By Randall Smith
Magnifica humanitas was widely discussed for its focus on artificial intelligence. Pope Leo emphasizes the importance of schools in forming people so that they preserve their humanity in the face of these challenges. If we took the encyclical as a guide for education, what kind of education would that be?
An essential goal would be to educate students about the dignity of the human person and what is required for integral development: body, soul, and spirit. It would teach them that “elevating any single dimension of human existence to an absolute is always a mistake.” The university would have to model this respect for dignity in its own actions and in the norms that govern the community. A Catholic university would teach its students not only about rights, but also about their responsibilities and duties. Such an education would consider the nature of the common good and our obligations toward it.
Given the Pope’s comments, an authentic education would be one in which “the love of truth” is fostered. “When people come to believe that nothing is genuinely true and that principles are empty,” he writes, “when questions about what is true lose their appeal and a pragmatism that settles for what seems useful or effective takes root,” the bonds of trust necessary for democratic life are weakened.
Therefore, “we need a healthy realism that avoids both political idealism and cynicism,” and that avoids any ideology which, “in order to preserve its own worldview, tends to select facts selectively, distorting and renaming them,” whose defenders “over time, inhabit a reality tailored to their own convictions.”
But in addition to avoiding the error of assuming that truth does not exist, or that only “my” truth and “your” truth exist, students should also be taught to avoid the error of assuming that attaining truth is relatively easy. Students should learn, the Pope writes, that authentic education is “a long path that requires patience and therefore needs time for development and for engagement with reality beyond appearances.” They should be taught how “truth is often distorted to serve particular interests and communication strategies.”
Students should learn the value of technology, but also how “technology shapes those who use it.” And they should be taught to avoid succumbing to the dominance of the pervasive “technocratic paradigm.” Computers and cell phones would not be an ubiquitous presence. A “genuinely healthy” community would integrate “rhythms that incorporate silence, deep study, reading, and judicious analysis, since without these elements inner freedom can be compromised.”
Universities should ensure that “the culture fostered on the internet does not become an instrument of excessive distraction, homogenization, or domination.” Rather, they should establish environments “in which inner freedom and critical thinking can mature.” Attaining that “inner freedom” and the capacity for “critical thinking” requires virtues, both intellectual and moral, and a university fails if it does not instill them.
Likewise, the Pope repeatedly speaks of the importance of dialogue “to establish a set of basic agreements that allow the creation of a shared vision, on which all can move forward together.” Such a dialogue is not easy; it requires patience, discipline, and skill, and “an attitude that seeks to forge bonds of fraternity built on listening, an open disposition, making time for one another, and even wasting time together.”
“As knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented,” he warns, “it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask deep questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical, and creative thinking.” Therefore, a “main challenge” for universities “lies in the integration of knowledge,” so they must cultivate in their students “both the ability to connect and synthesize knowledge to grasp complexity, and the skills needed to verify facts.”
“Many educators,” the Pope notes, “already report signs of dehumanization, where students may ‘know many things’ but struggle to find direction in their lives, partly due to the inability to connect information with deeper knowledge or to maintain a sense of purpose.” Therefore, an education that inspires a “love of truth” must also instill “the ability to connect information with deeper knowledge and a sense of purpose; one that fosters deep study, reading, and judicious analysis.”
Universities should also establish “places and moments where physical presence remains crucial, such as shared meals.” How many universities still have shared meals? The Pope encourages cultivating relationships of “authentic closeness” in communities where members “receive care and recognition from attentive minds” and “kind words.” He also speaks of the need to “disarm words.” “The way we communicate is of fundamental importance,” so “we must teach students to communicate effectively, but to say ‘no’ to the war of words and images.”
An authentic education would also teach students to respect our human limitations, not to indulge them in the illusion that life always follows a steep upward trajectory. Rather, it would teach them how to deal with “failure, loss, and suffering,” how “not to deny or suppress them, but to integrate them.” It would teach them that “over the years, we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars, the memories of a path marked by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments,” and that “to renounce this adventure, at once tragic and splendid, in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human.”
And finally, if they followed Pope Leo’s guidance, universities would teach their students that, “when we embrace the possibility of transcending ourselves through the grace of God, we do not deny our nature, nor do we become less human”; on the contrary, “we become fully human” when “we let God lead us beyond ourselves to reach the fullest truth of our being.”
It is a good list. No high school or university is doing all of it. Someone should try.
About the author:
Randall Smith holds the J. Michael Miller Chair in Theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. His books include Bonaventure’s Journey of the Soul into God: Context and Commentary, From Here to Eternity: Reflections on Death, Immortality, and the Resurrection of the Body, Aquinas, Bonaventure, and the Scholastic Culture of Medieval Paris: Preaching, Prologues, and Biblical Commentary, Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide. His forthcoming book, Mapping Bonaventure’s Itinerarium: Context and Commentary, will be released by Emmaus Press this summer. His articles can be found here: http://t4.stthom.edu/users/smith/portfolio/