I was reading an article on scholasticism the other day. I didn't get very far into it, and I can't seem to find it now, so I apologize in advance if I'm somehow plagiarizing it. What I did learn in the first few paragraphs, however, was that the Latin root for education means "to draw out."
Long story short, what this made me think (and where the author may well have intended to go) was that a classical Catholic education will almost always be at fundamental odds with a Marxist approach to pedagogy.
That is, if we really do believe what we profess to believe, then we think that the purpose of education is not so much to implant values and ways of thinking into students. Rather, we try to help them understand the tents of natural law that already reside within them. We are not inserting truths in them; we are making them see truths that are already written on their hearts.
This simply won't jive with Marxism which says that no Truth can be written on our hearts because any such concepts are indoctrinated by an ideological state apparatus.
Of course, the Marxist would just say that the belief in natural law is itself a man-made fiction designed to reinforce the Church authority that tries to control us. Even if we should claim to know or feel the reality of natural law, any such knowledge or feeling would be predicated on an ideology that has been engrafted on us. It might feel like it comes from within, and it might even feel like a particular truth is self-evident...but it the Marxist would argue it only seems self-evident because we have been programmed so well by the Church that we have normalized its teachings.
The same, of course, could be said for the cynicism of Marxism...but that's because Marxism is fine with being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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