The Congregation for Catholic Education is a part of the government of the Holy See. The genesis of this Dicastery can be traced to special commissions created by the Roman Pontiffs for maintaining vigilance over the universities in Rome and other educational institutions in the Papal States. A general overview of the history of the Congregation…

Catholic schools in Scotland have been fully state-funded since the 1918 Education (Scotland) Act. Under this Act, 369 contemporary Catholic schools are able to retain their distinctive identity and religious education and the teachers have to be approved by the Catholic hierarchy. Similar to the position of other forms of state-funded and…

The Church brings us an encounter with Jesus and offers us an invitation to faith. It proclaims Christ's words of truth and life. This article seeks to explore the depths of these realities in the context of our culture, our society--a world not always prepared to hear and accept the message. It is precisely this context that has evoked the call…

This article is an attempt to highlight some main themes in the "International Handbook of Jewish Education", which may resonate with themes that are pre-occupying Catholic educators, and which may help Catholic educators understand some of the pressing issues and concerns of Jewish educators and Jewish education. Its intention is to…

This article describes a case study in which Our Lady of Hungary Catholic School (OLH) principal Kevin Goralczyk and the parish's pastor, Reverend Kevin Bauman, faced educators' universal challenge: Knowing what students need to learn but wondering how to evaluate if they were really successfully taking in the information rather than simply…

Catholic schools in the United States support the Church's mission to evangelize; in doing so, they have an impact on the future vitality of the Catholic Church. Catholic school cultures make the schools authentically Catholic and distinguish them from other educational institutions. The Church depends on administrators and teachers in the schools…

International research shows that the curricula of Catholic secondary schools are increasingly becoming dominated by the pressures of conforming to the requirements of nation states. These requirements are generally expressed in economic and utilitarian terms and evaluated by criteria of measurable outputs. As a result of these pressures, Catholic…

Catholic elementary and secondary schools across the country recently adopted standards reflective of the Common Core State Standards to align instruction with state and national guidelines requiring the revision of curriculum and the adjustment of instruction to meet the new standards from an ideological model. This article describes a…

Catholic educational historians note that although preserving Catholic identity has been a constant in the mission of Catholic schools, their curriculum and instructional practices evolved in ways that were similar to public schools, thus enabling Catholic parents to select schools that were both faith based and modern. Since there is an absence…

The present work aims at presenting and comparing challenges faced by religion teachers in Catholic and state schools in Poland. For that purpose, 10 religion teachers from Catholic and 10 from state high schools were interviewed. First of all, the concept of teaching religion was discussed, followed by an analysis of the Catholic schools'…

In the midst of the debate surrounding the question of whether Australia's National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test is high-stakes, it is evident that children's own accounts of their experiences remain sparse. This paper describes the findings of a case study which documented the experiences of 105 children across two…

This article examines the biographies and personal records of nineteenth-century Catholic nuns who worked in education, with a view to determining how they reconciled their individuality with the demands of religious life. Their resistance to rules, and the ways in which they wrestled with the vow of obedience, is examined. The roles of the Novice…

This article reports on a two-year study of one principal's professional learning practices in "Transform," a professional learning program in Edmonton Catholic Schools, Alberta, Canada. Transform was designed to be a bottom-up, morally-oriented professional learning approach in which principals and teachers worked as partners on…

Pedro Arrupe was concerned about the growing attitude in which the vocation of humankind is understood as making oneself the centre of the universe, fearing that it has infiltrated into education and schools. Consequently, he set out to counteract this egoistic mindset by propounding an approach to education rooted in justice tempered with faith,…

The differing theological perspectives evident in the literature on Catholic schools and education suggest those who appoint headteachers in Catholic schools may need to know more about candidates than that they are practising Catholics. This paper summarises a doctoral research project aimed at identifying the dominant theological motifs that…