The Characteristics of Jesuit Education a commentary

Greg OKelly sj, 2003

Jesuit education may be described as formation
taking place over time. It is not mere schooling;
it aims to go beyond the institution. It is based on
the Christian vision which sees men and women
as made in the image of the Creator, and called to
live out a vocation in the world.
The formative view demands the insistence we place
on the quality of our staff, as it is their example which
makes great impact. In our students we are dealing
with impressionable persons of great dignity whose
worth in their own eyes and in Gods we are to
encourage them to see. We are to confront them with
challenges to excellence, in order that they may
appreciate their talents and foster them, so that their
ultimate faith-response may be free and mature,
leading them to a sense of purpose in their world,
and arming them with skills and graces to pursue the
truth and act justly, to know to learn and think, and to
be genuinely Christian.
The first Jesuit secondary school was established by
Ignatius as Messina, Sicily, in 1548. At the time of
his death eight years later the Saint had founded or
was in the process of founding forty Jesuit Colleges.
The Jesuits were not founded to run schools. Soon,
however, they recognised the apostolic and pastoral
potential of the Colleges as a ministry and become
strongly involved in education. Writing to the
Provincial of the Portuguese Society in 1552, Ignatius
gave the reasons why he favoured the founding of
schools by the Jesuits:
Our present students will in time
assume various roles, some in the
religious life, some in the
government of the land and in the
administration of justice, others in all
sorts of responsible occupations, for
the children of today because the
adults of tomorrow, so their good
formation in life and learning will
benefit many others, with the good
results of that spreading more widely
day, to the greater glory and service
of God our Lord.
The value Ignatius placed on a school as an
apostolic ministry was upheld in the Society after his
death; by 1773 when the Order was suppressed, the
Jesuits were staffing 176 Seminaries for the training
of priests, directing fifteen Universities and teaching
in nine others, and conducting some 640 secondary
schools. All this work collapsed with the suppression
and was commenced again in 1814 when the
Society was restored but today the number of
seminaries is fewer, the number of Universities is
greater, the number of secondary schools is several
hundred, and there are larger networks of primary
schools, especially in the developing countries.

The rationale of Jesuit education was contained in

the Ratio Studiorum, the code of studies for our
schools. Based on the system of an orderly
progress in studies that then distinguished the
University of Paris, the Ratio Studiorum attempted
to reflect in the school curriculum the principal
features of the spirituality of the Spiritual Exercises,
a series of meditations outlined by Ignatius and
expressing his insights into the truths of finding God
in all things and in the world, and of companionship
with Christ in working for the Kingdom of God.
There are various techniques in the Spiritual
Exercises also, such as the use of imagination and
reflection and discernment that became part of the
style of Jesuit education.
Central to the educational philosophy of Jesuit
schools are the concept of excellence and
individuality within the community. Excellence as an
attitude towards the use of our individual talents is
emphasised; the degree of our gifts may vary, but
the attitude of fostering them to their own limits is
open-ended. Not to do so is to fail to recognise our
reflection as the image and likeness of God. Flowing
from this is the style of Christian Humanism that has
always been a feature of our schools. Whatever is
the highest in humankind is to be fostered. The
glory of God is man fully alive wrote Irenaeus in the
Third Century, and Jesuit schooling seeks to
endorse this. Thus opera, ballet and drama
received considerable emphasis in the early Jesuit
schools, to the apparent disedification of some.
Ignatius insisted that the best of the Renaissance
discoveries be employed in our schools, despite the
opposition of some early Jesuits who believed such
things to be pagan. The cultivation of the
imagination and the aesthetic sense was deliberate,
because this nurtured a young persons sense of
wonder.
There is no real worship of God, or prayer or poetry
or philosophy without a developed sense of wonder.
Hence Jesuit schooling has also been described as
education for worship.
Next the early Jesuit schools placed value on the
fostering of a critical mind. The question why was
stressed, to help produce students who could think
for themselves, as this is a prerequisite for
leadership. In order to query intelligently and think
for oneself, mastery of the subject matter was
essential; otherwise one only results in the
arrogance of the ignorant. Hence, for mastery, the
emphasis on graded approaches to subject matter,
and regular examination.
Mastery of matter is fruitless if it cannot be
expressed, so another feature of Jesuit schooling
has been the vir eloquens, the eloquent person,

