This little book is a gem. It ought to be read by anyone involved with Catholic schools, and especially by all teachers and governors, Catholic or non‐Catholic. It embeds its account of Catholic education into explanations of what it is to be both a Catholic Christian and a human being. Thus much of it is relevant to anyone wanting to understand the basics of our faith. It is easy to read, lucid, inclusive, balanced, open‐minded, thought‐provoking and highly engaging. It is skilfully divided into accessible chunks, with helpful quotations highlighted, cross‐references to relevant material in RE curricula, and suggestions for making use of each chapter (for example, for assemblies, staff meetings or governors’ INSET days). A humorous touch and imaginative illustrations are the icing on the cake. (My favourite example is the picture in the section about courage, of a Great White Shark, with the caption, ‘selachophobia (fear of sharks) is a rational reaction’.)
The three main parts are each divided into three chapters, each in turn containing five sections. The first, ‘The Nature of Education’, describes human beings in Aristotelian style as a kind of animal endowed with language and reason, and above all the capacity for friendship. Chapter 2, ‘The Integral Formation of Persons’, explains the virtues needed for such a creature to flourish. This account, in the best tradition of modern Thomist ethics, provides a distinctive underpinning for the whole book. Education is primarily for helping young people to cultivate the virtues, both moral and specifically intellectual. The third chapter, ‘Education & Ethos’, offers a liberal account of the purpose of education, set in the context of the parents as the primary educators. Jones and Barrie repeatedly remind us, ‘That which does not reproduce the characteristic features of a school cannot be a Catholic school.’ It is essential to their approach to begin with an account of education as such.
Section Two, on specifically Christian education, is subtitled, ‘What difference does Jesus make?’ Chapter 4 provides a fine summary of the fundamentals of the faith, including ‘a whistle‐stop tour through the Scriptures’. It is followed by an exploration of how the virtues are transformed, in Christian understanding and practice, by faith and grace. The section on hope and discernment is particularly illuminating and relevant to the theme. Chapter 6, ‘Christianity & the Task of Education’, argues a balanced case for faith schools in the context of secular criticisms, and explains how sin and grace affect our approach to teaching and learning. As Rowan Williams put it, ‘a believer's vision ought to be such as to be hospitable to the idea that effects are, in a grace‐haunted world, unpredictable and disproportionate to effort.’
The final section, ‘The Church & Education’, asks, ‘What should a Catholic school look like?’ It introduces the main subjects of education ‐ the natural sciences, language and literature, history and geography, art and music ‐ by linking each with the purposes and history of the Church. The authors recount how the faith of individuals and communities has stimulated continual and ground‐breaking developments in each of these areas. An illuminating photograph shows Mgr Georges Lemaître, the discoverer of ‘Big Bang’ theory, with Einstein. Christians as various as Albert the Great, Marco Polo, William Shakespeare, Mozart and Fra Angelico are celebrated here. It is invigorating, in an age of cynicism about religion, to recall the transforming impact of Christianity on learning and culture. The next chapter reminds us that the Church had a similarly dramatic impact on the institutions of education, creating the school and university systems first of Europe, and then of much of the rest of the world. But a Catholic school is much more than a collection of teachers and learners: it aspires to be a communion and a collaborative community, enlivened and united by prayer and worship. Thus the Christian ethos affect the whole curriculum, not least by insisting on an integrated vision of learning, which counters the contemporary tendency to over‐specialisation and intellectual fragmentation.
Finally, Catholic schools have a mission. (The word ‘mission’ itself, like ‘vocation’, is another gift from the Church to wider society.) They share in the Church's own twofold mission, to preach the Word to others so as to share the gift of God's love with them, and to exemplify that love in practical service. Catholic schools should incarnate the principles of Catholic Social Teaching such as human dignity and equality, solidarity and subsidiarity, and a preferential option for the poor. This last offers a continual challenge, as repeatedly over the centuries the very success of Catholic schools has made them magnets for the rich and privileged. There are sensitive reflections here also on the role of Catholic schools in educating the children of lapsed Catholics or non‐Catholics, including those of other faiths and non‐believers. Catholic schools are not preparing children for careers in the conventional sense, but rather for vocations: for the form of loving service to which each will be called in his or her adult life. One of the most important possible vocations, Jones and Barrie remind us, is that of the teachers themselves.
The book ends with a very useful list of the pithy definitions that are included through out it, and a bibliography. Perhaps in a second edition, the book titles might be supplemented, for example, by websites and DVDs.
Jones and Barrie write self‐consciously in the tradition of the three ‘As’ ‐ Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas ‐ and explicitly acknowledge their evident debt to two great twentieth‐century developers of this tradition, Elizabeth Anscombe and Fr Herbert McCabe OP. The latter would have appreciated the style as well as the content of Thinking Christian Ethos. In the best tradition of Dominican writing it makes profound thinking on a vital topic available to a wide range of readers.
