Newman the Educator: Formation in Freedom

Many today imagine freedom as freedom from restraints, not freedom for the good. The first prioritizes instant gratification, personal preference, and self-indulgence. The latter cultivates morality, justice, and self-mastery. If we can’t control ourselves, we are not really free—we are enslaved to our own bad habits. The French revolutionaries, in their fanatic zeal for freedom from the constraints of monarchy, aristocracy, and religion, became, in a term coined by the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, eleutheromaniacs—freedom-crazed. Paris, France, and all of Europe suffered the bloody consequences for generations. Young people, especially, are in need of the formation which John Adams and other American Founding Fathers called “self-government”—the personal acquisition of virtue without which the American Founders thought the United States would flounder.

St. John Henry Newman’s view of liberal education draws upon this healthier sense of freedom. In order to be free to choose the good, one must know the good and form proper moral habits. Newman uses the phrase liberal education to stand for what some today call classical education. The term liberal has at least two senses: 1) related to knowledge, wide, all-embracing, and free from arbitrary or artificial limitations, and 2) related to human potential, liberating, instilling a moral and intellectual perfection that allows a student to flourish with virtue and excellence in whatever he or she pursues as an adult. A truly free or liberal education is not unlimited freedom of choice or freedom from constraint, but an education in freedom which imparts a power of thought and action honed by moral self-restraint in order to choose a well-informed, greater, higher good. 

Discourse V of Newman’s Idea of a University asserts what some see as the key to his educational philosophy, that knowledge is valuable  for its own sake. Sound education involves intellectual freedom without artificial constraints or utilitarian calculations. Absent this intellectual orientation, education can descend into moralizing or activism or indoctrination. Above all, Newman was concerned with the unreasonable dismissal of God and religion from education. Freedom to know truth, natural and supernatural, is cultivated by an environment of free intellectual inquiry. In order to cultivate freedom to will the good, one must enjoy freedom to know all that is true, and this necessarily includes freedom to know God and what he has revealed. 

It is in keeping with human dignity to say that students deserve the fullness of truth. This does not mean that even the best of students will achieve an exhaustive knowledge of all things, but for Newman, it means that they will gain the capacity to have a map or outline of all dimensions of knowledge, a “philosophical habit of mind” in which they are given the seeds and rudiments of all knowledge that can be built up as they grow. 

This intellectual orientation is only sustained by sound moral formation. Knowledge informs action; action remains deficient or inept in proportion to lack of knowledge. The result of a balanced moral and intellectual formation is authentic and thriving freedom of conscience, wherein a well-formed individual retains a capacity to judge rightly in temporal affairs, and looks at all things from God’s perspective, acting only in the light of what God thinks and what God reveals. Newman’s well-formed student is a true disciple of Christ, one of whom Christ would say “you will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32).

As much as these principles about knowledge and morality are essential, Newman knew first-hand that bringing about excellent education requires much prudence and creativity. He wanted students to encounter, through the living persons of instructors, a real integration of morality, intellect, and religion. Students should know their instructors and know them well. Luigi Giussani, in The Risk of Education, calls excellent teachers “horizons” that students look to as they seek to test and verify what the “real world” is beyond the limitations of their particular upbringing. Students must see teachers’ upright conduct, see them at prayer, worship alongside them, and be eager to learn from them as from wise counselors, not just dispensers of information. This should give them a rich sense that their learning is an introduction into realities to be lived by, not just theories to discuss. As Newman put it in an 1856 sermon preached in the midst of his short rectorship of the Catholic University, Dublin: “I want the same roof to contain both the intellectual and moral discipline. Devotion is not a sort of finish given to the sciences; nor is science a sort of feather in the cap, if I may so express myself, an ornament and set-off to devotion. I want the intellectual layman to be religious, and the devout ecclesiastic to be intellectual.”

There is no easy formula or “instant download” that can produce such an integration of intellect, morals, and religion. Rather, it is the real and living work to which Newman devoted his whole life with great zeal and creativity. Today the new Doctor of the Church would urge us to make new ventures and take new risks for the cause of this authentic formation in freedom. An education that does not form a moral sense, or that arbitrarily dismisses one aspect of authentic knowledge, or that denies the truths of God and religion, is not really free, nor really intelligent, nor really education. Authentic education must remain open to all truths in heaven and on earth and must form the conscience with right-judgment, prudence, fortitude, and moral integrity. Students thus formed can become salt and light for our tasteless and darkened world. By God’s grace there is reason for hope from our schools, universities, and seminaries that hold fast to the principle of true educational freedom while applying it in prudent and winsome ways.

St. John Henry Newman, co-patron of education—pray for us!