Ethics and Education: Reimagining the Catholic Leader

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Ethics and Education Re-imagining the Catholic
Leader
South Australia CEO conference 2009

• James C Conroy
• Dean of Education University of Glasgow

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Strangers in a Strange Land

• In the land of beginnings spirits mingled with
  the unborn. We could assume numerous forms. Many
  of us were birds. We knew no boundaries. We
  feasted much because of the beautiful terrors of
  eternity. And we sorrowed much because there
  were always those amongst us who had just
  returned from the world of the Living. They had
  returned inconsolable for all the love they had
  left behind, all the suffering they hadnt
  redeemed, all that they hadnt understood, and
  for all that they had barely begun to learn
  before they were drawn back to the land of
  origins.
• There was not one amongst us who looked forward
  to being born. We disliked the rigours of
  existence, the unfulfilled longings, the
  enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths
  of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of
  dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living
  in the midst of the simple beauties of the
  universe. We feared the heartlessness of human
  beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom
  ever learn to see.
• As the child narrator observes To be born is to
  come into the world weighed down with strange
  gifts of the soul, with enigmas and an
  inextinguishable sense of exile. (Ben Okri The
  Famished Road)

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Two reflections

• noli foras ire, in te rede, in interiore homine
  veritas habitat
• St. Augustine
• I did not let the fear of death govern my life
  and my reward was, I had my life. You are going
  to let the fear of poverty govern your life and
  your reward will be that you will eat but you
  will not live.
• G.B. Shaw Heartbreak House

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Five notions 3 Virtues!

• Liberal anxieties
• Religious illiteracy and theological literacy
• Tradition
• Authority
• Discernment
• Fides
• Spes
• caritas

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What is the Mission?

• The first condition of mission is to understand.
  How often have we trampled in and made a mess
  through a failure of understanding?
• In the 19th Century Newman confronts the poverty
  of the inner city.
• Across Britain, America and Australia Catholic
  schools were established to confront such
  poverty.
• In the 21st century we are confronted with new
  forms of poverty, which entail, amongst other
  things, the disintegration of the notion of the
  child.
• Our mission is, like our 19th century forbearers,
  to recognise the conditions and seek responses.

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Challenge of maintenance

• What are the marks of secularisation in the
  school?
• Does secularisation make any difference to your
  teaching?
• Some fundamental questions about identity
• Why are Jews able to do this?
• Why are Muslims able to do it?
• The nature of persecuted minorities
• The Enlightenment is both our release and our
  nemesis it is our creation and our constraint.

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The context some preliminary issues

• Postmodernity
• Education enmeshed in the re-shaping of the
  public and private spaces
• Changing conceptions of the self and their
  consequences for the social practices of Catholic
  schools its teachers and students
• for teachers - a re-shaping of the profession
• a shift from vocation to profession
• cosmopolitanism- faith as a professional
  resource rather than (as in Scotland) a ground
  upon which all is, rhetorically at least,
  built.
• for students
• subjected to the loss of their childhood
• confusion and incoherence

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The Challenges

• The Context
• The rise of virulent forms of anti-religious
  sentiment and commentary in the public spaces
• Militant atheism (Muriel Gray) Dawkins and The
  Emergence of the Brights
• Catholic schools as inevitably injurious to
  demands of
• common citizenship
• The complexity of the public private spaces
• Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
• Apparent failures of religions
• Leadership
• The rise of fundamentalisms
• Complacency (Gilchrist /Johnson et al offer
  damning critique of our internal health)

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Postmodernism

• Impact on the social fabric
• Impact on the lives of children - re-shaping
  childhood
• Impact on the lives of teachers re-shaping the
  vocation as profession
• Catholic schools as an imperfect concordat
  between believer and unbeliever the doubting and
  the certain
• The emergence of changing conceptions of the Self
  and the role education has in presenting coherent
  conceptions of the different aspects of the self
  (rational, entrepreneurial, consumer, sexual,
  spiritual) in a culture where these categories
  are subject to radical contestation and
  re-invention?

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Public and Private

• The post War period has seen a disintegration of
  the classical distinction between the public and
  the private.
• How we make our living (and how much we make)
  has become a source of perennial public
  interest.
• Sexual activity once a matter of private
  relations is largely a matter of public gossip
• The art and skill of parenting has become the
  topic of television biopics
• And so on

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Disintegrating sense of the whole person

• The emergence of the multiple self
• Rational - the move from a unitary account of
  truth to relative and pragmatic truths
• Entrepreneurial - The self becomes a site for
  investments such that management and professional
  development are often devolved to the individual
  worker, for whom the self becomes the final
  resource to be exploited.
• Consuming - From a self shaped by production to
  one shaped by consumption. Objects that once had
  utility value now have only symbolic value. A
  transition from a society driven by need to one
  driven by desire where the objects now construct
  us rather than we them
• Sexual - The interior becomes exterior, the
  private public, and the soul is rediscovered as
  the sexualised self, the free expression of which
  is championed by many as an advanced expression
  of modernitys work of liberation.
• Religious - the evolution from the self as
  fashioned in the image of God to the commitment
  to an existence-led self (Dean, 1992) that
  bears no nature or essence, far less an immortal
  soul.

