My mother who did not finish the 9th<\/sup> grade always stressed that her six children get as much education as possible. She also tweaked her highly educated son by giving him a copy of All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.<\/em> I told her that I indeed learned all I needed to know in the Catholic kindergarten taught by the same Sr. Mary Charlotte who taught me first grade. The lesson I learned was that I needed to learn a whole lot more. Thus even from kindergarten and first grade one can have a vocation to life-long learning.<\/p>\n Here perhaps is an intimation of a solution for Catholic higher education\u2019s failure of nerve. If only we would remember our first grade and the love of learning that it inspired!<\/p>\n Daniel Sheridan<\/strong>\u00a0is Professor of Theology at Saint Joseph\u2019s College of Maine and former Director of the Online Theology Program.<\/span><\/p>\n [1]In 1952, one of the great Catholic intellectuals of the 20th<\/sup> century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, was working in the fossil warehouse of the Museum of Natural History, about six miles from where I was watching Omnibus<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Love of learning can began in kindergarten and first grade. Yes, some of us loved school from day one. In the spring 1952, I was in first grade at Saint Teresa of Avila school in an Irish and Italian American … Continue reading ![\"Alistair](\"https:\/\/blogs.sjcme.edu\/theology\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/10\/2014\/09\/Alistair-Cookie.jpg\")
<\/a>One Sunday I was watching Omnibus<\/em> hosted by a young Alistair Cooke [Alistair Cookie to Sesame Street fans!]. I saw Australian aborigines dancing around a fire. The voiceover said this was how human beings lived 50,000 years ago. The next day I told Sr. Mary Charlotte that I had seen how people lived 50,000 years ago. She said it must have been an anti-Catholic show, since the world was created 5,000 years ago according to the Bible. On three counts, I knew that she was wrong (perhaps even then TV had more authority than a mere school teacher!). (1) The world was indeed older than 5,000 years [I had seen the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History[1]]. (2) The Bible did not teach that [my father, who I thought was the smartest man in the world, read me the first chapter of Genesis; we could not find any dates]. (3) The Catholic Church in which I was totally immersed could not be teaching something so intuitively wrong [years later in high school I found out that in 1952 the Church did not teach that the world was 5000 years old]! Thus I knew she was wrong on these three counts. However, I was polite and didn\u2019t tell her. But I knew that it was an important \u201cCatholic thing\u201d to get it right. I think my vocation as a Catholic intellectual began right there.<\/p>\n