Reigniting the Fires of Catholic Education, by Regis Martin

By Regis Martin, Crisis Magazine, Sept. 27, 2023

Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. …

If education is not to be a matter of merely filling buckets which happen to be empty, but of lighting fires that have gone out, how are we to set them blazing again?

The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil…             
—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

If education is not to be a matter of merely filling buckets which happen to be empty, as the poet Yeats once put it, but of lighting fires that have gone out, how are we to set them blazing again? Where is the kindling wood? And who’s got the match with which to light the fire?

Perhaps the wood is already within, just waiting to be ignited. Plato certainly thought so, having shown us in the Meno how Socrates, in the very act of soliciting the slave boy to unearth all that he does not know—i.e., the truth about geometry—reveals the very thing hidden away in the dark cave of his memory. If that is so, then maybe the meaning of life really does lie deep down, planted by God Himself beneath both mind and will. …

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