Reflecting on Pope Francis’ Educational Legacy
by President Kyle Washut

While there will be many voices discussing Francis’ legacy and the impact of his papacy in the coming weeks, I would like to limit my thoughts to the impact he had on the world of higher education, specifically. In this area, I have come to recognize that his most distinctive contribution was his emphasis on “integral education” as an essential antidote to the crisis of the “technocratic paradigm,” a phrase he first coined in Laudato Si. Over and over again, he reminded us that this paradigm understands our relationship to the natural world and to other human beings as one defined exclusively by efficiency, profit, and ultimately, power. Such an understanding fosters a throwaway culture that produces not only a rampant consumerism, but a deep and abiding disregard for human dignity.

For Pope Francis, this paradigm is rooted in the Enlightenment view of the human person, with its emphasis on knowledge as a means of mastery over nature and its penchant to exalt the individual human will without reference to a higher common good. Francis believed that this paradigm had so completely infected the contemporary educational system that the world of education needed to be radically reformed. Educators needed to offer an integral education: an education of the whole person rather than a reductionist, technocratic education; an education, in fact, that immersed its students in nature and in reality, in a comprehensive and holistic way. This radical reformation would produce students freed from the technocracy found in their ubiquitous screens and social media apps (among other things), replacing our current educational environment with one steeped in authentic human community and the natural world, and giving us a new culture—one rich in tradition and cultivated by a new humanistic mode.

The challenges posed by AI, materialism, transhumanism, transgenderism, screen addiction, the ubiquity of pornography and its diminishment of the dignity of the human person, the isolation and extremism cultivated by social media, and more are all deeply rooted in our age of technocracy, and are perpetuated (intentionally or not) by our system of higher education Catholic educators need to lead the way in this radical reform, focusing on creative ways to break with the technocratic paradigm and replace it by immersing students in rich liturgical ritual, facilitating their engagement with nature, leading them to read and discuss great old books in a way that leaves room for nuance and personal insight, promoting education to them not merely as job training but as formation in virtue and contemplation, and fostering authentic human community. Teachers and educational institutions that do this will be responding to the fundamental demands of the day, and will be living out the best aspects of Francis’ teachings on education.