one able to communicate. From this our emphasis

on debating, public speaking and drama. As God is
to be found in the real world of today there must
also be a knowledge of media. Ignatius fostered the
use of the new discovery of the printing press.
These emphases, of excellence of attitude, the
development of the creative talents, Christian
humanism, mastery of approach, and eloquentia
prefecta were for a special purpose, the praise of
God and service of ones neighbour. Men and
women for others, excellence for others are
phrases employed to indicate this. We stress
leadership; having fostered ones talents to the level
appropriate to age and maturity, they are to be
employed in a leadership of service in the
community, where possible and desirable, of
personal example always. Leadership for most
means personal resilience, the ability to make up
ones own mind, speak out ones own views, march
to ones own drum, not that of the mindless crowd.
The leadership students from Jesuit schools need to
focus on is that which fights any forms of injustice.
Injustice dehumanises its victims, one of the
greatest offences against Gods creation. Love is
found in deeds, Ignatius says. Our Christian faith is
to be one that flowers in actions against whatever
destroys humanity.
The basic Christian community is the Church at
worship in the Mass, because there one is
presented again to the saving acts of the death and
resurrection of Christ. Without Christ as our
companion, a very Ignatian picture, and walking with
us through our lives as our Way, our Truth and our
Life, then the development of individual talents can
become a distortion.
Formation through learning, learning how to learn
and maintaining a search for knowledge, the use of
language study as a most powerful method for
disciplining of the mind and the fostering of memory,
and raised by the humanizing arts of music and
drama are to be key features of our education. Sport
develops team spirit, individual discipline and a
strong sense of belonging and community and is
also to be fostered for those values.
Excellence of attitude, leadership for others, selfpossessed young persons of faith with a love for the
Mass and the Church, and nurtured by a spirituality
in which they offer their days work as a prayer of
praise to the Lord represent the ideal graduates for
which Jesuit schools strive.
In 1883 the Prefect of Studies at Riverview wrote:
We should be false to our own
traditions if we made it our chief
object to pass our pupils at these
examinations. Our main object, of
course, is to make our pupils good
Christians, we have always made,
and shall always make, all else

subordinate to this. In the next

place we desire to make them
educated gentlemen; not merely to
put into their minds a certain
amount of information which they
may not retain, but gradually to
make the young mind conscious of
its own powers, gradually to
exercise and strengthen those
powers, so that when the
schooldays are over the young
scholar may be able to walk alone.
We do not undervalue the amount
of information the young scholar
may obtain during his school days,
but we value it not so much for
itself as for the mental exercise
gone through acquiring it.
The Scared Congregation for Catholic Education
has issued a statement on the role of the Lay
Teacher in Catholic Schools (Osservatore Romano,
25 October, 1982). The purpose of a school is
described there:
In virtue of its mission, then, the
school must be concerned with
constant and careful attention to
cultivating in students the
intellectual, creative, and aesthetic
faculties of the human person; to
develop in them the ability to make
correct use of their judgement, will,
and affectivity; to promote in them a
sense of values; to encourage just
attitudes and prudent behaviour; to
introduce them to the cultural
patrimony handed down from
previous generations; to prepare
them for professional life, and to
encourage the friendly interchange
among students of diverse cultures
the school enters into the specific
mission of the Church.
In 1986, an authoritative document The
Characteristics of Jesuit Education was published
over the signature of Father General. The year was
important because it marked the fourth centenary of
the 1586 draft of the Ratio Studiorum, referred to in
the third paragraph. Like the Ratio it was composed
by the International Commission, but it clearly
cannot impose common content these days on the
hundreds of different Jesuit schools around the
world. It is a normative document to us because it is
unique to Jesuit schools. The emphasis and
approaches of the Jesuit tradition of schooling are
formed according to that document.
In 1882 De Roger Bede Vaughan, Archbishop of
Sydney, exhorted some Jesuit students on Speech
Day about The importance of cultivating wholeness
of mind, tenderness of heart and strength of

character. Fr General, Peter Hans Kolvenbach, SJ

has written:
Jesuit education aims at joining
learning and virtue and developing a
faith that does justice. It means the
ideal of being young men and
women of competence, conscience
and compassion, who know that life
is only lived well when lived
generously in the service of others.
It means helping them to discover
that what they most have to offer is
who they are rather than what they
have.
th

If the conviction of the 18 Century Jesuit

Schoolmasters, that institutio puerilis renovatio
mundi, the education of youth is the renewal of the
mind, is to stay relevant, all staff in our schools, lay
and Jesuit, should continue to strive to implement
these ideals, ad maiorem Dei gloriam.