The Core is the heart of a Jesuit, Catholic liberal arts education. It is the curriculum that links all students to each other and to the mission. Through these required courses, students explore the disciplines, ask enduring questions, grapple with complex problems, develop their talents and skills, and form their characters. Words that Boston College students often associate with the renewed Core are: “integrated,” “holistic,” “discernment,” and “love.” The Core Curriculum pairs the practicality of the humanities and sciences with the desires of the human heart. As one recent graduate shared, these foundational studies prompted him to “see God in all things.”
In 1548, when the first Jesuit school was founded in Messina, Sicily, Jeronimo Nadal, S.J., asserted that “the primacy of pietas (maturity of character)” was the heart of Jesuit education. “Everything is to be so arranged,” he said, “so that in the pursuit of these studies pietas holds first place.” Formative education has been balanced with intellectual rigor since the beginning. In 1599, when the Ratio Studiorum was released, the top faculties were scripture, scholastic theology, ethics, philosophy, rhetoric, and grammar. Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s ultimate goals never changed, although he encouraged himself and others to change paths through a process of discernment. These two tensions—the interiority of the Spiritual Exercises and the exteriority of disciplined rule-following—have been called “authoritarian humanism.” Upholding the foundational structures of nearly 500 years of excellence in education allows for the ability to adapt to both the needs of students and the challenges of our time. Even to this day, deep critical thinking grounded in theology, philosophy, and literature remains foundational in Jesuit pedagogy for intellectual and spiritual formation. Core requirements in Jesuit, Catholic institutions include theology, philosophy, writing, history, literature, mathematics, natural science, social science, arts, and cultural diversity courses.
We are living in an age of great uncertainty. The turn of the twenty-first century has included plague, wars, forced migration, terrorism, political polarity, corruption, social inequities, racial injustice, environmental degradation, and advances in artificial intelligence. In the face of such turbulent historical times, how can leaders and faculty in Jesuit, Catholic liberal arts institutions of higher education help our students and, frankly, ourselves to find hope?
EMBRACE
Faculty hold a privileged position in the classroom, and it is through them that our schools can make the greatest impact. The role of the teacher as modeler and formator is key for the promotion of a hopeful mode of intellectual inquiry, community building, contemplation, companionship, and conversation. These are core practices of the faculty in the Jesuit, Catholic liberal arts tradition. Therefore, before we can produce, reproduce, and critique disciplinary knowledge, skills, and content with our students, we are called to this special mode of modeling “how to be” in the classroom, and in the world, for our students.
The faculty’s natural curiosity, love of learning, and willingness to embrace the life of the mind led us to our roles in higher education. We certainly model these attributes to our students, but in a Jesuit, Catholic context, we are asked to be and to do more. It is our hopeful mode that is the most formative attitude we can have with our students for their overall education as whole persons, facing whatever challenges lie ahead.
“In the face of such turbulent historical times, how can leaders and faculty in Jesuit, Catholic liberal arts institutions of higher education help our students and, frankly, ourselves to find hope?”
ENCOURAGE
My own undergraduate and graduate Jesuit, Catholic education continues to reveal its impact on me in new and unexpected ways. As a historian, I teach my students disciplinary knowledge and skills, but with each year that passes, I believe more strongly that the most important method that we use to open the minds and hearts of our students is love. If we educate lovingly, that is where higher education transforms into transcendence no matter one’s religion, socioeconomic status, gender, race, ethnicity, or political persuasion. Once the educator as formator embraces love as a method in the classroom, the class can really engage with difference, they can seek justice as companions, and they get closer and closer to the common good. Working with students through conversations, labs, writing, projects, and travel creates the conditions for transcending “what is” to becoming “what may be.” In an era of great uncertainty, it seems even more critical to make the unseen more visible in our classrooms, in our interactions with our students, and in our interactions with each other. As scripture states, “For what is seen is transitory and what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor 4:18).
ENLIGHTEN
Through the Core Curriculum, we create and curate communities across campus, from the classroom to the dorms, in support of the University’s mission. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu reminds us, “God accepts as pleasing those who live by the best lights available to them that they can discern. All truth, all sense of beauty, all awareness of goodness has one source, God, who is not confined to one place, time, or people.” In this spirit, our mode is hopeful, and our method is love, which leads to transcendence in word and deed, intellectual productivity, and well-being in mind, body, and soul. This is indeed formative education that should flow through every action and communication across the University ecosystem from dining to janitorial staff, from dorms to athletic facilities, and from our administrative staff to our faculty and deans. The academic project both intellectually and socially may be reframed as one of love, and we are co-creators of that project.
ELEVATE
How do we define and measure success for our students as whole persons in body and soul, or cura personalis, as they make their way through the Core Curriculum? We want them to demonstrate critical mathematical, analytical, expressive, and creative skills that are essential for an educated person, for a vocation. We want them to understand the major ideas and methods of the scholarly disciplines. We want them to be able to identify and articulate the strengths and limits of the disciplines themselves as well as their relationship to each other. We want students to be able to intelligently discuss fundamental enduring questions and complex contemporary problems and to be able to approach them in an interdisciplinary way. We want them to understand how faith and reason are related to the search for truth. We want them to be able to examine their values and then integrate them with their experiences to guide their lives. Finally, we want students to use their talents and education as global citizens and leaders to contribute to the common good. The Core Curriculum elevates high school students into college students. It then elevates college students into men and women in the world for other people—that is the true value of its success.
Elizabeth H. Shlala is the guest editor of this issue of C21 Resources. She is associate dean and professor of the practice in the University Core Curriculum at Boston College.
Learn about Boston College's Core Curriculum.
Learn more about Boston College's Justice and the Common Good Living Learning Community.
