Catholic schools have faced a number of hurdles in recent decades, including the sharp decline of vocations among religious sisters who have worked in schools (as much as 90 percent in the last four decades), rising tuition prices for families, the sexual abuse crisis, and questions about institutional commitment to maintaining schools in light of these challenges. These changes affect all students and families, but have special significance for those of lower socioeconomic status, who historically used Catholic schools as an engine of upward mobility.

For this policy dialogue, the editors of HEQ asked Paul Grendler and Carol Ann MacGregor to reflect on the benefits, challenges, and turning points of Catholic-sponsored education from the sixteenth century to the present. Grendler is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Toronto, the former president of the Renaissance Society of America and the American Catholic Historical Association, and a recipient of the Galileo Galilei Prize. The author of eleven books, he has published widely on education in the Renaissance. His recent work concentrates on Jesuit universities and Jesuit schools, especially in Italy. MacGregor is Associate Professor of Sociology and current Vice Provost at Loyola University New Orleans. She has also been named an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Her publications, which have appeared in American Catholic Studies and American Sociological Review (among others), focus on Catholic education policy and practice, and religion and public life.

HEQ Policy Dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references to readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

Progressive education swept across Canada in the early to mid-twentieth century, restructuring schools, introducing new courses, and urging teachers to reorient the classroom to the interests and needs of the learner. The women religious who taught in Vancouver's Catholic schools negotiated the revised public school curriculum, determined to utilize the latest methods and meet public school standards in hopes of receiving government funding. But they were equally adamant about preserving Catholic beliefs regarding human life and resisting “false” philosophy. Despite their caution, progressive education began to transform Catholic pedagogy in this period, most notably in religious education. Looking back over the decades, Catholic educators in the early 1960s would observe that progressive education had brought about a shift in schools that emphasized process over content and self-expression over discipline. They found themselves questioning whether the curriculum undermined revealed knowledge by overemphasizing empirical science as the foundation for all knowledge.

In a recent contribution to this journal Loughlin (2011) reflected on the place of wonder in Newman's education. This instructive piece followed a pattern in which Newman is regarded as having made positive contributions to educational debates. It is this pattern or assumption about Newman's contribution to education, particularly for the theory or philosophy of Catholic education that will be the focus in this article. It will be explained that there is some ambiguity over how much Newman's arguments for liberal education are actually grounded in more general theological arguments about the distinctive nature of Catholic education. In what follows it will be argued that a more general analysis of Newman on education draws attention to a wider issue concerning what ought to be the relationship between theology and the theory or philosophy of education. It will be proposed that Newman down played the role of theology in defending liberal education and this has implications for those who might want to appeal to him now in terms of guiding debates about the philosophy of Catholic education.