Inculcating a Passion for Truth and Learning

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 27, 2001 | by Stephen Goode

Christendom College President Timothy O'Donnell is committed to educating students with authentic grounding in the great Western intellectual tradition.

Timothy T. O'Donnell is Christendom College's third president. He s an able defender of traditional Christian education. But he's also a man who with infectious enthusiasm will talk about the "sense of festivity" that comes with genuine learning and wisdom that are part of a liberal-arts education.

"How do young people get together and really enjoy themselves now that the art of making good conversation has been lost?" he asks rhetorically. "There has to be an effort to recapture the lost art of conversation and festivity."

If that sounds like the idle talk of an idealistic educator, there's a surprise. It is that at tiny Christendom, amid all the other things undergrads are prone to do, from drinking beer to daydreaming on a grand scale, students are very likely to be found talking passionately -- and to care deeply about -- what they learn from their college's traditional curriculum.

Insight: Take a quick look at the ad brochures produced by any American college or university today and you're very likely to come across the boast that "we prepare our students for the real world," as though other institutions of higher learning don't do any such thing. What do you think they mean by the real world?

Timothy T. O'Donnell: Putting the best spin on what they say, I think what they mean by training for the real world is getting a job. But, if that's the case, I think traditional liberal-arts colleges are doing a better job because we don't overspecialize. We aim at educating the whole person intellectually and spiritually while being attentive to character formation and morality.

What you end up with are people who can think clearly, who have a sense of moral integrity. And aren't those the things that every employer is looking for? We put a strong emphasis on writing and on research papers, and those, too, are marketable skills, no matter what job our students go into. We have noticed indications that some of the Ivy League business schools, all factors being equal, actually prefer a graduate of a liberal-arts college over someone who's gone and majored in business. If they've studied business, they may know certain things about business, but they've been impoverished in many other areas.

Insight: Indeed. Sometimes very impoverished. But doesn't the boast about training students for the real world seem to be, at times, nothing more than code that says, "We don't waste students' time with liberal-arts courses," thereby justifying the impoverishment you're talking about?

TTO: If what passes as college education at most institutions is preparing students for the real world, then I think that claim is a joke. I would maintain that the real world is found in places like Christendom College where we introduce students to the great questions with which men and women have struggled through millennia and about which they always have thought.

Of course, the fundamental problem is that as Americans we tend to be very practical, and liberal arts are not merely practical. In studying the liberal arts, what you're really pursuing is an arduous good -- and an arduous good is by definition a very difficult thing to pursue.

But education is primarily not about getting a job. It's about learning. It's about coming to understand the great tradition of wisdom that has characterized so much of Western education down through history. One of the fruits of this is that you will be able to get a good job -- but that's not the purpose.

Insight: It's not just secular and Protestant colleges that have given up the Great Tradition. Haven't Catholic schools also been plagued by this development?

TTO: I remember growing up in the 1950s with the strong sense of Catholic identity that I received from my Catholic grammar-school education. There was a strong sense of discipline and achievement, and that's why many of us who grew up then were appalled when we saw the chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. An institution that was really quite effective, Catholic higher education, was beginning to be dismantled and was aping what I think were many of the mistakes that were made by a lot of the Protestant colleges and universities.

When the Catholic schools began to pursue a brutal form of secularization, it badly upset many parents. They had sent their young people to Catholic colleges thinking they were going to be instructed in the faith. Many times that's not what they got at all, which meant in turn that there was no adult-level deepening of such study. While young people were progressing intellectually in the other disciplines, they were remaining at an infant level when it came to the Catholic faith.

They never were challenged intellectually to see the reasons why Catholics believe the way we do and to examine the strong reasons for our faith. That intellectual challenge is what we provide at Christendom.

Insight: Christendom College is a Roman Catholic institution, and one of the "givens" of the modern secular world is that education should be a "liberation" from religion and its demands, a learning to "think freely."