs of the community we serve. This is a uniquely “Lasallian” characteristic, derived from the commitment of Saint John Baptist de La Salle to meet the needs and challenges of the students entrusted to his care, particularly in and around the margins of seventeenth century French cities.

By the time you read this column, we will be in the middle of “Catholic Schools Week” an annual nation-wide celebration sponsored by the National Catholic Educational Association (www.ncea.org). I want to take the opportunity of Catholic Schools Week to begin to explore the theses Father McShane asserts and to see how they correspond to the lived reality of La Salle High School. Next month: the Catholic school as a “community of communities.”