The Jesuit Educational Philosophy and Mission

To discuss the Jesuit educational philosophy and mission is very much to discuss Catholic education and moral philosophy more generally. However, there is a specific history attached to Jesuit education, inasmuch as its traditions emanate from the origins of the Society of Jesus in the 16th century. The founder of the Society, Ignatius Loyola, initially established Jesuit schools as seminaries, for the training of the Order's membership. But in 1548, at the invitation of the civil authorities of Messina, and in the context of the Catholic Reformation, Ignatius opened the first Jesuit school for lay students. "By 1551 he wrote urging the inauguration of colleges throughout Europe" (Jesuit Colleges; also see Barthel 113). The Jesuits very much controlled European higher education for the next 300 years (Martin 26-28).

The Catholic/Jesuit approach to education is grounded in the Christian revelation of faith, hope, and charity, as well as in secular moral philosophy, chiefly that of Aristotle as articulated in the Nicomachean Ethics (Fulop-Miller 15

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Barthel 293ff). Controversy surrounds the concept of "hiring for mission" in today's Jesuit universities, i.e., in contemplation of educational structure and praxis skewed in favor of a Catholic identity. Meanwhile, there has emerged a view that the Jesuit world view has been subsumed, even in Jesuit colleges, by a variety of pressures, which come down to "a yet-to-be-worked-out negotiation between the culture, the rigors of academia and a post-Vatican II church" (Schaeffer 7). More generally, however, the modern missional aspect of Jesuit education can be set beside its origins in scholasticism and rigorous Aristotelian structures of thought. Aristotle describes ethics as a "practical" science, which is to say that ethics is something that has application to real life beyond the merely theoretical. That entails action and behavior that have purpose and consequence for what eventually comes to be called a good, something not simply to be thought about but rather to be experienced directly and practically by human beings. "It makes no difference," Aristotle says, "whether the activities themselves are the ends of the action, or something beyond the activities" (I.i.87). It is not enough that the individual be the practitioner of e
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