Page 36 - Gonzaga at 60
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GONZAGA AT SIXTY: A WORK IN PROGRESS
demands of the Leaving Ceriicate, which in many subjects are rapidly becoming less challenging
and less intellectually simulaing. And a radical educaional experiment may be tenable with a
Sixth Year numbering sixteen students, but hardly when the numbers have swelled to ninety.
Increasingly the Gonzaga student, like his peers everywhere else, has resorted to, and
demanded of his teachers, the pre-packaged answer; kept his ear to the latest ‘predicions’ from
the Insitute. To a degree, teachers have had to ruefully comply.
Fr Lee ofered the following wise excuse in 1985:
‘If you are locked into a controlled system, and your pupils need those ceriicates, then
you must operate within certain limits. And let this be said very clearly: many, many ine
teachers worked within these constraints, yet managed to awaken young minds to the
wonder of the world.’
His last sentence captures, it appears, what happens in Gonzaga. Time ater ime in the
following pages writers from the recent decades describe their experience of the teaching in the
school. They recall learning the habit of quesioning, of arguing a case; a teaching that ‘did not
smother curiosity in an imposed consensus favouring the status quo’ . . . ‘did not cramp invenion
in the interests of rote learning to secure the necessary university points’. Manchan Magan
writes of how the ‘highly talented subversive’ students in his year were not only tolerated, but
‘It’s just that simple.’ The
Headmaster organises the fostered. Most interesingly, Gerry Whelan SJ quesions whether the experience of a Church
Graduation photo, 2010. outside Gonzaga could have led him to the priesthood.
GONZAGA AT SIXTY: A WORK IN PROGRESS
demands of the Leaving Ceriicate, which in many subjects are rapidly becoming less challenging
and less intellectually simulaing. And a radical educaional experiment may be tenable with a
Sixth Year numbering sixteen students, but hardly when the numbers have swelled to ninety.
Increasingly the Gonzaga student, like his peers everywhere else, has resorted to, and
demanded of his teachers, the pre-packaged answer; kept his ear to the latest ‘predicions’ from
the Insitute. To a degree, teachers have had to ruefully comply.
Fr Lee ofered the following wise excuse in 1985:
‘If you are locked into a controlled system, and your pupils need those ceriicates, then
you must operate within certain limits. And let this be said very clearly: many, many ine
teachers worked within these constraints, yet managed to awaken young minds to the
wonder of the world.’
His last sentence captures, it appears, what happens in Gonzaga. Time ater ime in the
following pages writers from the recent decades describe their experience of the teaching in the
school. They recall learning the habit of quesioning, of arguing a case; a teaching that ‘did not
smother curiosity in an imposed consensus favouring the status quo’ . . . ‘did not cramp invenion
in the interests of rote learning to secure the necessary university points’. Manchan Magan
writes of how the ‘highly talented subversive’ students in his year were not only tolerated, but
‘It’s just that simple.’ The
Headmaster organises the fostered. Most interesingly, Gerry Whelan SJ quesions whether the experience of a Church
Graduation photo, 2010. outside Gonzaga could have led him to the priesthood.
