Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher who made significant contributions to the philosophy of education. He believed that education should focus on developing the whole person and their independence of thought. For Maritain, education requires an integrated curriculum that teaches ordered knowledge while also cultivating virtues like wisdom and love. He saw the teacher as a guide rather than the principal influence, and believed education is a gradual, lifelong process involving not just schools but families and churches.

1. September 28, 2013 Mary Queen T. Bernardo
• Born: November 18, 1882, Paris, France
• Died: April 28, 1973, Toulouse, France

2.  Raised as a Protestant, he became an agnostic before
converting to Catholicism in 1906.
 An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive
St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is a
prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights.
 Long time friend and mentor of Pope Paul VI
 Maritain's interest and works spanned many aspects
of philosophy, including aesthetics, political
theory, philosophy of science, metaphysics, the nature
of education, liturgy and ecclesiology.

3. • One of the most eminent Catholic philosophers of our
time to explore the American system of education.
• He believes that it must be based on the Christian idea
of man being "more a whole than a part, and more
independent than servile."
• In his view, education is concerned with "making a man"-
a man with "deep-rooted independence with regard to
common opinion.”

4.  Jacques Maritain’s philosophy of education is based upon a
single conviction: the integrated education of the person.
 An integrated education must be able to point out the deep
realities which matter most to the human person: the deepest
realities of God, the human person, and persons in communal
relationships.
 For Maritain, an integrated education is religious; it would
have to be in order for the growth toward personhood to reach
a sense of accumulating perfection.
 Religious knowledge can never be disconnected from the
rest of education.

5. His distinction between the person
and the individual, is at the heart of his
philosophy of education.
• This distinction grounds his anthropology which sees
human beings created in the image and likeness of
God, whose perfection comes from the experience and
exercise of human and divine love, and whose dignity is
manifested in the gradual experience of freedom, a
dignity rooted in the spiritual reality of the person and
which relates the human person to a community of
persons to God.

6. Education at the
Crossroads
• For Maritain:
Education is the process which makes the person fully
alive.
Wisdom is the key to good life and,
There is danger in reducing education to the teaching of
sets of skills without a clear focus on the moral and
human development of the
human person.

7. Education at the Crossroad
• Triple meaning of education
1. Education as shaping and leading toward human
fulfillment
2. Intentional task undertaken by adults with regard to
youth
3. Particular task of universities and colleges
He moves quickly to the heart of his pedagogical conviction that the
essence of education must focus upon the “formation…and the
inner liberation of the human person. This is achieved by
completing through the will what has previously been sketched
out in nature (Maritain, 1962).

8. METAPHYSICAL AND
ANTHROPOLOGICAL ISSUES
• To discover who or what is human being – a question central
to a Christian philosophy of education.
• A human being is:
– a person by virtue of the spiritual soul,
– a material individual
– a fragment of a species
– a part of the physical universe
– a single dot in the immense network of forces and
influences, cosmic, ethnic, historic, whose laws we must
obey.
However, the intellect and will and knowledge and love
enable human persons to become a “universe” unto
themselves, mainly through knowledge and love.

9.  Maritain’s (1951) distinction is based upon the
conviction that human beings have a natural and
supernatural calling; spiritual growth, therefore, is vital in
the quest for freedom. This renders all education – in
dealing with freedom – to be religious.
 Maritain (1962) frequently stresses that institutional
education deals directly with the education of the
intellect and that through the enlightenment of the
intellect it deals directly with the will.
 The shaping of the will is throughout more important to
man than the shaping of the intellect.

10. • He considered education to be an art, perhaps in its
own way the finest of arts because its object, when
perfected, was the most beautiful of all the earthly
realities.
• Maritain held that the teacher was indeed a cause in
the education of youth, but an instrumental cause,
necessary for the most part, to be sure, but not the
principal cause of education. The student was the
principal cause of his own education.

11. • For Maritain(1943), ordered knowledge is essential in
the search for wisdom. The school is directed not
toward wisdom but to equip the students’ mind with
ordered knowledge, thus, enabling the student to
advance toward wisdom in adulthood.

12. The “What” of Christian Religious
Education
• The “what” for Maritain probably holds the fewest
answers, not because of a scarcity of definitions or
distinctions but because the other questions deal with
religious education in a more direct way.
• The curriculum contains a hierarchy of values which
shows that knowledge and love of what is above time
are superior to, embrace and quicken, knowledge and
love of what is within time.
• The virtue of charity becomes the “supreme virtue”
• The essence and aim of education are the formation and
inner liberation of the human person.

13. The “Why” of Christian Religious
Education
• The ultimate end of education concerns the human
person in his personal life and spiritual progress, not in
his relationship to the environment.
• The shaping of the will is far more important than the
shaping of the intellect, but it is their interdependence
that enable such a conclusion.
• Wisdom, unlike philosophy, cannot be taught formally:
“wisdom is gained through spiritual experience.”

14. • Intuition and love are vital virtues because human self-
perfection comes through love, and ultimately it is divine
love that transforms a human being into a person, “a true
original, not a copy.”
• Maritain says formal education needs to foster five
dispositions:
1. Love of truth
2. Love of justice
3. Existence
4. Work
5. Others

15. The “Where” of Christian Religious
Education
• Maritain (1962) contends, “Educators… must not expect
too much from education”.
• He stresses the importance of formal education, but
notes the role of other educational agents, the family and
the Church, in the integral education of the student as a
person.
• Formal learning is only a part of the educational process:
“the school system is only a partial I and inchoative
agency with respect to the task of education.

16. The “How” of Christian Religious
Education
• For Maritain, the “how” is realized through an integrated curriculum,
one which lays particular stress upon the liberal arts and humanities.
• Maritain insists that educators must be sensitive to the mysterious
identity of the student, one to be respected rather than uncovered.
• By appealing to the intelligence and the free will of the student, the
teacher must make sure that nothing is done without understanding
the process.
• It is rooted in the conviction that the freedom of independence is
dependent upon the internalizations of the two greatest
commandments: love of God and love of one’s neighbor as oneself.

17. The “When” of Christian Religious
Education
• Education is a gradual and ascending process.
• Knowledge advances step by step and depends upon
collected wisdom and experience, particularly the
aspirations of the human person.
• Education in general and religious education in particular
cannot ignore the social environment or the concerns
and anxieties of the age.

18. Passages from Education at the
Crossroads
Jacques Maritain
• Teaching is an art; the teacher is an artist
• The teacher has further to comfort the mind of the pupil
by putting before his eyes the logical connections
between ideas which the analytical or deductive power of
the pupil's mind is perhaps not strong enough to
establish by itself.
• The principal agent in education, the primary dynamic
factor or propelling force, is the internal vital principle in
the one to be educated . .
• Any education which considers the teacher as the
principal agent perverts the very nature of the
educational task.
•