Kerygma and Neoliberalism: Toward a New Vision for Catholic Education in the United States

• In Event: For Whom and to What Extent Are Catholic Schools Good?

Abstract

Elsewhere the authors (2023) have argued that, in spite of precipitous declines both in schools and enrollment over the course of the last half century, “Catholic schooling in the United States remains an important point of comparison to public schooling” (p. 39). Importantly however, Catholic educational research has largely failed at developing alongside research trends methodologically, epistemologically, and particularly in its engagement with various critical and post-critical movements across sociological, anthropological, feminist, post-structural, and queer traditions. The fulcrum point of this argument sits at the decision to engage in apologetics for Catholic schooling to justify its continued existence and to bolster economic and ideological arguments for public funding mechanisms to ‘save’ Catholic schools. The upshot has been a move to project public policy arguments for Catholic schooling over and particularly against public schooling in the pursuit of presumably scarce public funding. The field has prioritized competition over comparison, in other words.

This paper seeks to reset the conversation away from neoliberal narratives emergent from econometric arguments mired in crisis ordinariness (Berlant, 2011) and toward a more fulsome, inclusive, and we think theologically consistent argument for Catholic education rooted in Kerygma.

The work here follows AERA’s guidelines for humanities-based research which seeks to “problematize unrecognized assumptions, implications, and consequences of various kinds of educational practice” (AERA, 2009, p. 482) that in this case will emerge from Catholic (and other Christian) theological engagements with Kerygma. Here, in its most basic form, Kerygma means “the basic story of Jesus as it took shape in the first months and years after his death” (Carroll, 2001, p. 25). Meaning, essentially, proclamation, the term expands theologically to include the fullest sense of the saving grace of God’s son in the world come to expunge sin, and bring about the fulfillment of centuries of prophecy and anticipation.

What this means in the context of Catholic education in this paper is a turning away from a neoliberal focus on competition in the market of schooling, and toward a robust belief in Catholic education broadly conceived, that refuses to be delimited by crisis.
This will require spending time with recent Catholic educational history, but also the development of a two-pronged argument first that 1) Catholic education has failed in its duty to engage the proclamation of joy of the Gospel that transcends economic scarcity and 2) an acknowledgement that Catholic education occurs both within, but also beyond Catholic schools. A Kerygmatic argument for Catholic education in other words, would refuse market arguments that tacitly undermine both Catholic and public schooling while pushing for the most robust, effusive possible vision of education in American society.

This work intends to mark an end to a period of crisis that has fenced Catholic educational research in favor of an alternative frame for conceptualizing the catholic and the Catholic in educational spaces in America.

Authors

• Kevin J. Burke, University of Georgia

• Andrew F. Miller, Boston College