Scottish Catholic Education Service | SCES

Promoting and supporting Catholic Education in Scotland

  • About SCES
    • Education Structures
    • Executive Board
    • Our Team
    • Who we work with
      • CHAPS
    • Latest News
    • SCES Newsletter
  • Award Schemes
    • Caritas Award
    • Pope Francis Faith Award
  • Catholic Education
    • Catholic Education Week
    • Catholic Schools
    • The Catholic School: Developing in Faith
    • 2018-Catholic Schools Good for Scotland
  • Parents
    • Catholic School Parents
    • Parent Council Contact
    • Pope Francis Loves Families
  • Religious Education
    • This Is Our Faith
    • R.E. Lessons & spiritual support ideas for schools
    • Religious Education S4 to S6
    • Planning Religious Education
    • Equality & Inclusion Learning and Teaching
    • R.E. Resources Weblinks
  • Resources
    • Useful pages on our site
    • Advent Learning
      • Advent Reflections
    • Articles of Faith
    • Daily Gospel Reflection
    • Health & Relationships Education
    • Equality & Inclusion Learning and Teaching
    • Latest resources
    • Liturgical Calendar
    • Lent & Easter
    • Thinking Faith
    • Year of Mercy
  • Teaching
    • Becoming a teacher
      • Setting Out on the Road Course
    • Church Approval
    • Career Long Professional Learning
      • CLPL Events Calendar
    • Teaching Vacancies
  • Laudato Si Schools Scotland

There is no freedom without prohibitions

  • Posted on 03/03/2010
  • By:
  • in Teaching issues
  • 0 Comment
  • Home
  • Articles
  • Teaching issues
  • There is no freedom without prohibi

There is no freedom without prohibitions

  • Posted on 03/03/2010
  • By: Barbara Coupar
  • in Teaching issues
  • 0 Comment

Rocco Buttiglione is a prestigious Catholic intellectual who in 2004 was deprived of a post in the European Union Commission because of his faith and “conservative” views.  In a recent article for L’Osservatore Romano he explains that education demands a series of restrictions as well as a formation in authentic freedom in order to seek truth. (Zenit report on 1st March 2010)

In the article titled, “There is no freedom without prohibitions,” Buttiglione, who is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, explains that amidst the debate over the “educational emergency” in society, Pope Benedict XVI’s statement that “proper education consists of formation in the correct use of freedom” must be remembered.

Buttiglione notes that the first step in this education is to discard the present-day bias that “in order to educate in freedom, one simply needs to remove all ties and abandon young people to the simple, natural development of their passions.”  This, he explains, is the “pròton psèudos (the ‘original error’) of modern education.”

Saying that this way of seeing things ignores the tendency to evil and the concupiscence that entered man through original sin, Buttiglione writes, “The emancipating and permissive pedagogy of our times has voluntarily ignored this anthropological structure of the human being. The intention was to create a liberated man,” however the effects are far from the intended results.

After contrasting “the freedom of man” and “the freedom of instinct,” Buttiglione remarks that to find freedom it is necessary “to subordinate immediate desires to the judgment of reason.”

He goes on to warn of the current-day tendency to make spontaneity into an idol and explained the need to truly adhere “to goodness in order to seek truth.”

To achieve this, he continues, two fundamental factors are necessary in the education process that “today are systematically ignored:” asceticism and the experience of authority.

Asceticism, Buttiglione explains, “is the capacity to say ‘no,’ to resist the violence with which an impulse demands to be satisfied immediately without reflecting on whether or not it corresponds to the truth or to the true good of the person.  Contemporary permissiveness has defamed asceticism by calling it ‘repression.’  Certain asceticism implies the effort to repress, but it also implies the capacity to give a new form to the energy that comes from instinct, corresponding to the truth of the person. Without asceticism there is no education of the person.”

Writing later about the experience of authority, the Italian intellectual says that it consists of “the presence of values in a person who bears witness to them and makes them directly and easily perceivable for others. 

“Authority is the guide in the path towards the experience of values.  Without asceticism and without authority there is no educational experience. Authority transmits the experience of values so that it can be tried in the life of the disciple. The disciple will not repeat this experience in a servile fashion as it has been fulfilled in the life of the master.”  Instead, the disciple “will confront it with his own personal experience and filter it through it, reliving it and making it his own.”

Buttiglione then denounces today’s “permissive society for offering young people different ways of gaining immediate satisfaction of their own instincts, while consequently making it more difficult to form a free personality, capable of establishing an appropriate relationship with truth.”

“Traditional education was an invitation to fight to control one’s own passions, to seek the truth, to guide one’s passions according to the truth and towards the truth.”

By promoting “obedience” to one’s own passions, he explains, one prevents “the forming of a responsible and free personality, in order to create a mass of people that can be more easily manipulated by whomever is in power. This is the problem with education in our times.”

“The purpose of many modern ‘deconstructionist’ tendencies is the deconstruction of the self and the abolition of a conscious personality. In order to rebuild education we need to begin again on the basis of authorized testimonies—should not parents and teachers be the first in this—that are capable of unambiguously pointing the way towards an asceticism that makes us capable of the truth, that allows us to journey towards its discovery,” he concluded.

Leave a Reply
Previous Post

Teachers as Catechists

Next Post

To Educate Is an Act of Love

Leave a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked (Required)

(required)

(required)

Facebook Twitter
Top

Scottish Catholic Education Service | SCES ©2020 SCES All rights reserved. Design by Media Design

Login Here

I wish to make a donation

or
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.Accept Read More
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT

X

Booking for: Event Name

Register now

Submit

Find my booking for Event Name

Form Text: We have to look up your booking in order to change it.

Find my booking

Successfully booked for Event Name

Successfully update booking for Event Name

Thank You

You have reserved space(s) for Event Name

We have emailed you a confirmation to

Change my booking

{"codes":{"err":"Required fields missing","err2":"Invalid email address","err3":"Please select RSVP option","err4":"Could not update RSVP, please contact us.","err5":"Could not find RSVP, please try again.","err6":"Invalid Validation code.","err7":"Could not create a RSVP please try later.","err8":"You can only RSVP once for this event.","err9":"Your party size exceed available space.","err10":"Your party size exceed allowed space per RSVP.","succ":"Thank you for submitting your rsvp","succ_n":"Sorry to hear you are not going to make it to our event.","succ_m":"Thank you for updating your rsvp","succ_c":"Great! we found your RSVP!"}}