Here and Now with Francis (the challenges of education)
From the question-and-answer session
We Christians are also a minority. And there comes to mind what a great thinker said: “To educate is to introduce in the totality of the truth.” One cannot speak of Catholic education without speaking of humanity, because, precisely, the Catholic identity is God who became man. To go forward in attitudes, in full human values, opens the door to the Christian seed. Then faith comes. [...]
It is true that not only the educational links have been broken but education has become too selective and elitist....This is a global reality that makes us ashamed [...]
Do what Don Bosco did....And today we have an “educational emergency,” we must push for “informal education,” because formal education has been impoverished by the legacy of positivism. It only conceives an intellectual technicality and the language of the head [...]
I think the situation of a broken educational pact, such as that of today, is grave, it is grave, because it leads to the selection of “super-men.” [...] What does this mean for individuals committed to the promotion of education? -- the question ended. It means to risk.
No one, no one can be excluded from the possibility of receiving values, no one! Hence, here is the first challenge I tell you: leave places where there are so many educators and go to the peripheries. Seek there, or at least leave half of them! Seek there the needy, the poor. And they have something that young people of the richer neighborhoods don’t have – not because of their fault, but it is a sociological reality: they have the experience of surviving, also of cruelty, also of hunger, also of injustices. They have a wounded humanity. And I think that our salvation comes from the wounds of a man wounded on the cross. [...] [Full text]
