Education today is very competitive and heavily focused on academics. Private lessons have become a lucrative business causing the quality of teaching in the classroom to suffer.

Every student who attends a top school, invariably denominational, wants to be “successful”, which translates into being economically successful. There is a mad rush to secure top SAT scores to attend North American universities either on full or partial scholarships. In this race the poor are left behind and so is the slower student.

As we have just started the 2005-2006 academic year, it is good to reflect on how we can make Catholic education more Catholic.

Catholic education is first of all at the service of the kingdom – Jesus' vision of how the world should be. In the kingdom the poor have a pre-eminent position. In Jesus, God sided with the poor and the Latin American Bishops at Medellin , Colombia (1968) reminded us that if the Church is to be a credible witness of Christ to the world it must make “an option for the poor”.

It is highly questionable whether our Catholic schools fulfill this responsibility at present. Catholic secondary schools get the “cream of the crop”: the students in this group come from stable families, better neighbourhoods, and are financially well off or reasonably so. No wonder they do well at primary school and even better at secondary schools.

That wealthier students are getting a much bigger portion of the educational pie is a disturbing trend. The Church must be instrumental in changing this trend.

HELPING SLOWER STUDENTS

The place to start is the primary school. Prof John Spence in a letter to the editor last week noted: “Do those results [i.e. Common Entrance/SEA] indicate that some Catholic schools do consistently well (e.g. St Gabriel's) and others do consistently poorly?

If so, has the Board attempted to determine why some schools do well and others do poorly so as to put measures in place to correct such a situation?” The quality of Catholic education in many of our primary schools needs to be seriously upgraded so that the many poor who attend these schools actually have a chance at upward mobility.

This means exposing them to teachers who see teaching as a vocation, who are attentive to students' domestic situation, provide financial help and generate the kind of self-esteem to convince them they can perform just as well as any other student.

Making Catholic education more Catholic also implies helping slower students to perform better with time. It is negligent for Catholic teachers to leave the slower learners behind; sometimes all they need is a little extra help and encouragement for them to meet up with the brighter ones.

Our instinctive response should not be to give them extra lessons; the extra lessons must be incorporated within the classroom itself. Historically, Catholic education has helped both the poor and the slower learners.

To have children pay considerable sums of money – and too many of them cannot – in order to improve academically when that should be the role of the Catholic school is a scandal of our present education system.

As we begin another academic year, let us retrieve some important Catholic values we have allowed to fall into abeyance: let us ensure upward mobility for the poor and due attention to slower students as well.