We live in an Australia of burgeoning secularism, one where individual choice can be seen as its own justification. Within this context, educators of young people, particularly within the Catholic system, face two challenges in particular: the need to educate for choice, and the need to educate for depth.
Confronting today's young people are choices of an extensive nature, far more than confronted their parents — not just choices of websites, or choices of TV stations, or choices of stores in shopping centres, but also choices concerning values and beliefs and lifestyles.
A choice enables us to be free, but choice is not its own justification. Education about choice is a real challenge for those charged with forming the young.
Five or six years ago, Allen Close wrote an article in the Weekend Australian in which he reflected on his generation, which was then just touching 40. He was struck by the childlessness of so many of his social circle and of the failure of himself and others from his circle to have established sustained relationships. He wrote;
What happened that so many of us have ended up entering middle age the way we have, on a grim treadmill of hope and disappointment. Our marriages ending, our families are split asunder, our assumptions about life devolving into confusion and loneliness?
We had choice, is my answer. More, I would suggest, than most of us knew how to handle. We got selfish, or greedy, or something. We left our partners because we could. We terminated our babies because we could. We discarded the rules, loosened the ties that bind, stretched the limits of the allowed, and this left us dependent on instincts, on our untutored human frailty.
In the fight for freedom which we considered our right we lost the quiet skills of commitment and relationships. We lost the gentle wisdom of putting our own needs second ... the art of love.
Unless there is education about discernment, the consideration of what directions and consequences choices will lead us to, students may make disastrous options or at the least become mired in indifferentism.
Another challenge is the need to educate for depth.
When in Rome for the canonisation of Saint Mary MacKillop in 2010, the then recently deposed prime minister, Kevin Rudd, visited Fr Adolfo Nicolas SJ, the present Father-General of the Jesuit order. In the casual way that one employs when having morning tea with someone, Rudd asked Nicolas what he believed to be the major challenges facing western society. Nicolas replied 'the globalisation of superficiality'.
In a world of massive and instant communications and distractions, it is possible never to go beneath the surface, never to go in to those deeper places where our humanity registers.
In year 12 classes I used to employ the Cro-Magnon cave paintings, which show the earliest homosapiens to be tool-makers, lovers, thinkers and worshippers.
You can see evidence of the axe as the tool; see the lover in the flowers that were laid around the bodies of the dead; the thinker in the scratchings and calculations made on the walls; the artist in the paintings; and the worshipper in the subjects conveyed by the paintings.
In essence one might say that nothing has changed, that human nature appears to have a consistency and a constancy. There can be no full humanity without those dimensions of creativity, of love, of thought, and of worship. To be fully human we must develop on all fronts.
To help our young people mature we should guide them on what Teilhard de Chardin called that most difficult of journeys, the journey within.
Educators live in a world these days of NAPLAN, of issues affecting numeracy and literacy, and of where their school comes on a league table. This is increasingly to the detriment of education for depth and discernment. I do think it is time for principals to look closely at the phenomenon and to see what can be done about it.
Bishop Greg O'Kelly SJ is the bishop of Port Pirie. He has been the headmaster of two Australian Jesuit schools and has served widely as an educational adviser. This article contains edited extracts from his opening address at the 2012 Conference of Catholic Secondary Principals of Australia and his address to the 2011 National Catholic Education Conference.