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The Loss of the religious imaginary
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Re-shaping the language
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Liberal anxieties

• Another useful secret of invincible authors is
  to intersperse contempt of pedantry and of the
  clergy. These damned pendants have got a trick of
  reading many authors, observing the sentiments of
  the greatest men in all ages and acquire an
  impertinent facility of discerning nonsense in
  the writings of your easy genteel authors, who
  are above perplexing themselves with the sourness
  and intricacies of thought.
• (Hutcheson 1750)

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Public and Private

• Wise conduct is the key to happiness
• Always rule by the gods and reverence them.
• Those who overbear will be brought to grief.
• Fate will flail them on the winnowing floor
• And in due season teach them to be wise
• Chorus from Antigone (translated by S.
  Heaney 2004)
• The perennial struggle between the public and the
  private spaces is nothing new but it has taken on
  new force in liberal polities

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The Light of the World

• Rabbi Nahum and Zimzum Gods self withdrawing to
  make space. Then God shines Gods light of
  creation into the world. However, so intense is
  it that it smashes the posts intended to capture
  it a cataclysm called shevira.
• Out there, sleeping rough,
• someone shakes a blanket and finds
• treasure like a jewelled monstrance

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Not for ourselves!

• Gaels! he said, it delights my Gaelic heart to be
  here today speaking Gaelic with you at this
  Gaelic feis in the centre of the Gaeltacht.We
  are all Gaelic Gaels of Gaelic lineage. He who is
  Gaelic will be Gaelic evermore. If were truly
  Gaelic, we must constantly discuss the question
  of the Gaelic revival and the question of
  Gaelicism. There is no use in having Gaelic, if
  we converse in it on non-Gaelic topicsI dont
  think the Government is earnest about Gaelic, I
  dont think they are Gaelic at heart. (OBrien
  1973, 54)

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Towards Distinguishing Tradition from
Nostalgia Nostalgia Tradition Arcadian S
entimentalising Realistic Narcissistic Othe
r-directed Discontinuous Contiguous Past-foc
used Future-oriented Negates the
Present Nurtures the moment Debilitating Su
staining Historical naivety Historical
consciousness Disempowering Empowering Hiera
rchical Collegial Hearing the
Past Listening to the Past
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Table 1. Personal ideals
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Table 3. Characteristics of the ideal teacher
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Table 2. Ideals for pupils
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The Principal as Faith Leader or the
Headteachers Dilemma?
How often might these sentiments be repeated
around the profession and across the miles?

• I would not be so bold as to say that I look at
  my young staff and try to develop their faith but
  I think that what we all do together in liturgy
  and worship and in the unspoken way we work in
  school, perhaps it has that effect. Whole school
  liturgies, class liturgies, year liturgies, ones
  with the parish community. All go together in a
  seamless whole I would not say I purposely set
  out to develop the faith of staff. I dont feel
  competent to do it, it could be the other way
  round, perhaps we help each other.
• An English Head Teacher
• How often might these sentiments be repeated
  around the profession and across the miles?

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Whats it like for me?

• Like many senior staff, each day is striated
  with compromise.
• What are the compromises?
• staff capabilities and capacities
• institutional disposition
• Ones own capacities

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Mission and Maintenance

• Constant tension between maintaining the
  revolutionary vision and ensuring that such a
  vision is instantiated as normative in the day to
  day practices of education.
• St. Francis and the Liminal spaces
• The experience of early Franciscans is
  instructive here.

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Anxieties and Ambiguities

• If we were to say, I dont feel equipped to
  form the professional lives of young teachers
  questions might be asked in the locker room.
• Whither such reticence?
• Given the express(ed) anxieties of last years
  conference what we see is, to some extent, a
  failure of nerve a failure to use religious
  language a failure to engage with the
  transcendent

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• Cultivation of Gifts
• Renewing the covenant
• Catholics as Principals!!!
• Invitation
• Building the bonds of community
• Formation in faith- inducted into faith
  commitment to values and doctrines

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Authority

• By whose authority?

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Authority

• Whats the relationship between leader and
  benefactor. Here I should like to move forward on
  our reflection on these matters and offer the
  following as a source of meditation on the nature
  and source of our authority and not as a set of
  disputations on who has and has not authority.
  Clearly the school leader has authority by virtue
  of her position. For the Catholic school leader
  this authority is likely to be discharged
  effectively in direct relation to our
  acknowledgement of the source and nature of
  Christian authority.

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Authority

• Authoritarian strict, sever, rigid,
  dictatorial, totalitarian
• Authorise - approve, allow, sanction, permit,
  consent, empower, give permission
• Authority power, influence, weight, clout,
  ability, weight, say-so, last word
• Author person behind, creator, instigator,
  biographer, novelist, writer, person responsible
• What do you notice about the various uses of the
  root word here?
• How are these words deployed in schools?
• If we were to take 100 incidents of the use of
  the root word in a school, what percentage might
  me attributable to each of the four uses here?

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Discernment

• Much is made in the Christian tradition of
  discernment but what in what consists this
  particular capacity?
• Indeed, is it a capacity?
• Etymologically rooted in the greek, dia kriasis
  from which of course we also get crisis.
  Logically we would only need discernment where
  there are choices to be made. If there is no
  choice no anxiety about making the wrong choice
  and therefore no crisis. Consequently there is no
  need for discernment.
• Discernment only occurs where we listen to the
  challenge and have to make a decision.

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Discernment

• So, how do we cultivate it?
• Contexts
• Staff appointments
• Teacher is always right!
• Individual needs communal requirements
• Where spend our money?
• Processes
• Recognition
• The Interior Life - space
• Practice (of virtue)
• Courage

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