Summary
Sarah Coakley considers the origins, and the internal contradictions, of modern Western education.
Transcript
Christianity has played an astonishingly important role in the development of Western views of education. But I think one thing that’s worth remembering here is that this was initially in the context of religious community, and mentoring often by monastic communities. And when you dislocate education from a sense of a common bond, a common set of transcendent goals, a common sense of responsibility to one another, then it begins to have a very different flavour. And wholly secularised education is a relatively modern phenomenon, and is still somewhat inchoately influenced by those deeper Christian traditions.
The question is, how can all those goods which are related to the specifically religious – and which you can find, for instance, encoded in the wisdom of something like Benedict’s Rule in the 6th century – how can you extend those in a world which tends to think of itself as simply individualistic and competitive?
