Abstract
Speaking to an American friend recently, I mentioned reading a book on Thomas Shields. As an educator, this friend was very familiar with the story, the work, and the ministry of Thomas Shields. While, I had heard the name in the past, I was unfamiliar with his contribution to Catholic Education. However, Leonard Franchi’s publication has put paid to that and in a succinct and well-written narrative has opened up the story of this remarkable teacher to a new generation of educators.
The Reverend Dr Thomas Shields (1862–1921) was born in Mendota, Minnesota to Irish immigrants. He was accepted for the priesthood by Archbishop John Ireland and entered St Thomas Seminary in St Paul, Minnesota. Ordained in 1891, he was to serve for a year in parish before being sent to study at Johns Hopkins University. He enrolled in the Catholic University of America which had been founded in 1887. His areas of interest were biology, physiology and zoology and subsequently psychology under the influence of Professor Edward Pace. He eventually received his PhD in 1895. He returned to Minnesota to teach at the seminary and then in 1902 returned to the Catholic University to teach until his death 20 years later. While at CUA, he taught at Trinity College, a newly established institution for the education of women run by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. He was also responsible for the establishment of the Catholic Associated Press in 1906, later to be known as the Catholic Education Press, which fortuitously is responsible for the publication of this book. He established a correspondence course for women religious who could not study at CUA. Later he began to teach women religious during the summer months (when the male students were elsewhere) and this led ultimately to his lasting physical legacy to Catholic Education in America, the establishment of the Catholic Sisters College in 1913.
I say physical legacy, because it is his contribution to the academic field of education that is his other legacy. His publications are too many to list here, but two that are noteworthy of mention are his founding of the Catholic Educational Review with Edward Pace in 1911 and his 1917 Philosophy of Education. It was through the former that much of what Shields had to say about education was disseminated.
Franchi states that the motivation for writing this book was to bring Shields to light and to show another example for the scholarly basis for Catholic Education. This second function of the book is timely. This is an era where many would seek the end of Catholic Education in schools and universities, usually without understanding anything of the philosophy of Catholic Education and what it seeks to achieve. The foreword opens with this current struggle, but then we should be reassured, it was ever thus: ‘the gospel of Jesus Christ, the foundation for Catholic Education, is always at odds with the world’ (p. ix). Franchi would see Catholic Education as not being limited to academic institutions, but in the wider Catholic world, which seeks to uphold the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, defined as ‘the search for meaning through the partnership of faith and reason (which) expresses how Catholicism has, from ongoing reflection on the meaning of the Incarnation for humanity’s relationship with God, developed a related ecosystem of ideas, beliefs, and social practices’ (p. 3).
The book is divided into five parts with various chapters in each part. The Introduction, entitled The Master Plan, sets out the structure and purpose of the book, but it also gives a detailed and comprehensive account of Shields’s life and work. I found it, not quite a love letter, but certainly a deep reverential bow from one educator to another. Franchi honours Shields in every sentence. It is comprehensive, exhaustively researched and sets Shields not just in the world of his own work, but also that of his contemporaries, John Dewey being one among many. The author is not interested in a biography, but gives sufficient details to the parts of that life pertinent to the cause of Catholic Education. Any future research on Shields will find it impossible not to begin at this Introduction.
Shields’s Master Plan as such comprised two elements: the formulation of a new pedagogy of Catholic Education; and concrete means for the dissemination of his ideas. On top of this Franchi states, ‘his desire to integrate material from other disciplines facilitated a shift in Catholic Education from a predominantly curriculum-centred phenomenon to an allegedly more child-centred approach, but one which, he claimed, remained entirely faithful to the theological and pastoral traditions of the Catholic Church’ (p. 19).
Obviously, treatment of Shields’s writings and ideas do not end with the first introduction. Section one, titled ‘Catholicism as an Educational Movement’ begins with the idea of teaching old things in a new way, the title of the first chapter. All too often we look forward to the next best theory in Catholic Education and its component parts, rather than from time to time, looking back to the writings of the past, thinking of the richness of Augustine’s de Catechizandis Rudibus, Erasmus’s Education of a Young Prince, or the Jesuit De Ratio Studiorum. These are some of the ways found in the history of the Church ‘to bring its message to all people (evangelisation) and develop the faith and religious commitment of the baptized (catechesis)’ (p. 25). Part II titled Responding to Progressive Thought comprises two chapters. The first takes up the relationship between progressivism and Catholic Education. Dewey, a near contemporary of Shields did advocate ideas that Shields would adapt (p. 41). He is examined in respect of his contribution to education and education reform. The following chapter stays with Dewey, via an examination of the work of the Religious Education Association, at whose first convention, Dewey was one of the keynote speakers. It is an insightful and balanced overview of Dewey and his place within the history of education in America. The next section, Shields and the Reform of Pedagogy and the subsequent chapters move into the heart of Shields’s pedagogical principles. ‘Shields saw Catholic Education as a process involving many actors: family, clergy, teachers, and academics as all called to draw from the Church’s intellectual and pastoral sources in support of their specific roles in the mission of education’ (p. 70). I think the addition of the word pastoral here speaks volumes to the endeavour of Catholic education, Religious Education and Catechesis. While we can and must attend to the academic within the exploration of these topics, it cannot be done at the expense of the pastoral. An academic wishes to prove a point, someone working pastorally wishes to save a soul. Shields’s second principle, plasticity reminds this reader of the writings of Zygmunt Bauman on liquidity. The subsequent chapter explores Shields’s pedagogy of Catholic Education in particular by looking at one lesson from his 1905 Twenty-Five Lesson in the Psychology of Education. Part Four is concerned with Forming Teachers in Heart and Mind. This is a section which is quite timely to the debate on the education and formation of teachers today and the subject of a book recently co-edited by Franchi. The Key Principles of Catholic Teacher Formation of culture and vocation, correct method, and curricular content are discussed. The work of establishing the Catholic Sisters College and the Schools Affiliation Programme are discussed in subsequent chapters as evidence of the reform at the heart of Shields’s life and ministry. The final section deals with the Catholic Education series, and a number of Shields’s works are scrutinized. The conclusion is an evaluation of Shields’s contribution to Catholic Education, which the reader will realize at this stage was herculean.
Franchi as a good educator begins each chapter of the book with a brief introduction as to the content and ends with a succinct conclusion by way of summation. His introduction and conclusion to the whole work are again well-written, well-researched, and well-balanced. It is followed by a substantial bibliography. There is an appendix which is Lesson XXV (Educational Principles in the Teaching of Christ and of the Church 331–344) from Shields’s 1907 The Psychology of Education, as if the reader needed more proof as to how timely this volume is and how relevant Shields’s writing remains to this day.
If I were to have anything negative to utter it is very small: an annotated bibliography of Shields’s works would have been invaluable. Secondly, in the Introduction, biographical footnotes on some of the characters mentioned would have been an advantage. However, in the scheme of things, these are minor compared to the quality of the volume.
To conclude, this is a timely book, meticulously researched and very well written. It merits wide circulation in particular in the American academic community concerned with Catholic Education. This is their origin story, but it is more than that, it is a voice that speaks down through the decades to our present age and current praxis, and encourages us towards excellence in the field of Catholic Education. One particularly prophetic passage of Shields is worthy of note and reproduction here. ‘Today more than ever before we need an education that will lay broad and sure foundation for future intellectual developments. We need an education in theory and principle which will send our young men and young women forth from the school with plasticity and power to meet any and every concrete situation that may arise in our rapidly changing social and industrial environment’ (p. 125).