Expanding Horizons, Exploring Dialogue, Shaping Catholic Education for the Future
Let me start by thanking CEAP and OIEC for their persuasive invitation to me to address your conference. I fondly associate these two organizations with the parentheses that encompass the decades of working among you in the vineyard of education. I started as a teacher in a CEAP school and, early on, as a speaker in a CEAP Annual Convention. I ended as a director in UNESCO, during which I worked closely with OIEC in Paris and other places where UNESCO and OIEC collaborated
And in preparing my thoughts for you today, it seems that I have ironically come full circle myself. When I started my career well over thirty years ago, my reflections revolved around what it meant to be a good teacher in a Catholic school, especially as I was teaching theology. Now, just at the point of my retirement, my thoughts have once again been turned to what Catholic education is, and should be.
In between, the world has changed dramatically, at a pace far swifter than any earlier stage in human history. The tragedy of the past week has swept us into yet another, more fragile, stage. I too have gone through many personal and career changes. My arena shifted from the religious to the secular, from the classroom to the administrator's office, and then from institutional management to national policy, and then from the private sector to the public sector, and finally from the local to the international. As I reflected on our theme for this congress, "Expanding Horizons, Exploring Dialogue, Shaping Catholic Education in the Future," I had to make explicit to myself what I had learned, and also what I had unlearned, in the intervening decades. This week alone has been for me, as for all of you, a period of profound reflection. Today therefore I share with you my personal musings, some comforting, some a bit disquieting and possibly controversial.
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